PDF Summary:The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick M. Lencioni
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable explores how teams fail to work cohesively together through a dynamic, five-part model of dysfunction. The five dysfunctions are 1) absence of trust, 2) fear of conflict, 3) lack of commitment, 4) avoidance of accountability, and 5) inattention to results. Through identifying these root causes of poor teamwork, teams can develop specific strategies for overcoming each of them. By doing this, they will become comfortable with one another, be willing to engage in constructive debate, achieve clarity and buy-in around team priorities, hold one another to high standards, and focus on team results instead of individual ambition.
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To overcome this dysfunction, teams should actively seek out sources of conflict instead of avoiding them. Leaders should give real-time permission for individuals to debate with one another, and hold back their urge to protect the team from conflict and disagreement.
Lack of Commitment
Committed teams are those that have full buy-in from everyone. Because they’ve been able to passionately and productively debate ideas, they can move ahead with a decision knowing that everyone’s opinions have been considered.
When there is a lack of commitment, teammates are unclear about priorities and expectations.
Teams that suffer from a lack of commitment lose opportunities due to delays, distractions, missed deadlines, and repeated discussions of the same issues.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should review major decisions and responsibilities at the end of each meeting and assign deadlines to individual team members.
Avoidance of Accountability
High-performing teams hold each other accountable to high performance standards. They are able to do this because everyone is clear on what is expected of themselves and their teammates (they have already engaged in healthy conflict to develop a plan that everyone is committed to). Moreover, they’re comfortable being vulnerable and sharing feedback, so they can raise questions of performance in other people without fear of retaliation.
When there is a lack of accountability, teams encourage low standards and force the leader to become the sole source of discipline. Higher-performing team members resent lower performers. Mediocrity becomes the standard.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should engage in peer pressure tactics, which is scalable and reduces the bureaucracy needed for oversight. This means publishing team goals and standards and instituting regular process reviews. They can also receive team rewards, which motivates teams to work together and point out individuals who aren’t pulling their weight.
Inattention to Results
Great teams are focused on team results, not individual milestones. This is possible because individuals know that they will be called out by their peers if their poor performance ends up hurting the team.
If a team isn’t focused on team results, its members will gravitate toward working on what’s good for them personally or for their department, to the detriment of the organization as a whole. This connects to the previous dysfunction - when accountability is absent, a team member will naturally pursue whatever is best for herself.
To overcome this dysfunction, organizations and leaders should encourage rewards based on the achievement of team outcomes. They should publicly declare ambitious goals, which will inspire the team to meet them. Both tactics provide the incentive for individuals to work as a team toward common goals, rather than pursuing individual ambitions.
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PDF Summary An Executive Team Divided
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Michele Bebe (“Mikey”), Head of Marketing
Mikey was known for her acerbic style and difficult personality. She had a low opinion of her teammates’ intelligence and was dismissive of their ideas, frequently making sarcastic and hurtful comments to her colleagues.
Martin Gilmore, CTO and Co-Founder
Martin was uncommitted to team priorities and group discussions, rarely paying attention during meetings. He only dealt with his teammates in the most remote and detached manner, never engaging them on a personal or emotional level.
Jeff Rawlins (“JR”), Head of Sales
JR displayed a lack of commitment, being inattentive to detail, missing deadlines, and blowing off assignments that weren’t immediately relevant to his work. He was also inattentive to team results, only being interested in one measurement of success: his personal sales figures.
Carlos Amador, Head of Customer Support
Carlos was unwilling to open up to his colleagues, rarely saying what he actually thought. He also displayed a lack of commitment, failing to update his colleagues on progress and adhere to deadlines.
Jan Mersino, CFO
**Jan didn’t trust her fellow...
PDF Summary Dysfunction One: Absence of Trust
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Example 2
When asked her greatest strengths and weaknesses, Mikey gives highly guarded, tight-lipped responses, while other members of the team reveal some of their innermost fears and insecurities. This is a product of her inability to be vulnerable in front of her peers, as is her caustic and defensive attitude toward her colleagues, which prevents them from seeing her insecurities.
PDF Summary Dysfunction Two: Fear of Conflict
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Example 1
When Mikey refuses to accept responsibility for marketing’s role in the company’s lack of success, Carlos knows that she’s in the wrong. “If the company as a whole is struggling, then clearly we’re not succeeding on an individual level either,” he thinks to himself. However, he does not press her on this point because he thinks she’ll snap under pressure of being called out by a colleague. This is a wasted opportunity, and as a result, the discussion goes nowhere.
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Dysfunction Three: Lack of Commitment
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Example 1
Kathryn shares an anecdote about her how her husband’s high school basketball coaching methods. While he is the leader and has final say on how games and practices will be run, he allows each member of the team to voice their concerns and objections to any particular plan. He always provides an explanation for why he’s making a decision—creating the conditions for buy-in and clarity.
Example 2
Kathryn demonstrates to the team that there is no clarity around what the overarching goal should be for the rest of the year. Each member of the team believes that their area of expertise is the most important and should receive highest priority (i.e., Martin in engineering believes that it’s product improvement, Jan in finance says it’s cost containment, JR and Nick push for market share). Since they don’t trust each other and don’t resolve their disagreements through constructive debate, the result is a lack of buy-in and total ambiguity on what their priority should be. Everyone continues to work in silos, individual efforts are not harnessed to a common purpose, and the same discussions continue to take place with no resolution in sight.
PDF Summary Dysfunction Four: Avoidance of Accountability
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In this scenario, achievement-driven individuals leave the organization, with the few high performers that remain resenting their colleagues for their poor standards and failure to adequately pull their weight. Within this vacuum of accountability, it falls to the leader to be the sole source of discipline, placing an undue burden on them and further eroding morale and group cohesion.
Example 1
Kathryn notes that Martin has a habit of pulling his laptop out during meetings, answering emails, and engaging in other work, instead of focusing on the discussion. This is distracting, interrupts the flow of the discussion, and signals that he is not taking his commitments to the team seriously. When Kathryn reprimands him for this behavior, the rest of the team is relieved—they had been too fearful of interpersonal discomfort to address it themselves, and so they let the destructive and problematic behavior continue.
Example 2
Nick does not make his team available for a meeting that Carlos has called. Not only does Nick not hold these subordinates accountable for their unresponsiveness, but Carlos does not confront Nick either..** This avoidance of accountability...
PDF Summary Dysfunction Five: Inattention to Results
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Example 2
Martin becomes defensive when Jan and Carlos point out that the company may have over-committed resources to engineering, while under-investing in marketing and sales. He ultimately admits he has overstated the resources needed to build the company’s core technology because he doesn’t want DecisionTech’s potential failure to be blamed on his department—not because he thought that this commitment of resources was necessarily in the company’s best interests. He put his pride and ego before the good of the company—a textbook display of inattention to results.
PDF Summary Solving Dysfunction One: Building Trust
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Team Effectiveness Exercise
Here, every member of the team identifies the most important contribution and the biggest area for improvement for every other member of the team. All team members share their thoughts, focusing on one person at a time, usually starting with the leader.
In a trustless environment, this could be dangerous, but the structure of the exercise makes it safer than usual to identify weaknesses. And on the positive side, everyone gets to see the talent and experience of their colleagues. This also breeds self-confidence, fosters assertiveness (since teammates can act knowing that they are respected and admired by the group), and checks egos (since everyone is laying their weaknesses on the table in front of their teammates).
Personality and Behavior Preference Profiles
These are diagnostic tools that provide behavioral and cognitive descriptions and insights into individual behavior. They can be useful in identifying how people think, speak, and act. Examples include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Big Five Personality Test, Extroversion Introversion Test, and 16 Personalities Test.
Once you understand that someone’s...
PDF Summary Solving Dysfunction Two: Empowering Constructive Conflict
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Benefits
Teams that employ these strategies are able to engage in constructive conflict free of personal grudges. They learn to discuss and resolve issues as soon as they arise and focus on ideological arguments, rather than personal rivalries.
Example
Kathryn uses both the mining and real-time permission strategies. She declares that the group is not going home without having articulated what their goal should be. She then nurtures and encourages the discussion as it unfolds, even observing at one point, “This is the most productive conversation I’ve heard since I’ve been here. Keep going.” Later on, she facilitates open debate by urging the team, “Let’s have this out. And let’s not pretend we’re doing anything wrong...this is not a religious battle. It’s about strategy.”
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PDF Summary Solving Dysfunction Three: Fostering Commitment
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Low-Risk Exposure Therapy
Display decisiveness in low-risk areas before applying it to more consequential decisions. Start with decisions that have lower stakes, where the worst-case scenario is not all that bad.
Like the tactics above, this can demonstrate how much teams underrate their own decision-making capacity. By grabbing this low-hanging fruit, teams develop the confidence to apply their new, bold approach to everything.
The Leader’s Role
A leader must be comfortable making wrong decisions. Since more is lost to inaction than to wrong action, leaders must reinforce the fact that consensus and absolute certainty are unattainable, and instead encourage action and decisiveness. The leader should push for decisions and sticking to deadlines once agreed upon.
Benefits
Teams that use these tools are more decisive and clear about priorities. They are aligned on common objectives, able to learn from mistakes, confident in their ability to make decisions, and able to pivot quickly and effectively should those decisions turn out to be wrong.
Example
Kathryn makes use of cascading messaging and deadlines with the DecisionTech team. When...
PDF Summary Solving Dysfunction Four: Promoting Accountability
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When disagreement arises, the leader must also serve as the judge to decide cases, then return power back to peer accountability.
Benefits
Teams that make use of these practices hold each other to high standards, knowing that everyone sinks or swims together. These teams create a positive, self-reinforcing cycle, in which individuals know that they’re going to be responsible to their peers for their performance, so they work harder to deliver results. This actually helps poor performers as well: rather than letting them establish counterproductive working habits (which will only harm them in the long run), a culture of accountability gives such individuals the opportunity to improve themselves through constructive peer-to-peer criticism.
Example
Nick demonstrates his willingness to hold his teammates accountable by requesting that the full DecisionTech executive team attend a two-day sales training session for the salespeople. He makes the case (correctly, and with Kathryn’s full endorsement) that since the company needs to improve its sales, everyone should learn to think and act like salespeople. When Mikey complains about having to attend a training...
PDF Summary Solving Dysfunction Five: Delivering Results
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Example
The DecisionTech executive team decides (after much passionate, ideological debate) to focus on closing 18 new deals with customers as the overarching goal for the coming year. They are drawn to this goal because it is clear, ambitious (yet still achievable), addresses the main problems facing the company, will involve commitment from every member of the team, and will facilitate the achievement of future goals.
PDF Summary Epilogue: Realizing Results
... After observing Mikey’s destructive and egotistical behavior over the course of the retreats, Jan decides that she is a poor fit for the company.
She cites Mikey’s pattern of uncooperative (and borderline abusive) behavior towards her colleagues, like the constant eye-rolling, her hurtful remarks (at one point she calls Martin a SOB), and her general lack of emotional intelligence in being able to see how harmful her presence has become.
Mikey also displays a general and consistent contempt for the idea of working more collaboratively with her colleagues (like not wanting to attend the sales training, despite it being a stated company priority which everyone else has committed to).
Kathryn tells Mikey that her total inability to work as part of a team far outweighs her talent as a marketing expert—consequently, she is doing more harm than good.
Generating Positive Results
By committing to a clear goal and removing those who are unwilling to work within the new team framework, DecisionTech starts to see positive results, as sales grow significantly, the company makes its revenue goals for three out of four quarters, and they move into a tie for number one in...