Note: this post was originally published at https://alfakini.com/books/the-five-disfunctions-of-a-team

This article presents The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model. In the book, Patrick Lencioni takes us on a journey with a struggling technology company and shows how to use the model to guide the team to success. Throughout the story, we learn valuable insights on building trust, embracing conflict, committing to decisions, holding each other accountable, and focusing on collective results.

While the book may center around management team leadership, I believe anyone in an organization can use the teachings to lead initiatives that foster collaboration, communication, and a culture of excellence. As illustrated by Donella Meadows, leadership is one of the most significant leverage points of a social system. It is an essential ability not only for managers but also for operational and technical roles.

The five dysfunctions

In the book's second section, the author discusses the five dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. The author suggests that high-performing teams trust each other, engage in constructive conflict, commit to decisions and action plans, hold each other accountable for results, and focus on achieving collective goals.

In the following picture, you can see a summary of the characteristics of high-performance teams, their obstacles, and the role leadership plays in developing the team:

Building trust

To get things done, teams must first establish trust. Trust means believing in your teammates' good intentions and feeling safe to be yourself and do your job without fear of judgment.

In other words, team members should feel at ease with being open about their weaknesses, skill gaps, and mistakes and be willing to ask for assistance. When trust is absent, teams waste precious time and energy tiptoeing around each other and avoiding discussing potential issues.

Having team members who lack confidence can be detrimental to the success of any project. They hide their weaknesses and mistakes, avoid asking for help or providing feedback and hesitate to offer assistance beyond their areas of responsibility. Additionally, they may quickly jump to negative conclusions about others and fail to recognize each other's skills and experiences. This results in spending a lot of time managing behaviors and holding grudges, which makes team collaboration unappealing.

On the other hand, a team that trusts one another is more likely to admit their weaknesses and mistakes, ask for help, and accept feedback and suggestions. They also give each other the benefit of the doubt before making assumptions, take risks by offering assistance and feedback, and appreciate each other's skills and experiences. This creates an environment where they can focus on the most critical issues, provide and accept feedback without hesitation, and look forward to working together.

With trust, the team can have healthy debates and discussions, and any conflict can be resolved without fear of punishment. This leads to a more productive and successful team overall.

Embracing conflict of ideas

Healthy relationships require productive conflict. While it may be perceived negatively, it should not involve personal attacks but rather a beneficial exchange of ideas.

Avoiding conflict in a team can lead to harmful tensions, with team members resorting to private conversations and personal attacks, ignoring critical topics, failing to take advantage of all team members' perspectives, and wasting time on interpersonal risk management.

On the other hand, teams that engage in productive conflict over ideas can increase team effectiveness by exploring ideas, avoiding repeated errors, solving problems quickly, minimizing politics, and discussing critical topics.

As a leader, one should not avoid conflict and attempt to solve the problem. Instead, leaders should encourage team members to engage in debates and help reach a natural resolution, even if it's complicated. By engaging in productive conflict, teams can make decisions that benefit from everyone's ideas, even if it's not a consensus.

Disagree and commit to decisions

Successful teams make clear decisions and commit to them, even when some members have different opinions. Two common causes of a lack of team commitment are the desire for consensus and certainty. While it's important to consider everyone's views, reaching an agreement is only sometimes possible most of the time.

Teams sometimes have all the information they need, but it resides in people's minds. Only when all opinions are made public, we can be sure that the decision taken has benefited from the collective wisdom of the entire group. Good teams ensure that all ideas are heard, but when there is no agreement, the leader makes the final decision.

A decision is better than no decision, even when the outcome is uncertain. When teams hesitate, it leads to paralysis and a lack of confidence. It's better to make a wrong decision, learn from the experience and change direction than to stand still.

Teams that don't commit create ambiguity, miss opportunities, and generate distrust. Teams that commit create alignment around goals, learn from mistakes and seize opportunities.

Leaders must be willing to make decisions that may be wrong, but they should encourage problem-solving and adherence to a plan. By knowing what is expected, team members can take responsibility for each other's work. Given that the whole team is clear about the goal and everyone is committed, there is no reason for anyone to be upset by demanding each other.

Hold each other accountability

Accountability means the collective monitoring of individual activities.

The team needs to hold each other accountable, even if uncomfortable. Avoiding accountability can cause relationships to perish and resentment and mistrust to flourish. Being accountable for teammates' work increases the team's quality. Being accountable for someone's work shows respect, as I will only question or demand more if I think the person is capable.

More than any corporate policy, collective ownership of work is a great leverage point to improve the quality of a working system. We are used to practices that leverage that in software development: code sharing, peer review, and pair programming are examples of practices that increase team accountability.

An accountable team is more effective because it sets high standards, identifies problems quickly, ensures low-performing teammates feel the need to improve, and avoids excessive bureaucracy. On the other hand, a team that avoids responsibility creates resentment, encourages mediocrity, doesn't deliver on commitments, and puts an undue burden on the leader.

Leaders should avoid assuming sole accountability. Instead, team members should hold each other accountable, and the leader should only referee when the team fails. If everyone is accountable for their contributions, the team can focus on the mission and the collective result rather than individual matters.

Focus on outcomes

Every good organization makes clear what it wants to achieve in a given period. The objectives and goals will guide the organization towards billing and profit, so they are not the final objective, at least not for the teams.

What can distract teams from the results? Individual and team status. Some groups have the thinking that merely existing is enough. This is especially common in associations, academia, and political groups, where success is associated with a role, the status of the organization, and not an outcome. In these places where politics drive, there is a tendency for people to focus on their careers and positions at the expense of the team's goals. A functional team puts collective goals ahead of personal goals.

A team that focuses on collective results keeps people mission-oriented, minimizes individualistic behavior, avoids distractions, enjoys success, and suffers failures collectively. A team that doesn't focus on collective results doesn't grow, easily gets distracted, loses mission-oriented people, and encourages individuals to focus on their career ladders and goals.

Leaders play a crucial role in setting the tone for the teams. If they prioritize values other than the mission, the team won't prioritize it either. Companies that prioritize results publicly declare their objectives and are transparent about their progress, achievements, and failures.

Ultimately, achieving results is not a matter of embracing reasonable values and principles with discipline and persistence. By staying mission-oriented, avoiding distractions, and working together towards collective goals, teams can succeed and deliver value to their organization or clients.

Final thoughts

The five dysfunctions are a good explanation of why some organizations grow while others seem to decay. An organization's culture is the most crucial leverage point to foster innovation and growth. The five principles presented by Patrick Lencioni are a good starting point, but they are not the only ones.

Each organization is unique, has its own culture, and defends its principles. Even the companies that don't clarify what principles they follow have some. In these cases, we usually find environments that incentivize some of the destructive behaviors described by Patrick.

The company's culture drives how we deal with improvement opportunities and set the environment. The teams will act on the opportunities if the culture is open to change and failure. If the team fails, we have a chance to learn something. If they succeed, we deliver more value and increase motivation.

In a culture closed to change, an environment of omission is established. Usually, in those environments, it is common to blame someone that tries to fix something and fails. This dynamic will lead to work systems and business degradation.

Based on my experience, the environment setup matters more than individual performance. For example, a high-performance software engineer can be unsuccessful in a bad environment or leave it because they encounter too many barriers to improve. But with the right culture, and a good environment, a regular engineer can learn, grow and make meaningful contributions.