Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators

Patrick M. Lencioni

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470893883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Practical exercises and hands-on tools to bring to life the timeless advice found in the author's best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In the years following the publication of Patrick Lencioni's best seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, fans have been clamoring for more information on how to implement the ideas outlined in the book.

In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni offers specific, practical guidance for overcoming the five dysfunctions, using tools, exercises, assessments, and real-world examples. He examines questions that all teams must ask themselves: Are we really a team? How are we currently performing? Are we prepared to invest the time and energy required to be a great team?

Written concisely and to the point, this guide gives leaders, line managers, and consultants alike the tools they need to get their teams up and running quickly and effectively.

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SECTION TWO
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Okay, this is the meat of the book, the part where I go through the dysfunctions and explain what they mean, how you can help your team overcome them, and which tools and exercises my colleagues and I find to be most useful. A detailed explanation of the tools and exercises mentioned in these segments can be found in Section Four.

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OVERCOMING DYSFUNCTION #1

BUILDING TRUST

Based on my experience working with teams during the past ten years or so, I’ve come to one inescapable conclusion: no quality or characteristic is more important than trust. In fact, my work with teams revolves around trust more than any other topic, and that’s why this is the longest, most important section in this book.

Unfortunately, there is probably no quality or characteristic that is as rare as trust, either. But I suppose that’s good news for your team, because if you can be the first on your block to build trust, the possibility of achieving a real competitive advantage is great.

So why is trust so rare? Two reasons. First, people use the word inconsistently, and so trust means different things to different people. Second, because it’s just plain hard. Let’s start by defining what we mean by trust, and the best way to do that is to clarify what trust is not.

Defining Trust

Trust is not the ability of team members to predict one another’s behaviors because they’ve known each other for a long time. Even the most dysfunctional teams, or families for that matter, can learn to forecast one another’s words and actions based on observable patterns over a long period of time. So when, for example, a person says, “I trust that Bob will start swearing at me if I mention his inability to arrive at a meeting on time,” know that this is not the kind of trust I’m talking about.

When it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability. Team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears. Now, if this is beginning to sound like some get-naked, touchy-feely theory, rest assured that it is nothing of the sort.

Vulnerability-based trust is predicated on the simple—and practical—idea that people who aren’t afraid to admit the truth about themselves are not going to engage in the kind of political behavior that wastes everyone’s time and energy, and more important, makes the accomplishment of results an unlikely scenario.

Here’s an example of how damaging a lack of trust can be in an organization.

The Invulnerable Leader Story

I once worked with a large company—one that, if you haven’t used their products, you’ve certainly heard of—that demonstrated how a lack of trust can destroy years of hard work and accomplishment. Let’s call the company Passivity.

Passivity had been a highly respected and accomplished company over the years, but had recently fallen on hard times at the hands of a larger, more aggressive competitor. Still, the company had legions of dedicated customers and employees, if not Wall Street analysts.

Enter the new CEO of Passivity, a man who neither valued nor elicited trust among his executive team. As the company, under the guidance of its new leader, watched its demise accelerate, journalists and industry-watchers attributed the spiral to unwise decisions about products and strategy. And while those decisions certainly contributed to the problem, they were merely symptoms of a bigger issue.

That issue could only be observed behind the scenes, at executive staff meetings. It was there that a tornado of distrust was raging, leaving in its wake a sea of bad decisions and real human suffering. Not to mention drowning stock options.

As is often the case, the trust vacuum emanated from the leader, a brilliant man whose intelligence was rivaled only by his inability to acknowledge his own limitations. This was made apparent to me, and the rest of his team, on many occasions, but none more painfully so than when he reluctantly “shared” the results of his 360-degree feedback during a staff meeting.

Standing before his team with his 360-degree report in his hands, the leader of Passivity started by addressing his weaknesses. “It says here that I’m not a good listener,” he announced, with a puzzled look on his face. “Hmm. What do you guys think?” After a brief and awkward moment of silence, the executives around the table assured their boss that he was not a bad listener at all, and that he was indeed better than many of the other leaders they had known. He accepted their reassurance without a fight.

“Okay. What about this next one? It says I don’t give enough praise.” Again, one by one the team shrugged and nodded their assurance that this was not really a problem.

It was at that moment that I kindly reminded the team that they were, in fact, the only people who had completed the 360-degree survey, and that someone had to have given the CEO low scores in these areas. After an awkward pause, a lone brave soul raised his hand. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I think you could give a little more positive feedback,” he offered almost apologetically. “I mean, my people don’t usually hear anything from you unless they’ve screwed up. It would be nice if we, or they, knew what they were doing well.”

After yet another awkward moment, one of the other executives in the room declared, in the direction of the CEO, “I don’t see it. I think you give more praise than most CEOs I know.” This set off a wave of head nodding, leaving the lone brave soul out in the cold, wondering why he’d bothered telling the truth.

As humorously pathetic as this example may seem, I am afraid to admit that it actually happened, proving again that truth is stranger than fiction. What it illustrates is the difficulty that people have in admitting their weaknesses, their faults, their mistakes, even when there is real data indicating otherwise.

Of course the real point of this story is not what actually happened that day. It is what it created. The members of that team learned a lesson: don’t be vulnerable. After all, if the CEO isn’t capable of being honest about his own issues, why should his direct reports fess up about theirs?

And so, the executives at Passivity learned to engage in a remarkable game of masquerade, pretending to know things that they didn’t and to search for solutions to their problems only in places that wouldn’t reflect poorly on them or their departments. Remarkably, as the company’s results tanked, the resilience of the leaders’ invulnerability held firm. Today, the company is a shell of what it once was, having lost most of its leaders and many of the employees who built the firm. A few years ago it was sold to another company and exists now in name only.

When journalists write the epitaphs of companies like Passivity, they cite unwise strategic decisions and product defects. But if they really wanted to understand the root causes of their failure, they would look at the inability of executive team members to be vulnerable with one another—to build trust.

The Difficulty of Vulnerability-Based Trust

The second reason why vulnerability-based trust is so rare is that it is just plain hard to achieve, even when teams understand the definition. That’s because human beings, especially the adult variety, have this crazy desire for self-preservation. The idea of putting themselves at risk for the good of others is not natural, and is rarely rewarded in life, at least not in the ways that most people expect.

So we learn things like “look out for number one” or “don’t let ’em see you sweat” or whatever other cliché calls for us to think of ourselves before others. And while this may be wise counsel if you’re in prison, on a team it’s lethal.

The key to all of this, then, is to teach team members to get comfortable being exposed to one another, unafraid to honestly say things like “I was wrong” and “I made a mistake” and “I need help” and “I’m not sure” and “you’re better than I am at that” and yes, even “I’m sorry.” If team members cannot bring themselves to readily speak these words when the situation calls for it, they aren’t going to learn to trust one another. Instead, they’re going to waste time and energy thinking about what they should say, and wondering about the true intentions of their peers.

Now, as hard as it is to achieve vulnerability-based trust, it is entirely doable. And better yet, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. In fact, I’ve seen remarkable distrust on teams that have worked together for years and years, and I’ve seen teams that have been together for six months develop amazing amounts of trust. No, the key ingredient is not time. It is courage.

For a team to establish real trust, team members, beginning with the leader, must be willing to take risks without a guarante...