The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
by Parker · 70 things on Twos
- A Leadership Fable
- Introduction
- Teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare
- If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time
- The real power of teamwork is achieving more than individuals could ever imagine doing alone
- Part One: Underachievment
- Part Two: Lighting the Fire
- A fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to reversal it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose
- Dysfunction #1: absence of trust
- Trust is the foundation of real teamwork
- Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal
- Effective teams have a substantial level of debate
- Be present and participate
- A computer can be too distracting. It’s easy to imagine the person sitting there checking email or working on something
- Hometown? Number of kids in the family? Interesting childhood hobbies? Biggest challenge growing up? First job?
- Everyone likes to learn about—and talk about—themselves. Until the criticism comes, that is
- What do you think is your single biggest strength and weakness in terms of contribution to our companies success or failure?
- The ultimate dysfunction: the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition and attention at the expense of collective results—the goals of the entire team
- When everyone is focused on results and using those to define success, it is difficult for ego to get out of hand. No matter how good an individual on the team might be feeling about his or her situation, if the team loses, everyone loses.
- Our job is to make the results that we need to achieve so clear to everyone in this room that no one would even consider doing something purely to enhance his or her individual status or ego. Because that would diminish our ability to achieve our collective goals. We would all lose.
- The key, of course, is to define our goals, our results, in a way that is simple enough to grasp easily, and specific enough to be actionable. Profit is not actionable enough. It needs to be more closely related to what we do on a daily basis.
- Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think
- Fear of conflict: If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony
- Lack of commitment
- Avoidance of accountability
- Once we achieve clarity and buy-in, it is then that we have to hold each other accountable for what we sign up to do, for high standards of performance and behavior.
- I am going to be pretty intolerant of behavior that demonstrates an absence of trust, or a focus on individual ego. I will be encouraging conflict, driving for clear commitments, and expecting all of you to hold each other accountable. I will be calling out bad behavior when I see it, and I'd like to see you doing the same. We don't have time to waste.
- Part Three: Heavy Lifting
- Building a team is hard
- You should challenge each other on what you are doing and how you are spending your time, whether you are making enough progress.
- Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about the team.
- Push with respect and under the assumption that the other person is probably doing the right thing. But push anyway.
- You can’t tolerate poor behavior.
- Part Four: Traction
- The Model
- The 5 dysfunctions
- Absence of Trust
- You must be vulnerable within the group
- Be open about your mistakes and weaknesses to build the foundation of trust
- Achieving vulnerability-based trust is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of a team, but that is exactly what is required.
- A leader should be vulnerable first.
- One of the best ways to lose the trust of a team is to feign vulnerability in order to manipulate the emotions of others.
- Fear of Conflict
- A lack of trust leads to an incapacity of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas
- Teams that engage in productive conflict know that the only purpose is to produce the best possible solution in the shortest period of time. They discuss and resolve issues more quickly and completely than others, and they emerge from heated debates with no residual feelings or collateral damage, but with an eagerness and readiness to take on the next important issue.
- It is also ironic that so many people avoid conflict in the name of efficiency, because healthy conflict is actually a time saver. Contrary to the notion that tears waste time and energy arguing, those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution.
- Once the discussion or meeting has ended, it is helpful to remind participants that the conflict they just engaged in is good for the team and not something to avoid in the future.
- It is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their people engage in conflict, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be.
- Lack of Commitment
- If you can’t openly debate, you won’t buy in and commit to decisions
- Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision.
- Reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and con-sidered. Great teams ensure that everyone's ideas are genuinely considered, which then creates a willingness to rally around whatever decision is ultimately made by the group.
- A decision is better than no decision.
- It is better to make a decision badly and be wrong—then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.
- One of the best tools for ensuring commitment is the use of clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honoring those dates with discipline and rigidity.
- The leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong.
- The leader cannot place too high a premium on certainty or consensus.
- You must be able to call your peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.
- You can't hold someone accountable for something that was never bought in to or made clear in the first place.
- Avoidance of Accountability
- Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
- Clarify publicly exactly what the eam needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed
- Team member should regularly communicate with one another, either verbally or in written form, about how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards.
- Shift away from individual rewards to team rewards.
- Inattention to Results
- You put your individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
- Every good organization specifies what it plans to achieve in a given period, and these goals, more than the financial metrics that they drive, make up the majority of near-term controllable results.
- Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results. Teams that say, "We'll do our best," are subtly, is not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.
- The leader must set the tone for a focus on results. If the team members sense that the leader values anything other than results, they will take that as permission to do the same for themselves.
- Team leads must be selfless and objective, and reserve rewards and recognition for those who make real contributions to the achievement of group goals.