The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

“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.”

It was not technically part of the Silicon Valley, but the Valley is not so much a geographical entity as a cultural one.

The only real action that Kathryn took during those first weeks was to announce a series of two-day executive retreats in the Napa Valley to be held over the course of the next few months.

And Kathryn's lack of in-depth software experience did not concern her. In fact, she felt certain that it provided her with an advantage. Most of her staff seemed almost paralyzed by their own knowledge of technology, as though they themselves would have to do the programming and product design to make the company Fly.

“We have a more experienced and talented executive team than any of our competitors. We have more cash than they do. Thanks to Martin and his team, we have better core technology. And we have a more powerful board of directors. Yet in spite of all that, we are behind two of our competitors in terms of both revenue and customer growth. Can anyone here tell me why that is?”

And, yes, I know how ridiculous and unbelievable it feels for you to be out of the office for so many days this month. But by the end of it all, everyone who is still here will understand why this is so important.”

“I want to assure you that there is only one reason that we are here at this off-site, and at the company: to achieve results. This, in my opinion, is the only true measure of a team,

“Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.

“Great teams do not hold back with one another,” she said. “They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”

Kathryn explained that everyone would answer five nonintrusive personal questions having to do with their backgrounds,

Hometown? Number of kids in the family? Interesting childhood hobbies? Biggest challenge growing up? First job?

It was really quite amazing. After just forty-five minutes of extremely mild personal disclosure, the team seemed tighter and more at ease with each other than at any time during the past year.

One of these was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Kathryn decided that late afternoon was a bad time to dive into the next phase, given everyone's energy level.

Kathryn would later kick herself for not calling Mikey on her remark, which at the time Kathryn attributed to her astonishingly low emotional intelligence.

“We are going to the top of the chart now to talk about the ultimate dysfunction: the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition and attention at the expense of results. And I’m referring to collective results—the goals of the entire team.”

“Well, when everyone is focused on results and using those to define success, it is difficult for ego to get out of hand.

If the team lost, he would be in a good mood as long as he was getting his points. And even when the team won, he would be unhappy if he didn’t score enough.”

This kid was without a doubt one of the most talented players on the team. But Ken benched him. The team played better without him, and he eventually quit.”

“Do you think most people like that can change?” Kathryn didn’t hesitate. “No. For every kid like that one, there are ten who never made it.”

“And as harsh as that may sound, Ken always says that his job is to create the best team possible, not to shepherd the careers of individual athletes. And that’s how I look at my job.”

“Well, in most sports, there is a clear score at the end of the game that determines whether you succeeded or failed. There is little room for ambiguity, which means there is little room for . . .” He paused to find the right words. “. . . for subjective, interpretive, ego-driven success,

You see, we are going to make our collective results as important as the score at a football game. We aren’t going to leave any room for interpretation when it comes to our success, because that only creates the opportunity for individual ego to sneak in.”

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.

By combining some and eliminating others, they narrowed them to seven: revenue, expenses, new customer acquisition, current customer satisfaction, employee retention, market awareness, and product quality. They also decided that these should be measured monthly, because waiting a full quarter to track results didn’t give them enough opportunities to detect problems and alter activities sufficiently.

Kathryn was almost amused at the predictability of what was unfolding before her. As soon as the reality of business problems is reintroduced to a situation like this one, she thought, people revert back to the behaviors that put them in the difficult situation in the first place.

“How often did you all talk about moving resources from one department to another in the middle of the quarter in order to make sure that you could achieve a goal that was in jeopardy?”

“And how disciplined were you during meetings about reviewing the goals in detail and drilling down on why they were or weren’t being met?”

“Okay, imagine a basketball coach in the locker room at half-time. He calls the team’s center into his office to talk with him one-on-one about the first half, and then he does the same with the point guard, the shooting guard, the small forward, and the power forward, without any of them knowing what everyone else was talking about. That’s not a team. It’s a collection of individuals.”

“All of you, every one of you, are responsible for sales. Not just JR. All of you are responsible for marketing. Not just Mikey. All of you are responsible for product development, customer service, and finance. Does that make sense?”

It almost feels like we’re all lobbying for more resources for our departments, or trying to avoid getting involved in anything outside our own areas.”

“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.”

But then she realized that this was precisely what she needed in order to provoke real change in the group: honest resistance.

“If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.”

“The next dysfunction of a team is the lack of commitment and the failure to buy in to decisions.” She wrote the dysfunction above the previous one. “And the evidence of this one is ambiguity,”

“I’m talking about committing to a plan or a decision, and getting everyone to clearly buy in to it. That’s why conflict is so important.”

“It’s as simple as this. When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.”

“Consensus is horrible. I mean, if everyone really agrees on something and consensus comes about quickly and naturally, well that’s terrific. But that isn’t how it usually works, and so consensus becomes an attempt to please everyone.”

The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.”

“Yeah, in my last company we called it ‘disagree and commit.’ You can argue about something and disagree, but still commit to it as though everyone originally bought into the decision completely.”

“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. And as simple as that sounds, most executives hate to do it, especially when it comes to a peer’s behavior, because they want to avoid interpersonal discomfort.”

“I’m talking about that moment when you know you have to call one of your peers on something that matters, and you decide to let it go because you just don’t want to experience that feeling when . . .” She paused, and Martin finished the sentence for her: “ . . . when you have to tell someone to shut down their e-mail during meetings.”

“No buy-in. People aren’t going to hold each other accountable if they haven’t clearly bought in to the same plan. Otherwise, it seems pointless because they’re just going to say, ‘I never agreed to that anyway.’”

Two years of behavioral reinforcement around politics is a tough thing to break, and one lecture, no matter how compelling, is not going to do it. The painful, heavy lifting was still to come.

If we cannot learn to engage in productive, ideological conflict during meetings, we are through.”

Our ability to engage in passionate, unfiltered debate about what we need to do to succeed will determine our future as much as any products we develop or partnerships we sign.”

“Let me assure you that from now on, every staff meeting we have will be loaded with conflict. And they won’t be boring. And if there is nothing worth debating, then we won’t have a meeting.”

“Can’t we have more than one overarching goal?” Kathryn shook her head. “If everything is important, then nothing is.”