The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

I’m not saying that there’s no place for ego on a team. The key is to make the collective ego greater than the individual ones.”

No matter how good an individual on the team might be feeling about his or her situation, if the team loses, everyone loses.”

he is all about the team. And as good as his teams are, few of his kids play ball at big colleges because, frankly, they’re not all that talented. They win because they play team basketball, and that usually allows them to beat bigger, faster, more talented groups of players.”

Ken benched him. The team played better without him, and he eventually quit.”

he came out the next year with a very different attitude, and went on to play for Saint Mary’s College after he graduated.

He’ll tell you now that it was the most important year of his life.”

“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.

you can definitely learn teamwork from lots of different activities, pretty much anything that involves a group of people working together.

there is a reason that sports are so prevalent when it comes to teams.”

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, if you know what I mean.”

great athletes’ egos are usually tied to a clear result: winning. They just want to win. More than making the All-Star team, more than getting their picture on a box of Wheaties, and yes, more than making money.”

The teams that figure it out have a bigger advantage than ever before because most of their competitors are just a bunch of individuals looking out for themselves.”

If you let profit be your only guide to results, you won’t be able to know how the team is doing until the season is almost over.”

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 ...

seven: revenue, expenses, new customer acquisition, current customer satisfaction, employee retention, market awareness, and product quality.

“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?”

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?”

At other companies where I’ve worked I’ve always been more involved in sales and operations, and right now, I feel isolated in my own area.”

it does seem like we don’t really have the same goals in mind when we’re at staff meetings.

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.”

you guys think I’m such a prince for volunteering, but that’s how everyone works at most of the companies I’ve worked for.”

“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.”

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

Just above absence of trust she wrote 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 just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.”

the lack of conflict that’s a problem. Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing. I’d trade that false kind of harmony any day for a team’s willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with no collateral damage.”

you don’t argue very well. Your frustration sometimes surfaces in the form of subtle comments, but more often than not, it is bottled up and carried around. Am I right?”

How long have we been talking about outsourcing IT? I think it comes up at every meeting, and half of us are for it, half are against it, and so it just sits there because no one wants to piss anyone off.”

“The next dysfunction of a team is the lack of commitment and the failure to buy in to decisions.”

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.”

some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.”

wrote 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. 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 just don’t want to have to tell someone that their standards are too low. I’d rather just tolerate it

I don’t have as much of a problem telling my direct reports what I think. I seem to hold them accountable most of the time, even when it’s a sticky issue.”

It feels like I’m sticking my nose into their business

“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.’”

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.”

Every great movie has conflict.