The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

“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 are honest 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.”

I see a trust problem here in the lack of debate that exists during staff meetings and other interactions among this team.

“But I'd have to say that every effective team I've ever observed had a substantial level of debate.

“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.

“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.”

“It’s 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.”

“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.”

As hard as it is sometimes to enter the danger with your direct reports and confront them with something sticky, it’s even harder with your peers.”

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

“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.”

“If everything is important, then nothing is.”

“During the next two weeks 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.”

There was little interaction, and almost no signs of willingness to engage with one another.

Some people are hard to hold accountable because they are so helpful. Others because they get defensive. Others because they are

intimidating. I don’t think it’s easy to hold anyone accountable, not even your own kids.”

The most important action that a leader must take to encourage the building of trust on a team is to demonstrate vulnerability first. This requires that a leader risk losing face in front of the team, so that subordinates will take the same risk themselves.

All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business. Unfortunately, conflict is considered taboo in many situations, especially at work. And the higher you go up the management chain, the more you find people spending inordinate amounts of time and energy

trying to avoid the kind of passionate debates that are essential to any great team.

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 teams waste time and energy arguing, those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution. They often ask team members to take their issues “off-line,” which seems to be a euphemism for avoiding dealing with an important topic, only to have it raised again at the next meeting.

How does a team go about developing the ability and willingness to engage in healthy conflict? The first step is acknowledging that conflict is productive, and that many teams have a tendency to avoid it.

Teams that Fear Conflict . . . Have boring meetings Create environments where back-channel politics and personal attacks thrive Ignore controversial topics that are critical to team success Fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team members Waste time and energy with posturing and interpersonal risk management Teams that Engage in Conflict . . . Have lively, interesting meetings Extract and exploit the ideas of all team members Solve real problems quickly Minimize politics

Put critical topics on the table for discussion

Therefore, 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.

In the context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. 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.

At the end of a staff meeting or off-site, a team should explicitly review the key decisions made during the meeting, and agree on what needs to be communicated to employees or other constituencies about those decisions. What often happens during this exercise is that members of the team learn that they are not all on the same page about what has been agreed upon and that they need to clarify specific outcomes before putting them into action.

The essence of this dysfunction is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations. Members of great teams overcome these natural inclinations, opting instead to “enter the danger” with one another.

Members of great teams improve their relationships by holding one another accountable, thus demonstrating that they respect each other

and have high expectations for one another's performance.

As politically incorrect as it sounds, the most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of perfor...

A Team that Holds One Another Accountable . . . Ensures that poor performers feel pressure to improve Identifies potential problems quickly by questioning one another's approaches without hesitation Establishes respect among team members who are held to the same high standards