The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

by Patrick Lencioni

it is better to make a decision boldly and be wrong—and then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.

specific steps to maximize clarity and achieve buy-in, and resisting the lure of consensus or certainty.

More than any other member of the team, the leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong.

it refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.

team members who are particularly close to one another sometimes hesitate to hold one another accountable precisely because they fear jeopardizing a valuable personal relationship.

the most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of performance on a team is peer pressure.

there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.

The enemy of accountability is ambiguity,

it is important to keep those agreements in the open so that no one can easily ignore them.

One of the most difficult challenges for a leader who wants to instill accountability on a team is to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism. Sometimes strong leaders naturally create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving themselves as the only source of discipline. This creates an environment where team members assume that the leader is holding others accountable, and so they hold back even when they see something that isn’t right.

he or she must be willing to serve as the ultimate arbiter of discipline when the team itself fails.

to care about something other than the collective goals of the group.

How does a team go about ensuring that its attention is focused on results? By making results clear, and rewarding only those behaviors and actions that contribute to those results.

If team members sense that the leader values anything other than results, they will take that as permission to do the same for themselves.

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.

teams succeed because they are exceedingly human.