The Five Dysfunctions of A Team

“If you can get all the people of an organization  rowing in the same direction you can dominate any industry on any market against any competition at any time.”

When the author use this quote from a friend in front of executives, they are all nodding, not only to express their approbation, but to express their inability to make it happen.

Success comes to those who are able to overcome the human bias that undermine the teamwork.

The five dysfunctions of a team is a book by Patrick Lencioni (not a new one, but it’s often useful to re-read some “classics”). This book use a novel at the beginning to make easier to understand the ideas that are further reexplain at the end.

The five dysfunctions can’t be treated in isolation, the first one is the foundation of the next and so on.

The five dysfunctions are, according to the author:

• Absence of trust: unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
• Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
• Lack of commitment: feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
• Avoidance of accountability: ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
• Inattention to results: focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

The author suggest tools to resolve each of the five dysfunctions. It’s probably there that the age of the book is visible as some of the tools had been overpass by others more recent and more effective.

Nevertheless, the model proposed by the book is useful to help a team understand what they will need to achieve to become an efficient team.

A book to recommend to many 🙂

You will also appreciate Rafael‘s review on goodreads (and all the others that will motivate you to read (or re-read) some books.

Header picture is from Adam Przewoski.