The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
- Prem Shah
- Jan 23, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 18, 2022
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
When I read this book, I don't think I was aware enough to understand the book completely, but the things that I learned impacted me a lot in my life and how to deal with people in teams. I think it is a very interesting read if you are working in a team.
Below is a short summary and all the highlights of the book which I did while reading.
Short Summary of the Book:
Absence of Trust. Teams who lack trust conceal weaknesses and mistakes, hesitate to ask for help, jump to conclusions about the intentions of others, hold grudges and dread meetings.
Fear of Conflict. A lack of trust leads to the fear of conflict. In these companies, employees worry more about politics and personal risk management than solving problems. Meetings are often boring because controversial topics are avoided.
Lack of Commitment. When teams become conflict-avoidant, a fear of failure develops. These teams have difficulty making decisions and second guess themselves.
Avoidance of Accountability. Second-guessing and a lack of common objectives then leads to an inability to develop standards for performance. Team members miss deadlines and deliver mediocre work.
Inattention to results. When teams lack focus and clear objectives, team members stagnate, become distracted, and focus on themselves.
Above summary taken from Executive Agenda
My Highlights from the Book:
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
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.
The fact remains that team, because they are made up of imperfect human beings, are inherently dysfunctional.
Building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But it is painfully difficult.
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. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
The fact is, if we don’t trust one another then we cannot be the kind of team that ultimately achieves results. And so that is where we’re going to focus first.
Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.
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 goal of the entire team.
No matter how good an individual on the team might be feeling about his or her situation, if the team loses everyone loses.
You can learn teamwork from lots of different activities, pretty much anything that involves a group of people working together. But there is a reason that sports are so prevalent when it comes to teams. The score. Well, in most sports, there is a clear score at the end of the game that determines whether you successes or failed.
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 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. And to that end, let’s see if we can come up with something right now.
Your department cannot be doing well because the company is failing and if the company is failing then we are all failing and there is no way that we can justify the performance of our own departments…
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.
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.
Next dysfunction is lack of commitment and the failure to buy in to decisions. And the evidence of this one is ambiguity.
Committing to a plan or a decision, and getting everyone to clearly buy in to it. That’s why conflict is so important.
When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.
Some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.
You can argue about something and disagree, but still commit to it as though everyone originally bought into the decision completely.
Avoidance of accountability. Holding each other accountable.
It’s not about what I want. It’s about you. You have to decide what is more important: helping the team win or advancing your career. I don’t see why those have to be mutually exclusive. They’re not. It’s just that one has to be more important than the other.
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 hold anyone accountable, not even your own kids.
Trust is not the same as assuming everyone is on the same page as you, and that they don’t need to be pushed. Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about team.
All credits go to the writer and the book.
Note: The Amazon link is an affiliated link, which means that if you buy it from the link, you won't get charged extra but I might get a commission.
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