Five Team Dysfunctions

In Patrick Lencioni's book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he describes the five main pitfalls for teams and how to overcome them. These include: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

The dysfunctions are interrelated and can be visualized as a pyramid. If there are team problems, the bottom of the pyramid should be addressed first because addressing top level issues first will be a waste of time. The issues are built upon each other. For example, if the issue appears to be with commitment, then attempting to fix it without addressing trust and conflict could potentially be a waste of time since commitment cannot be established without trust and conflict.

The main dysfunction my team experienced was avoidance of accountability. We experienced resentment among team members who had different standards of performance, missed deadlines, and placed a burden on the leader to be the source of discipline. At first, we struggled with difficult conversations on each other's performance, which only created resentment when standards weren't enforced and expectations weren't met. We fixed these problems by addressing each other's perfomance and having the leader back down as the "enforcer." We also made objectives clearer.

Lencioni suggests publication of goals and standards, simple and regular progress reviews, team rewards, and relying on peer pressure to instill accountability. Others have suggested similar methods.

After our efforts, our team...

1. Ensures that poor performers feel pressure to improve


2. Identifies potential problems quickly by questioning one another's approaches without hesitation


3. Establishes respect among team members who are held to the same high standards


4. Avoids excessive bureaucracy around performance management and corrective action

It was important to identify and address our avoidance of accountability so that we could move up the pyramid to the next potential problem stage, inattention to results. We did not have much issue with this area due to the nature of our rewards (team-based, result rewards).