PDF Summary:Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni

“Teamwork” is one of the most common buzzwords in the modern business world, but what does it actually mean, and how do you foster it? Renowned business consultant Patrick Lencioni seeks to answer those questions with this follow-up to his 2002 business fable The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He argues that all teamwork must begin with trust.

In this guide, we’ll start by explaining Lencioni’s definition of team and why not all groups can or should be teams. We’ll then discuss each of the five impairments to teamwork—distrust, lack of healthy disagreements, disunity, fear of accountability, and self-interest—and explore how you can surmount them to build a cohesive, effective team.

In our commentary, we’ll compare and contrast this book’s ideas with those of other popular business and leadership guides, such as the business fable Our Iceberg Is Melting and Lencioni’s own Death By Meeting. We’ll also provide some additional actionable steps you can take to implement Lencioni’s ideas.

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In this section, we’ll explain how to encourage healthy, constructive debates. Doing so first requires you to understand team members’ different styles of disagreement—aggressive and argumentative versus calm and logical. It often also requires guidance from the team leader during discussions. Let’s look at each of these requirements in detail.

Understanding Styles of Disagreement

Lencioni says that just like with building trust, you should begin the process of fostering healthy debates by helping your team members understand each other. Specifically, have a conversation with the team about how each of them approaches disagreements.

For example, how comfortable are each of your team members with arguing? What tactics do they tend to use in arguments—passionate appeals to emotion, calm and logical arguments, or somewhere in between? What cultural and familial influences formed the foundations of their disagreement styles?

Once you have an overall idea of how your team handles conflict, Lencioni says to establish what he calls conflict norms. Work with your team to set rules and expectations for debates—that way, they can handle disagreements in a way that’s effective and comfortable for everyone.

Be Aware of People-Pleasing Behavior

While tackling Impairment #2, be aware of people-pleasers: people who are afraid of any kind of disagreement and eagerly agree with everyone. People-pleasers also tend to burn themselves out by taking on every task that’s asked of them and taking blame for things that aren’t their fault. These qualities make them very likable but are unhelpful for a team that relies on honest discussion and debate.

If you have people-pleasers on your team (or are one yourself), one conflict norm you might set is replacing “maybe” with “no.” People-pleasers will often avoid outright disagreement and instead project uncertainty about an idea or a request. If one of your team members (or you) seems afraid to commit to something, ask whether they’re really not sure about it, or if they actually disagree. If it turns out that they do disagree, remind them of the ground rule that they should say “no” with confidence—remember, you’ve already created an environment of trust where it’s safe to do so.

Guiding Disagreements

Lencioni says that even after you’ve established that disagreements are expected and desired and have set your conflict ground rules, you’ll often have to encourage your team to start debates.

First, start team meetings by telling everyone what you’ll be discussing that day, why it’s important, and what the consequences will be if the team makes a bad decision. This will ensure that your teammates are engaged and energized right from the start.

(Shortform note: In his business parable Death By Meeting, Lencioni provides another tip to make sure your team gives it their all: Make the stakes personal. Don’t just talk about what the team’s decision will mean for the company in general—make sure they understand the impact it will have on them as individuals. For example, a good decision might lead to better profits for the company and therefore better bonuses for the team members.)

You might also need to help keep the discussion going. For example, if there’s a team member who tends to be quieter than the others, specifically ask for that person’s input from time to time. Lencioni also says that you should look for potential conflicts and try to bring them out into the open during meetings. If you suspect someone has an objection or argument that they’re holding back, encourage them to speak up.

Finally, Lencioni says that, although it’s important to encourage discussion and disagreements, a team leader also needs to know when to bring a debate to an end. Your team will often be unable to reach a consensus; if the conversation seems to be going in circles or tempers are wearing thin, it’s time for the team leader to step in and make a final decision.

How to Be an Effective Moderator

In essence, Lencioni is saying that the team leader should act as a moderator during team meetings—someone who guides the debate and keeps people from going off-topic. As such, here are some tips to effectively moderate a discussion:

1) Minimize your speaking time. It’s difficult to both act as a moderator and be a part of the discussion because you won’t have anyone to moderate you. Therefore, try to make a point of speaking only when necessary and for as short a time as possible. As Lencioni says, this could mean simply encouraging others to share their concerns and disagreements in order to promote productive conflicts.

2) Allow time for discussion. Remember, the purpose of having a team isn’t just to present ideas—it’s to discuss them. Therefore, make sure to leave plenty of time for people to think about what they’ve heard, ask questions, and debate each other’s ideas. You can do this by having “discussion time” as early as possible in the meeting and saving updates or presentations for the end, where they can be cut and sent via email if you need extra time for debates.

3) Keep the meeting on schedule. You’ve got a limited amount of time for any given meeting. Therefore, set a time limit for how long any one person is allowed to speak or how long the team can spend discussing a particular topic. As a moderator, it will be your job to watch the time and keep things moving along as needed. If a topic is running over time, you might need to stop the debate and come back to it during another meeting, or make a final decision yourself so that the team can move on (as Lencioni notes).

Impairment #3: Lack of Unity

The ability to disagree with each other respectfully and productively is crucial for a team, but it naturally leads to Lencioni’s third impairment: a lack of unity. Some team members may resist going along with a decision even after it’s been made. For example, they might genuinely think the team made a bad decision, or they might simply feel slighted because their ideas weren’t chosen.

(Shortform note: Having team members support a decision they disagree with goes back to trust. If they genuinely trust their teammates’ abilities and judgment, then they can also trust that the decision the team reached was a good one, even if it wasn’t the decision they’d personally have made. By establishing trust—and reminding your team members that they trust each other—you’ve already gone a long way toward overcoming this team impairment.)

In this section, we’ll go over Lencioni’s method for having your team present a united front: 1) ensuring clarity among the team members and 2) requiring them to communicate decisions to their subordinates.

Ensuring Clarity

Lencioni’s first tip for achieving team unity is making sure all team members understand exactly what decision they reached during the meeting. To support a course of action, they first need to know what that course of action will be.

Therefore, right before ending a meeting, clearly and specifically write down and share what the team has agreed to. This is also an opportunity for team members to share anything they’re confused about and to eliminate any ambiguity.

For example, say your team decided to have the company adopt a new type of software. You could write down that the team decided to phase out whatever software your company is currently using and require all employees to start using this new program. If one of your team members assumed the new software would just be an option for employees rather than a requirement, these last few minutes of the meeting are that person’s chance to clear up their confusion.

(Shortform note: Before you can effectively write down the team decision, you must make sure you understand it. A simple way to do this is by paraphrasing what you’ve heard during the discussion—throughout the meeting, put major points into your own words and repeat them back to the team. This provides an opportunity to clear up your confusion.)

Requiring Communication

Lencioni’s second tip for achieving unity is holding each team member responsible for explaining the decision to everyone who reports to them. By doing so, you’ll make sure they’re personally invested in team unity: They know there will be consequences if they don’t explain the decision willingly and accurately.

It’s not enough for your team members to send a simple email or voicemail communicating the decision to their staff—they must do so either in person or over a phone call so their employees will have the chance to ask questions and voice concerns. This requirement also helps ensure that team members fully understand the decision before they communicate it; since they’ll have to explain the decision and answer questions about it, they’ll want to make sure they understand it themselves.

Requiring “Skin in the Game”

By requiring team members to personally communicate the team’s decisions, you’re giving them what risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "skin in the game." You’re requiring them to take on some risk: If they don’t deliver the news accurately and impartially, they’ll have to face some sort of consequence. This (relatively small) risk ensures that they’ll act ethically—in everyone’s best interests.

The essence of Taleb’s concept of “skin in the game” is creating a situation where harming others also harms you and helping others also helps you. Here’s how it plays out in this particular case.

Option #1: The unethical option. A team member causes harm to the team and to their subordinates by not communicating the team’s decision, communicating it inaccurately, or offering their own negative opinions of the decision. This will also harm the team member in question since they’ll have to face the consequences you’d previously established—perhaps a formal reprimand or (if necessary) removal from the team.

Option #2: The ethical option. The team member carries out their duties by communicating the team’s decision willingly, accurately, and supportively. This benefits the team (who retain the support of that person’s subordinates), the subordinates (who now understand the decision and what it will mean for them), and the team member (who, rather than facing consequences, strengthens their bonds of trust with the rest of the team).

Impairments #4 and #5: Fear of Accountability and Self-Interest

Discussing unity naturally leads to the last two impairments: fear of accountability and self-interest. These both hinder team unity by keeping people’s attention focused on themselves. This final section will explain these two impairments and discuss ways to keep team members accountable to and intent on meeting the team’s shared goals.

Impairment #4: Fear of Accountability

Lencioni argues that accountability involves team members—including the team leader—holding each other responsible for their behavior and their results.

Holding people accountable for their results is easy. If there are clear expectations regarding, say, sales numbers or company profits, it’s easy to tell when someone isn’t meeting them. In that case, there needs to be a conversation about why they’re falling short and how to address the problem.

Lencioni says it’s much more uncomfortable to hold people accountable for their day-to-day behavior. But, it’s just as important because behavior leads directly to results; by correcting behaviors, you can stop poor results from happening in the first place. For example, if one of your team members seems disengaged or hostile during team meetings, that bad behavior might also come through when they’re talking to customers, thereby harming sales.

Accountability Through the “What Happened” Conversation

Holding people accountable, whether for their behaviors or their outcomes, often requires uncomfortable and difficult conversations. It may help to have a plan for handling these discussions.

In Difficult Conversations, the authors call this the “what happened” conversation, and they explain how to approach it productively. The key to a successful “what happened” conversation is to approach it with curiosity instead of judgment. Your goal should be to find out what’s wrong—in this case, to find the cause of the team member’s poor behavior or poor performance—not to accuse or shame the other person.

To learn what the problem is, start by explaining your perspective: The team member isn’t meeting expectations, or they’re engaging in a concerning behavior. Then, show curiosity by asking for the other person’s perspective on why the issue is happening. For example, they might reveal that a problem in their personal life is distracting them at work or that they’re having problems with another team member. Then, the two of you can work together to figure out the best way to address that problem.

How to Overcome the Fear of Accountability

According to Lencioni, to help your team overcome their fear of holding each other accountable, you must first help them realize that it’s really the fear of hurting each other. Accountability is personal—as a result, calling out your teammates’ shortcomings often feels judgmental and unkind. This holds true for the team leader and team members alike.

Once you understand where this impairment comes from, you can start taking steps to overcome it. Specifically, change your team’s mindset: Explain that failing to hold each other accountable is much more harmful than the brief discomfort of a difficult conversation. Holding back criticism doesn’t just harm the company—it also robs team members of the chance to improve.

Lencioni adds that the most effective type of accountability is between teammates. This is because criticism feels more personal and more meaningful when it comes from a peer instead of from “the boss” (the team leader), who’s in a position where giving feedback and criticism is just part of their job. Therefore, overcoming the fear of accountability—empowering team members to give each other feedback—is more effective than any feedback the leader could give personally.

(Shortform note: In No Rules Rules, Netflix co-founder and executive chairman Reed Hastings says that the best way to make sure people feel comfortable giving (and getting) feedback is to create a company culture where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, at any time. This eliminates the uncertainty about whether and when it’s acceptable to give someone negative feedback. It also helps minimize the power dynamic that Lencioni notes, where feedback from “the boss” doesn’t feel as meaningful or as personal as feedback from a peer. In this case, feedback from a peer will be just as common as feedback from the manager or team leader, so one won’t feel any more personal or unusual than the other.)

Holding Back Criticism Is a Lie by Omission

Another way to help your team push through their fear of accountability is to share that holding back important criticism is the same thing as lying. Specifically, it’s a lie by omission, since you’re pretending everything is OK when it actually isn’t, and that people don’t need to improve when they do. Lies by omission are just as hurtful as actually saying something untrue, even if you’re trying to protect someone else’s feelings by withholding your feedback.

Furthermore, just like any other type of lie, lies by omission quickly erode trust—teammates need to trust each other to tell the whole truth, not just the positive parts of it. So, even though a person might just be trying to keep their teammate happy, they could be doing serious harm to the team as a whole, and, by extension, the company.

Impairment #5: Self-Interest

Fear of accountability hinders teamwork because people are too concerned about hurting their teammates; self-interest hinders teamwork when people go too far in the other direction and aren’t concerned enough about their teammates.

Lencioni says that people are naturally self-centered, and as a result, they lose sight of the big picture: company outcomes. In this section, we’ll briefly examine a few ways that self-interested behavior can harm the team and the company. We’ll then discuss advice on how to keep the team focused on company outcomes.

The Problems With Self-Interested Behavior

Self-interested behavior can have several negative impacts on companies and teams. First, Lencioni notes that people might resist ideas that hinder their personal goals, even if those ideas are good for the company as a whole. For example, if the team decides to hire an outside expert to fill an advisory role that a less experienced team member was hoping to get, the team member in question would likely oppose that idea.

Team members may also sometimes suffer from tunnel vision—focusing too heavily on their own work or their own department—and may not take into account how the company as a whole is performing. For instance, if the manager of a manufacturing team is having the team cut corners to produce vast amounts of a product, that manager's personal metrics might look exceptional. However, their team’s shoddy work will harm the company in the long run when customers realize that their products are of poor quality.

Finally, self-interest may give rise to egotism, where one team member thinks they’re more important or more capable than the team as a whole. Lencioni notes that this is especially common with top performers, whose exceptional work often shields them from the consequences of bad behavior and rule-breaking. However, he says that no one person—no matter how good they are at their job—is more important than the team. Therefore, anyone who can’t let go of ego and commit to the group should be removed from it. You’ll find that the team’s improved overall performance more than makes up for the loss of one top performer, leading to better outcomes for the company as a whole.

A Company Is All One System

You can address all of the problems stemming from self-interest by encouraging your team to understand the big picture: the company as a whole. As systems scientist Peter Senge explains in The Fifth Discipline, self-interested people make the mistake of viewing a company as a collection of disconnected parts: individual departments, or even individual employees. Instead, Senge urges you to see an organization as a single cohesive system where every part influences every other part and to help your coworkers (or teammates, in this case) see it that way as well.

For the team member who resists hiring an outside expert for a role they hoped to fill themselves, you might point out that a specialist could produce better outcomes—and higher profits—for the company as a whole, which will then be reflected in that team member’s salary or bonus. Alternatively, you could argue that taking on a new role will hinder or eliminate that person’s ability to perform in their current role. That could harm the company, the team, and the team member in question.

For the team member who’s having their workers cut corners to make products more quickly, point out that it won’t matter how quickly they can produce if their goods gain a bad reputation and nobody wants to buy them. Also, help them to see how one shoddy product harms the company’s reputation—and its bottom line—which will end up hurting everyone who works for that company.

The egotistical top performer needs to understand that they’re just one tiny part of a much larger system and that their behavior is harming that system, regardless of how good their individual metrics are. To use a metaphor, their selfishness is like sand in the gears of your corporate machine; it slows and irritates everyone around them, making the entire system less efficient. This eventually comes back to hurt the star performer as well.

How to Keep the Team Focused on Outcomes

To shift people’s focus off themselves and onto overall outcomes, Lencioni suggests choosing and visibly tracking one or two company metrics related to the team’s overall goal. You’ll be constantly reminding your team of their big-picture goals and letting them see their progress toward those goals. For example, you might maintain a shared online document or write the chosen metrics on a whiteboard before each team meeting.

Note that the metrics you choose must be objective and measurable, such as sales numbers or customer reviews. In other words, set a simple and concrete goal for your team to reach, and track appropriate metrics to keep each team member focused on that goal.

Also Set Intermediate Goals and Celebrate Meeting Them

Lencioni urges you to track your team’s progress to keep people motivated and focused. In Leading Change, leadership expert John P. Kotter says you can make this practice even more effective by setting short-term goals or milestones leading up to that main goal—tracked using the same metrics—and celebrating with your team when you pass each milestone. For example, if your final goal is to sell 1,000 of a certain product each month, you might celebrate when your monthly sales reach 250, 500, and 750.

Those small victories will make sure your team stays engaged and encouraged as they work toward their big-picture goal. This practice will also help ensure that you’ve chosen an appropriate big-picture goal; if your final goal isn’t simple, concrete, and measurable, it will be extremely hard to identify actionable steps that lead up to it.