PDF Summary:The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick M. Lencioni

Even when teams are well-resourced and stacked with top talent, they can still fail. But why? In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team management consultant Patrick Lencioni argues that when teams fail, it’s often because they’ve fallen prey to at least one of five common behavioral traps.

These traps—having to do with trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results—are conceptually simple but difficult to overcome because doing so requires people to make lasting behavioral changes. Lencioni says the effort pays off, though: Because so many teams struggle with these traps, any team that overcomes them will gain a huge advantage over the competition—enough to dominate any professional field.

This guide will explore the five behavioral traps (which Lencioni calls dysfunctions), explaining what they look like, the damage they cause, and how to overcome them. In our commentary, we’ll compare Lencioni’s ideas to perspectives from other experts on teamwork, such as Amy C. Edmondson (Teaming) and Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams).

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Personality Tests and Ways to Get to Know Your Team

Not everyone agrees with Lencioni that personality assessments are the best way to get to know your team. In a piece for Harvard Business Review, author and entrepreneur Peter Bregman argues that such tests are reductive attempts to categorize people into a limited set of personality types instead of allowing them to be complex and changeable. Because these tests are self-assessments, Bregman says they tend to reflect our self-image instead of showing us our biases and blindspots.

With respect to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in particular, the scientific community generally doesn’t consider it valid. Reasons for this vary: For one, the same person can get different results when taking it twice with a few weeks in between; for another, it’s based on early 20th-century psychological theories that haven’t been proven.

A more direct, reliable approach may be to simply observe your team members and get a sense of their typical behavior and dynamics. Who tends to speak first? Who asks clarifying questions? Who plays devil’s advocate or rocks the boat more often? By getting to know these observable patterns, you can figure out team dynamics without the need for personality assessments of uncertain value.

Behavioral Trap #3: Team Members Don’t Fully Commit

Once a team can engage in fruitful conflict, the next step is ensuring that debate leads to genuine commitment. In this section, we’ll discuss what happens when team members don’t commit fully, what problems that causes, and how to get people to commit.

When Team Members Don’t Buy Into Decisions

According to Lencioni, the third behavioral trap is when team members fail to commit to plans and decisions. For example, people might nod and agree to a new project timeline in a meeting, but later express doubts in private. When commitment to a plan is missing, it’s often because team members don’t feel they were heard during the meeting (which happens when debate is missing).

(Shortform note: Why is feeling heard so important for buy-in? One reason is that change is scary: Research shows that it causes stress and mistrust among lower-level employees. Mitigate this by giving everyone a seat at the table and a stake in the decision. When people feel involved, they’re more likely to embrace change because their agency—their ability to make choices—has been respected.)

Neglecting to listen to your team members can lead to:

• Inconsistent execution. Without buy-in, people often execute decisions half-heartedly or interpret them to suit their preferences. This creates confusion about priorities and causes people to work at cross-purposes, even if the original decision was clear.
• Second-guessing and resistance. Team members who don’t fully buy in will continue to doubt decisions after they’ve been made and sometimes resist them, either openly or passively. This wastes time and energy.

(Shortform note: Even if you succeed at listening to your team, other obstacles may prevent buy-in and commitment. One such obstacle is overwhelm, such as team members having too many tasks on their plate. This lack of bandwidth could be the real reason they’re executing decisions half-heartedly or displaying resistance. To avoid this problem, look for the early signs of employee burnout and proactively free up teammates’ bandwidth before you ask them to commit to big decisions.)

How to Build Commitment

Lencioni writes that building commitment requires clarity and closure. After a team has debated an issue, the leader must ensure that everyone leaves the meeting knowing exactly what was decided, why it was decided, and what happens next. To achieve this, Lencioni recommends that at the end of each meeting, the team should explicitly discuss what they need to communicate to their respective departments. This ensures that everyone understands the decisions that have been made and how to share them with their subordinates.

(Shortform note: In Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal adds that explicit, open discussion is vital to maintaining what he calls “shared consciousness”—the group mindset that emerges when everyone is on the same page. Shared consciousness helps everyone on a team (whether large or small) to coordinate skillfully on the fly amidst changing circumstances. McChrystal recommends developing it by breaking down silos, the usually separate departments within an organization (like marketing or human resources) that don’t talk much. He did this with a policy of “extreme transparency,” which included cc’ing a wide range of people on important communications, taking calls on speakerphone, and building an open-office environment.)

Keller says teams should also establish clear deadlines for decisions. While people could theoretically debate a decision forever, setting a deadline forces them to commit. Even when the team can’t be completely certain they’re making the right choice, moving forward is better than staying stuck in endless analysis.

(Shortform note: In addition to setting deadlines, try establishing a clear process for arriving at a final decision. Teams tend to think they can figure out decision disagreements when they arise, but this approach isn’t as reliable as deciding in advance how you’ll settle differences and come to a consensus. One strategy is to set a time limit for making a decision—and if you go over it, put things to a vote.)

Behavioral Trap #4: Team Members Don’t Hold Each Other Accountable

With trust built, debate normalized, and clear commitments in place, teams must then follow through on the decisions they make. This is where the next trap—the failure of accountability—comes into play. In this section, we’ll describe this trap, the issues it causes, and how to overcome it.

When Team Members Don't Hold Each Other Accountable

According to Lencioni, the fourth behavioral trap builds directly on the third—teams that lack commitment struggle to hold each other accountable. Without buy-in on a shared plan, team members hesitate to confront each other about poor performance. That said, Lencioni also writes that even teams with strong commitment face accountability challenges because people naturally avoid the interpersonal discomfort of calling out their peers. In either case:

• Standards erode. When poor performance or counterproductive behavior goes unchallenged, it becomes the new normal.
• Resentment builds. People who pull their weight resent those who don’t, and because nobody addresses that imbalance directly, that resentment festers and damages relationships.
• Team leaders shoulder the burden. When team members don’t or won’t hold each other accountable, that responsibility falls on the leader. But because it’s exhausting for one person to hold multiple others accountable, this doesn’t work for long.

How Fatigue Impacts Teams

Why do we struggle to hold each other accountable? One reason might be that it often requires going outside your comfort zone, which contributes to some people’s already-high levels of fatigue. 2025 saw a rise in fatigue due to outside-of-work-stress, from worrying about political instability to dealing with wages falling due to inflation. Therefore, you might think twice before asking people to stretch themselves further with things like mutual accountability efforts.

Our economic system could be contributing to this fatigue. In The Divide, economist Jason Hickel argues that our economic system (neoliberal capitalism) depends on a logic of perpetual, exponential growth. In other words, it’s like a motorcycle that can only accelerate: If it slows, it starts to tip, and if it stops completely, everything falls apart, and in a world that’s constantly driving for more, people get worn out.

Not only that, argues Tricia Hersey in Rest Is Resistance, but our culture of constant hustle and grind leaves us unwell and robs us of the full range of human experience. When we’re always working or under pressure, she says we can’t fully pause, dream, and imagine in ways that enrich our lives.

So, if standards seem to be eroding at your workplace, you worry about simmering resentment, or you have to micromanage people, step back and consider the systemic context: Less-than-ideal behaviors might simply be a result of exhaustion, not a lack of character or skillfulness. Therefore, it may benefit your team for you to brainstorm ways that your workplace could support workers’ need to rest or provide them with energizing, motivating experiences.

How to Create Accountability

Lencioni writes that holding each other accountable is much easier when teams have trust, engage in fruitful debate, and commit to the plan. When those elements are in place, team members respect one another, and accountability will feel like a form of support rather than criticism or policing.

(Shortform note: Research supports the idea that mutual respect enhances accountability. Specifically, people tend to feel much more willing to collaborate when they feel emotionally connected to their team. This increases accountability—but it’s less clear whether it actually improves performance.)

Alongside overcoming the three traps that precede it, the best way to boost accountability is to make goals and standards public and visible. Visible measures of success or failure act as positive peer pressure: When everyone has committed to an unambiguous plan of action, everyone will work harder to perform their part of it, because they don’t want to be the one person who lets the others down. To that end, Lencioni suggests that teams should establish clear metrics and review their progress regularly with all team members present. Team leaders should give members permission to call each other out, so that accountability doesn’t fall entirely on the leader’s shoulders. This normalizes direct, peer-to-peer accountability.

Lastly, Lencioni notes that team-based rewards further encourage people to care about each other’s performance—for instance, using compensation structures in which pay is based on team success rather than individual achievement.

(Shortform note: All workplaces have established cultural norms, and if yours isn’t already performance-focused, people might resist additional metrics and a culture of calling each other out. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein share one possible solution: choice design. In Nudge, they say that no choice is ever neutral, and by being intentional about how we frame choices, we can encourage people to choose better without restricting their freedom. Lencioni’s team-based rewards demonstrate this “libertarian paternalism” by encouraging people to put the team first, but not mandating it. A team leader could similarly encourage peer-to-peer accountability by framing it as less hierarchical than top-down accountability.)

Behavioral Trap #5: Team Members Don’t Put the Team First

The final behavioral trap, at the top of the pyramid, is when team members lose sight of shared goals and prioritize personal or departmental interests. We’ll cover this issue below, first describing it and the problems it causes, and then explaining how to resolve it.

When Team Members Prioritize Themselves

According to Lencioni, team members sometimes put their personal needs, like pride or career goals, over the team. This is especially true of business executives, because they’re used to being powerful, heard, and in charge. But for the members of any kind of team, the first priority should always be the team itself. When team members don’t put the team first:

1. Results suffer across the board. Teams miss targets, lose to competitors, and fail to capitalize on opportunities because energy goes toward individual advancement rather than collective success.
2. Meetings get political. Instead of focusing on what’s best for the organization, team members use meetings to protect their turf, grab resources, or advance personal agendas.
3. Top talent abandons ship. Employees who do care about the team’s success get frustrated with the lack of meaningful progress, and they may leave to seek out teams that are more functional.

(Shortform note: A team suffering from this behavioral trap may not only miss opportunities and lose to competitors—they could collapse completely. This happened with Theranos, the 2010s biotech company whose CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, was convicted of fraud. Holmes reportedly covered up important information about flaws in their product—portable blood-testing tech billed as revolutionary—in the name of preserving her own position. Just as Lencioni says, Theranos is known to have had turnover problems, as well as frequent firings in a hostile and siloed work environment where teams were not allowed to communicate transparently.)

How to Ensure the Team Comes First

According to Lencioni, leaders can get team members to put the team first by having them commit publicly to their goals and tying success to specific, measurable outcomes. The public commitment reinforces accountability (discussed in the previous section), while measurable outcomes—for instance, increasing user engagement by 35% in the first annual quarter—give unambiguous parameters for success or failure.

(Shortform note: Lencioni’s recommendation to use public commitments finds backing in the work of behavioral economist Katy Milkman. In How to Change, she further explains that while people tend to avoid extra effort, affixing a penalty to failure—like letting down a teammate—drives us to keep our commitments. The harder the penalty, the stronger the effect, so if the penalty is that the rest of the team sees you fall short (as in Lencioni’s solution), you’ll likely try harder not to.)

The team leader should also explicitly tell team members that they’re part of the team first—and that their own interests or subordinate teams come second. If someone starts putting their own interests first, the leader should redirect them: “That’s a valid concern for your department, but right now we need to think about what’s best for the organization as a whole.” For business leaders in particular, this teaches C-suite team members to think of themselves primarily as members of the executive team who happen to lead departments, rather than department heads who happen to sit on the executive team.

Lencioni notes that with trust, fruitful conflict, clear commitment, and peer accountability established, you can stave off self-interest and build toward genuine team cohesion.

(Shortform note: Self-interest may not always be diametrically opposed to the interests of the group. Often, people are motivated by the potential to develop a good reputation. So, imagine a workplace culture where good teamwork gets rewarded with increased status: Even the most self-interested amongst us would realize that our interests and the group’s can dovetail. In game theory, this is what’s called a win-win—everyone involved gets what they want.)