How “Scrum” addresses the “Five Dysfunctions of a team”…

Sometime back, i was reflecting on the scrum implementation in my team. I was trying to figure out what scrum values are not being demonstrated by the team members and how to fix those gaps. Just to give a sense of the values and what they mean in short, below is the image from scrum.org

During the same time i was also going through the famous book by Patrick Lencioni, “The five dysfunctions of a team”. In this book the author talks about the 5 major issues which teams face as they “grow together”. A good description of that can be found in the image below.

I was amused to see that how each dysfunction in a team is addressed by one of the scrum values. So theoretically, if we follow the scrum practice in spirit (by honouring the scrum values) we would be able to address all the five dysfunctions of a team. See the below comparisons:

1. Dysfunction 1 — Absence of Trust between team members is addressed by the scrum value of “Respect”. The value of “Respect” if internalised correctly will cause the team members to help each other on areas they are good at and behave in a non-judgemental way for each other’s weakness. This will improve the trust in the team. To some extent, another scrum value “Courage” also helps here. To ask for help (e.g. calling out blockers/helps needed during the daily standup) when stuck, needs courage. Team members risk being judged by others while showing their vulnerabilities. This also increases trust between team members.
2. Dysfunction 2 — Fear of Conflict between team members is addressed by the scrum value of “Courage”. Scrum encourages “courage” in all the actions performed in a team. Be it in terms of setting audacious sprint goals, or adopting changes, or holding each other accountable, discussing out issues and improvements as part of sprint retros or any other sprint ceremony. Scrum is a heavily collaborative process and when you combine that with “courage”, the “Fear of conflict” goes away.
3. Dysfunction 3 — Lack of commitment is directly addressed by the scrum value of “Commitment”. Scrum requires 100% commitment of each team member towards the sprint goal. This starts right from sprint planning where the scrum together commits for a scope of work. It is a commitment from all the members of the team together and not only by a few members. The scrum team rides together and fails together so 100% commitment from each member becomes a core necessity thus address this dysfunction of a team.
4. Dysfunction 4 — Avoidance of accountability is addressed by the scrum values of “Openness” and “Courage”. The logic is simple, if scrum team members and their stakeholders are completely transparent and open about their decisions, strengths, vulnerabilities and status of their work then there is no need for avoiding any accountability on the decisions/actions. They will be on the same page in terms of owning up the success or failures of the team. “Courage” helps team members in owning up their decisions/actions.
5. Dysfunction 5 — Inattention to Results is addressed by the scrum value of “Focus”. Scrum specifically focuses on results of sprint and goals of the scrum team. The smaller iterative delivery model of scrum itself insures that focus on continuous delivery of the project goals thus addressing the “Inattention to Results” dysfunction.

So theoretically an ideal scrum team will be free from all the five dysfunctions of a team.