The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Book Review
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is kind of a frustrating book. The actual technical leadership knowledge in it is great. Unfortunately, to get to that knowledge, you first have to suffer thru the 180-page “parable” that precedes it. It tells the story of Kathryn, a CEO who is trying to whip a dysfunctional executive team into shape. She applies the principles talked about in the later part of the book. They are good principles and I have no doubt that they’re effective in the real world. You just have to get to the end of the book to read them.
Honestly, having read the whole book, I’d just say that you should skip the beginning part. The real knowledge is much more worth having. If you prefer this kind of thing told to you in story form, then by all means read it, but just be forewarned of a couple of things.
Because it’s a “parable,” any info that’s not related to conveying the leadership concepts of the book isn’t included (such as characterization). There are also these unbearable cliffhanger chapter endings (“And none of them would have been surprised to know that one of their colleagues wouldn’t be around by the time the next off-site began. They would have been shocked, however, to know that the colleague would not be [the one you would expect it to be :O].”). These issues combine to make this portion of the book feel like bad fanfiction.
There is also a more subtle reason why you should skip this part: reading the parable is weirdly addicting. I hate to admit it, but 80 pages in, I was really curious what would happen. So then I had to finish it. It was like a bad TV show that you can’t stop watching. That said, if you want to get the most value out of the book the most directly, the leadership principles are the real meat and potatoes.
So what are the leadership principles? Well, like I’ve been alluding to, they’re actually pretty good. Lencioni lays out a model of team dysfunctions that makes a lot of sense.
At the bottom of the pyramid, you have Absence of Trust. This is like the ur-problem that all other team problems stem from. If you have a team that doesn’t trust each other, it doesn’t matter if they are putting out good results at that moment because that team is not long for this world. That’s because Absence of Trust leads to Fear of Conflict.
Lencioni conveys that generally if teams are afraid of conflict it’s because they don’t want to be vulnerable with each other. I thought that was an insightful point- if you have a board room full of backstabbing executives, you’re sure as hell not going to open yourself up to them. Because of this Fear of Conflict, you get a Lack of Commitment.
This makes sense too. If your team is not having healthy disagreements, people aren’t sharing their opinions. If that happens, they don’t buy into decisions and no one is going to commit very hard to a decision that they weren’t consulted on. I have seen this happen a lot with subordinate dynamics. Folks who are bad at leading teams will unilaterally make a decision and get frustrated when people don’t scramble head over heels to carry it out. This kind of behavior is the perfect way to breed Avoidance of Accountability.
This again flows naturally. Why would you take accountability for a decision you had no part in making? You never felt invested in the first place. And what flows from this is Inattention to Results.
This is more or less self-explanatory- if you’re not taking accountability for your work, which is part of an overall strategy that you never bought into, you’re not really going to care how it ends up. This is another thing that I have seen (and participated in) a lot. People have a lot of concerns, and at the end of the day your top priority is probably the one you’re going to have a lot more ownership in.
So all of the leadership principles flow from these insights. Some of them are as follows: Be selectively vulnerable to the team so that the team will display vulnerability back, and thus build trust. Be comfortable with making a decision that turns out wrong, and instill that in the team. Allow constructive conflict. Ensure that the team members keep each other accountable (so that the leader isn’t the only one enforcing accountability). Reserve rewards and recognition for those on the team who truly deserve it.
The book also discusses some of the mistakes that inexperienced leaders often make and how to mitigate them. There’s some different activities that teams can do to get closer. And there’s even a worksheet for assessing your team’s status.
All in all, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a book with great info that really doesn’t need to be 220 pages. Honestly, the last 40 would make a great post on Medium. The fact that the book manages to overcome its first 180 pages is a testament to the high quality of the technical leadership skills that it conveys.
