Book Summary — 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
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1 paragraph summary:
Excellent book on building the culture of a(n) (executive) team.
Cohesive teams:
- Trust each other.
- Engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
- Commit to decisions and plans of action.
- Hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
- Focus on the achievement of collective results.
A fractured team is like a broken arm or leg, fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break because you have to do it on purpose.
I want to understand confidentialities and loyalties.
Who do you consider your first team?
1. Absence of Trust // Invulnerability
Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation of trust.
Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
Overcoming the Dysfunction
It requires shared experiences over time, multiple instances of follow-through and credibility, and an in-depth understanding of the unique attributes of team members.
Examples:
- Personal Histories exercise — doesn’t need to be overly sensitive ie siblings, homework, childhood challenges, hobbies, first job, worst job.
- Team Effectiveness exercise — identify each others’ biggest contribution to the team and areas to improve on or eliminate for the good of the team.
- Personality and Behavioural Preference profiles — break down barriers by allowing people to better understand and emphasize with one another. ie Myers-Briggs
- 360 Degree feedback — divorce this from compensation and formal reviews, this should be used as a development tools
- Experiential Team Exercise — physical team building activities.
Role of the Leader — demonstrate vulnerability first.
2. Fear of Conflict // Artificial Harmony
If we don’t trust each other we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.
Harmony itself is good if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing. I’d trade the false kind of harmony any day for the team’s willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with no collateral damage.
The single most important arena for conflict? Meetings.
The ability to engage in passionate, unfiltered debate about what we need to do to succeed will determine our future as much as any products we develop or partnerships we sign.
Every great movie has conflict. Without it, we just don’t care what happens to the characters.
It is important to distinguish productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. Idealogical conflict is limited to concepts and ideas and avoids personality-focused, mean-spirited attacks.
When team members don’t openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.
It is ironic that so many people avoid conflict in the name of efficiency because healthy conflict is actually a time saver.
You are fighting. But about issues. That’s your job. Otherwise, you leave it to your people to try to solve problems that they solve. They want you to hash this stuff out so they can get clear direction from us.
Overcoming the Dysfunction
First step is to acknowledge that conflict is productive, and that many teams have a tendency to avoid it.
- Mining — get someone to assume the role of “miner of conflict”, someone who extracts buried disagreements
- Real-Time Permission — remind people when they get uncomfortable with a disagreement, interrupt to remind them that it is healthy conflict
Role of leader — don’t interrupt healthy conflict prematurely or team members can’t develop the coping skill for dealing with conflict themselves.
3. Lack of Commitment // Ambiguity
Without having aired your opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy-in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.
Commitment is a function of clarity and buy-in.
Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member even those who voted against the decision.
The greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty.
Great teams understand that reasonable humans don’t need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered.
Overcoming the Dysfunction
- Cascading Messaging — at the end of the meeting, review what decisions have been made and how they will be communicated across the team
- Deadlines — clear deadline for decisions and actions
- Contingency or Worst Case Scenario Analysis — this usually reduces the fear of making a decision
- Low-risk Exposure Therapy — for commitment-phobic teams demonstrate decisiveness in low-risk environment, it will quickly get you comfortable that a solid discussion was more important than rigorous research
Role of leader — don’t place too high of a premium on certainty or consensus and push for adherence to decisions and deadlines.
4. Avoidance of Accountability // Low Standards
Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviours that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
In the context of teamwork, accountability refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviours that might hurt the team.
As politically incorrect as it sounds, the most effective and efficient means of maintaining a high standard of performance on a team is peer pressure. One of the benefits is the reduction of bureaucracy around performance management and corrective action. More than any policy or system, there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected team members that motivates people to improve their performance.
Some people are hard to hold accountable because they are so helpful. Others because they get defensive. Others because they are intimidating. I don’t think it’s easy to hold anyone accountable, not even your own kids.
I want all of you to challenge each other about what you are doing, how you are spending your time, whether you are making enough progress.
But that sounds like a lack of trust?
No, trust is not the same as assuming everyone is on the same page as you, and that they don’t need to be pushed.
Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they’re doing it because they care about the team.
Push with respect, and under the assumption that the other person is probably doing the right thing. But push anyway. And never hold back.
Overcoming the Dysfunction
- Publication of Goals and Standards — clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, the enemy of accountability is ambiguity
- Simple and regular progress reviews — team members should regularly communicate how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards. Relying on them to do it by themselves is inviting the potential for avoidance of accountability.
- Team Rewards — shift individual into team achievements
Role of Leader — one of the biggest challenges for a leader is to encourage and allow the team to serve as a first and primary accountability mechanism. Sometimes strong leaders create an accountability vacuum leaving themselves as the only source of discipline. The creates an environment where team members assume that the leader is holding others accountable, so they hold back even if something isn’t right.
5. Inattention to Results // Status and Ego
This occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
Imagine a basketball coach in the locker room at half-time. He calls the team’s center into his office to talk with him one-on-one about the first half, and then he does the same with the point guard, the shooting guard, the small forward, and the power forward, without any of them knowing what everyone else was talking about. That’s not a team. It’s a collection of individuals.
“All of you are responsible for sales, not just JR. All of you are responsible for marketing, not just Mikey. All of you are responsible for product, customer service and finance. Does that make sense?”
Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.
Overcoming the Dysfunction
- Clarity and Reward — by making results clear and rewarding only those behaviours and actions that contribute to those results
- Public declaration of results — teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate even desperate desire to achieve those results.
Role of Leader — leader has to set the tone on results. If team members sense that the leader values anything other than results, they will take the permission to do the same for themselves.
Leading the Change
- Who do you consider your first team?
- Leader to be vulnerable first.
- Acknowledge that conflict is productive and that many teams have the tendency to avoid conflict.
- I will be calling out bad behaviour and encourage you all to do the same.
- When things get uncomfortable but productive, remind that it is a good thing.
- Get the team to hold each other accountable, rather than rely on the leader.
- Leader relentless focus on results to set the tone.
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