What We’re Reading: Rework & The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
I’m always on the lookout for advice from people who’ve observed or built successful organizations. In that spirit, I decided to crack open a couple of leadership-oriented books over the holidays: Rework (2010), by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of the software company 37signals, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002), written by business consultant Patrick Lencioni. I found each illuminating in its own way, in spite of a few hitches that come with the territory of books of their genre.
About Rework & The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team defines a set of common points of failure that its author asserts are endemic to companies big and small, and prescribes a framework that purports to solve them. Lencioni accomplishes this with a narrative device he calls a “leadership fable” — he tells the short story of a CEO named Kathryn Petersen, who’s hired by a fictional company exhibiting all five of the titular dysfunctions. Petersen assumes the role of an omniscient surrogate for Lencioni’s model, over the course of the book’s plot, we see her thrust into a top leadership role at the company, where she observes that the team indeed suffers from all of the five issues and slowly convinces each of them that these flaws are institutional in nature and that they all have workable remedies. Lencioni injects a bit of drama by creating decently fleshed out characters who resemble typical personalities on an executive team and bestowing them full narrative arcs. There’s the self-centered, sarcastic lead technical architect, the irritable product marketing head who’s the most resistant to the program’s “mumbo jumbo,” and a few others who might remind readers of their own co-workers. Some make it through Kathryn’s program, while others don’t.
Rework’s authors draw liberally from their own experience running and growing their company. The book contains bite-sized portions of real world advice on running an effective small business… in fact, many of the chapters in the book were adapted from posts on 37signals’ blog, and can still be found online for free. These chapters cover everything about how to run a lean and successful organization — topics include personal productivity, hiring, and company culture. Rework presents the entrepreneur (or “starter,” as the authors propose as an alternative term) with a specific set of concrete approaches, with the implication that she can try them out piecemeal if desired. In one chapter, Hansson and Fried suggest discouraging employees from working long hours, on the grounds that it negatively impacts team morale and that you wouldn’t be doing good work anyway. Another recommendation is to follow a very specific set of rules for meetings so that they don’t waste people’s time. Most of this advice is bound by the basic principle of cutting back on the perfunctory and doing more with less (“finding judo solutions”) yet each area of guidance is individually actionable.
What I Learned:
In reading and reflecting on both books, what made the deepest impression on me was when I’d find overlapping advice, even if it would be presented from different perspectives.
Decision Making — Of the prescriptions in both books, there are a number of little things in common that draw from classical business knowledge. For example, both Rework and The Five Dysfunctions make it a point to remind the reader that making some decision is often better than making no decision, even if that decision is made with imperfect knowledge.
Honesty — The values of openness and honesty are two big takeaways from both books as well. In Rework, honesty is presented as a precondition of gaining credibility when conducting day-to-day operations. For example, you’ll have a much easier time handling P.R. emergencies if you try to be forthcoming with what happened. In The Five Dysfunctions, being vulnerable and open with people on your team is demonstrated to be a hard requirement of engaging in productive conflict, something Lencioni flags as an activity that’s absolutely essential to a good team.
Trust — Similarly, trust is a value that the three authors return to repeatedly. Trust is invoked as an essential catalyst of a productive working environment in Rework — people just work better when they’re given privacy and autonomy, Fried and Hansson assert. And in Lencioni’s model, trust between members of your team is what enables the radical vulnerability cited above.
That Rework and The Five Dysfunctions often come to similar conclusions from divergent premises is not to say that their advice is all-encompassing, or even fully convincing. One of Rework’s selling points is that all of its pointers reflect the process and culture that 37signals has put into place. However, without having the first-hand experiences of the authors, my curiosity as to why particular processes worked well for them was often left unfulfilled, and the lack of case studies in the text contributed to this.
Lencioni doesn’t make any claims about his prior experience in the book. Even then, The Five Dysfunctions manages to come off as a bit more sagely than Rework — the corporate melodrama was surprisingly realistic, leaving me with the impression that the author had been around his fair share of dysfunction and convincing me to pay attention to his advice. (But that advice also suffers a bit from a lack of scenarios drawn from the real world… a familiar narrative is still only a narrative.)
When it comes down to it, industries, companies, and teams vary so widely that no one person’s advice will ever fully diagnose any one organization’s problems to a tee. So while neither Rework nor The Five Dysfunctions is likely to be a team leader’s panacea, I don’t think a “business book” can ever be. All the same, both these books have great advice within them, and especially given the short lengths and brisk writing styles of both, I’d definitely recommend giving them a read.
– Carlo Francisco, Senior Software Engineer
