Liberate the Five Dysfunctions of your Team — Part 1
A path for organizing and facilitating workshops for overcoming the 5 dysfunctions of (scrum) teams, using Liberating Structures.
While reading Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, the parallelism between a healthy team and the values proposed by Scrum comes often to my mind.
The idea was born to see if this parallelism exists. To prove the hypothesis, I organized workshops for overcoming these five dysfunctions.
And why not using Liberating Structures for reaching this goal?
The book in brief
With “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, his world bestseller, Lencioni offers a fun and instructive book on one of the hottest and most pressing issues of any company: the behavior of workgroups.
The structure is the author’s favorite: a short novel, followed by a clear explanation of how to put into practice the theory that emerges from the story.
The story is that of Kathryn Petersen, a brilliant manager called to solve the problems of a company. Despite the talents of the management team, the company is unable to make the decisive leap in quality to become a successful one.
The reason for the difficulty is simple, but not trivial: even the brightest and most talented people, if they don’t know how to play as a team, can be more harmful than useful for the organization they belong to.
In the company teams, there are always 5 dysfunctions — lack of trust, fear of conflict, failure to make commitments, escape from responsibilities, little attention results — which cause quarrels and misunderstandings, distance goals, and generate failures.
Lencioni — through Kathryn’s story — offers an agile and fun method to recognize and face them, to overcome even frozen situations, to make the group finally cohesive and effective.
The five dysfunctions
Teams could be dysfunctional because they are made up of individuals with varied interests, strengths, and weaknesses.
But with knowledge, courage, and discipline, teams can just as quickly become not only cohesive but high performing.
Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust
This occurs when team members are reluctant to be vulnerable with one another and are unwilling to admit their mistakes, weaknesses, or need for help. Without a certain comfort level among team members, a foundation of trust is not possible.
Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict
Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in an unfiltered, passionate debate about key issues, causing situations where team conflict can easily turn into veiled discussions and back channel comments. In a work setting where team members do not openly air their opinions, there is a lot of posturing and precious time is wasted, resulting in inferior decisions.
Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment
Without conflict, it is difficult for team members to commit to decisions, creating an environment where ambiguity prevails. Lack of direction and commitment can make employees, particularly star employees, unhappy.
Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability
When teams don’t commit to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven individuals hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that may seem counterproductive to the overall good of the team. This allows for mediocrity, poor performers to slip by and the leader to become the sole source of discipline.
Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results
Team members naturally tend to put their own needs (ego, career development, recognition, etc.) ahead of the collective goals of the team when individuals aren’t held accountable. If a team has lost sight of the need for achievement, the business ultimately suffers.
Scrum values as an antidote to the five dysfunctions of a team
When reading the book, I was reminded of a picture from the start of my journey as a Scrum Master. This picture showed Scrum as a temple, in which:
- Trust is the deck of the temple,
- The three pillars of Scrum (Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation) are the columns
- The five Scrum Values (Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness) are the basement
So I started to think about which touchpoints were possible between Lencioni´s model and Scrum. Here are some thoughts.
The absence of trust and fear of conflicts are addressed by empiricism, which is Scrum’s foundation. A team using empiricism relies on findings from experience to guide the next step they take. Adapting to reality means dogmatism does not dominate and judgment is avoided.
To make empiricism work, teams must practice transparency, inspection, and adaptation. And to be transparent about problems, safety must be present. Without safety, the engine of empiricism breaks down. And safety can be present only if the first two dysfunctions, absence of trust and fear of conflicts, have been overcome.
Lack of commitment is directly addressed by the scrum value of “Commitment”. Scrum requires 100% commitment of each team member towards the Product Goal, the Sprint Goal, and the Definition of Done. It is a commitment from all the members of the team together and not only by a few members.
Avoidance of accountability is addressed by the scrum values of “Openness” and “Courage”. If scrum team members and their stakeholders are completely transparent and open about their decisions and the status of their work, then there is no need for avoiding any accountability on the decisions/actions. “Courage” helps team members in owning up to their decisions/actions.
Inattention to Results is addressed by the scrum value of “Focus”. Scrum specifically focuses on the results of sprints and goals of the scrum team. The smaller iterative delivery model of scrum itself ensures the focus on continuous delivery of the product goal.
A path for Coaching the Team
After reading the book and the Field guide, it was time to bring it to the team.
As not all team members had read the book, we started with a book presentation.
Secondly, a Team Assessment Questionnaire was performed to evaluate the team’s status.
After that, a first workshop was organized to deeper understand the healthy and unhealthy behaviors of a high-performing team, by discussing them all together.
The goal of this first workshop is to get a common understanding and a basis for the dedicated workshops that will follow. This will address the specific dysfunction more in detail.
The suggested learning methods are Learning 3.0 and Liberating Structures. (As suggested in “How liberating structures and learning 3.0 are complementary.”)
Liberating Structures
Liberating Structures are a set of 33 microstructures designed to replace the ineffective formats in which groups dissect information, make decisions, and explore new ideas.
Rather than actively involving only a handful of those present, and drowning out other voices, Liberating Structures allows everyone to be equally involved in shaping future actions.
Rather than focusing on individuals, Liberating Structures taps into the wisdom and creativity of the entire group.
Learning 3.0
Learning 3.0 is a concept that enables you to create an environment in which everyone can feel safe to collaborate and to share experiences to harness the power of collective knowledge. Alexandre Magno describes this concept in his book “How Creative Workers Learn”.
In learning 1.0 the expert defines the questions and answers.
In learning 2.0 the learner defines questions; the expert provides the answer.
In learning 3.0 the learner defines questions and answers. The motto here is “sharing is the new teaching”. It’s up to the facilitator to create an environment where participants are invited to share experiences and to create a learning space.
Conclusion
The process of overcoming the 5 dysfunctions should be a common journey for the whole team.
My next articles will go into more detail on how to start with an introductory workshop and follow up with other workshops designed for each of the identified dysfunctions.
This series of articles will guide the facilitator on how to design the workshops. But it is very important that the facilitator experiments with what works for a particular team. He/she should adapt to fit the personalities in each team.
Special thanks
Special thanks to Christiaan Verwijs and Barry Overeem from The Liberators, that inspire my daily job with their meetups, articles, and strings of Liberating Structures.
Do you want to write for Serious Scrum or seriously discuss Scrum?
