The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, 20th Anniversary Edition

This is a novel, not a reference book, but the storytelling works fairly well. Consequently, while it works okay for replicating the success in the story within your own team, if you happen across a situation that falls outside something they addressed in the story, you may be a bit lost in how best to deal with it. That’s the nature of dealing with a novel instead of a direct implementation guide. On the plus side, it’s a heck of a lot easier to read a story than a dry manual. 🙂

It does feel just a bit contrived to me. The situations are relate-able, but they feel just a little forced… like the situations are designed to fit the lessons, rather than being strictly based in reality. The company and characters sometimes don’t feel *real*… they feel as though they were designed to be generic, so as to be more generally relate-able… but in so doing they lose a dimension of their personality, and it’s (paradoxically) harder to relate to them very deeply. It makes the story feel rather “jack of all trades, master of none.” Which is okay, it provides a solid all-around basis, but I’d also want something more specific to either my industry or my field, or my particular problems.

The actual 5 dysfunctions seem pretty solid to me. I somewhat disagree on just how bad each one might be and what sorts of behaviors will be better or worse, but it’s a reasonably good framework for looking at a team and judging it’s overall effectiveness.

I do suspect that the book does not stress the lower dysfunctions (particularly the lowest one, lack of trust) strongly enough. This is based on my own experience- people want to try and talk about failures at all levels of the pyramid, but the reality is it’s extremely difficult to effectively solve any problems above trust, until trust is already solved. Therefore, I believe it would be better to focus heavily on trust only until you’re sure it’s really nailed down, then move up the pyramid. Even the team in the story makes this mistake, and consequently backslides easily. I believe the book does not do enough to dissuade readers from trying to fix problems at every level right off the bat.

To my earlier point of wanting a more focused book, I will add that if you’re looking to fix an IT department specifically I’d *highly* recommend “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim, even instead of this one. This is still good (and there’s a lot of info that’s complementary), but that one is just flat better, for that specific scenario. It is also in novel form, but reads much more naturally to me (as an IT manager). I could certainly relate to things in 5 Dysfunctions, but I could feel the protagonists challenges in my soul in TPP. It’s a whole other level of precision and applicability. I imagine there may be books like this for other disciplines.

I have an aversion to business fables. The ones I’ve read give me the irrates. They seem to trivialise business. Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life , Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (Kotter, Our Iceberg is Melting) , Fish! and Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling all left me a little cold. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

Five Dysfunctions popped up on my radar a couple of years ago and ever since then a number of people suggested I should read it. It was published back in 2002 and there seems to be quite an industry that’s grown around it with addional handbooks and resources available. For me, this wasn’t a good sign.

Then a client lent me a copy so I started on a plane trip home from Sydney and finsihed the book in three short sittings. It’s a nicely crafted story: short chapters, cliff hangers, good dialogue and believable and messy business situations.

Most of Five Dysfunctions is a business story. About a third of the book, at the end, describes the five dysfunctions model. The story is about Kathryn who joins DecionTech as their new CEO. The executive team is a bit of a mess and they don’t welcome her with open arms. Kathryn starts a process of conversations and straight talking at a series offsites and team meetings and engages the Executive in understanding a simple model showing what needs to happen to turn their group into a team.

Like all good models it’s nice and simple and can be drawn on a whiteboard.

Each part of the model is interlocked. It’s pointless working on one part without addressing the others.

One of the real advantages of learning about the model as a story is that you hear from the characters ask and answer questions. You are a fly on the wall of an executive team and you learn through their experiences. This experiential learning is then reinforced with the didactic chapter at the end of the book.

Here’s how Kathryn describes the five dysfunctions.

Absence 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.”

Fear of conflict:”If we don’t trust each other, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, idealogical conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artifical harmony.”

Lack of commitment: “I’m talking about commitment to a plan or a decision, and getting everyone to buy into it. That’s why conflict is so important.” “It’s as simple as this. When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like theyre been listen to, they wont really get on board.”

Avoidance of accountability: “Once we achieve clarity and buy-in, it is then that we have to hold each other accountable for what we have signed up to do, for high standards of performance and behaviour. And as simple as that sounds, most executives hate to do it, especially when it comes to a peer’s behaviour, because they want to avoid interpersonal discomfort.”

The last dysfunction, Inattention to Results, is all about putting the team before individual egos. This issue is handled over a number of chapters at the end of the fable but I wont go into detail and spoil the surprise.

What I really liked about this book was just how well written the story was so are immersed in the world of an executive team and see the tensions and compromises, their good itent and judgements, and how conflict arises and can play out. There’re plenty of models of good and poor behaviour, and our hero, Kathryn, shows us one way progress can be made.

What struck me most was just how much time is needed for an effective team to spend together planning, discussing, arguing. The perenial push back to spending this time, however, is that tired business phrase, “we just need to get back to the real work.” Well, here’s the breaking news for any executive who wants their company to excel: it’s your first priority to build an effective executive team so it can draw on all its talents to achieve results.

I loved this book and have been recommending it all over the place. Get a copy, read it, then pass it on to another executive who you think really needs to get their team back on track.

Excellent parable. A great study of the dysfunctional organisations we all encounter. Appropriate for any organisation of team.

Enjoyed reading this as a follow up to my company doing a ranking against the dysfunctions. The storyline kept things moving along and related to each of the five areas quite well. The summary at the end tied it all together based on the survey results we’d shared as a company and areas we wanted to work on specifically.