dysfunctional team dynamics

Recently I was asked to read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lenioni. This management book has an interesting approach to providing content. Instead of preaching about his life experiences, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, Lenioni opts to illustrate his ideas in the form of a fictional short story (a ‘leadership fable’). The main character, Kathryn Petersen, is the new CEO at DecisionTech and after observing her company during her first few weeks on the job she determines the biggest obstacle to overcome is the working dynamic of her executive management team! Throughout the story Lenioni is clearly highlighting the five reasons why teams are dysfunctional:

1. Absence of trust (invulnerability) – teams that are not open about mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation of trust.
2. Fear of conflict (artificial harmony) – teams that lack trust will never have unfiltered debate of ideas.
3. Lack of commitment (ambiguity) – without having aired their opinions, the healthy debate of ideas, team members will rarely buy-in to the final solution.
4. Avoidance of accountability (low standards) – without commitment and buy-in people are reluctant to challenge their peers and themselves: what are they doing? How are they spending their time? Are we making enough progress?
5. Inattention to results (status and ego) – without accountability individuals have a tendency to put themselves ahead of the team.

As you can see, none of the issues are mutually exclusive. If one issue is present it breaks down the entire function of the team.

Through a series of executive team off-sites we see how Kathryn turns her team around, creates an environment of respect, makes hard decisions to get rid of toxic personalities and emphasizes the level of discipline and persistence to make a team function.

The book also provides a quick evaluation questionaire for your own team and goes on to offer specific suggestions for how to overcome a dysfunctional team and the role of the leader. The goal is to move the team to the ideal state of:

• Trust one another
• Engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas
• Commit to decisions and plans of action
• Hold one another accountable for delivering those plans
• Focus on the achievement of collective results

Wow. Wouldn’t every company want that of their teams?

I think there should have been an entire section on hiring practices to ensure that key team individuals have a willingness to change their behavioral patterns (if they don’t already fall in line with the above) and can demonstrate the level of discipline required. We all have bad hair days – some more than others.

This book will not make it into my top five management books but if you have a team that has really gone sideways, and you are willing to make the extraordinary effort (time and discipline) to turn it around, I would suggest you get your team to read this book as the spring board for your talking points at your next offsite.

Good luck!