Release year: 2002

Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

This is a book I have known about for a long time and finally got around to reading. Much like Death By Meeting from the same author, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is written as a short fable where characters reenact the problems facing many business leadership teams. One of them (in this case Kathryn, their new CEO) teaches them new concepts and pushes them out of their comfort zones in a way that propels them to success.

Tuckman’s four stages of team development

From my understanding, although this isn’t explicitly mentioned in the book, it seems that Kathryn’s team is plateauing in the storming phase because they are not comfortable with conflict. She teaches them how to work through their issues in a trusting way that allows the team to make changes for the good of the team and the company (some team members voluntarily accept demotions, others change roles, while others simply leave).

The cause and effects of the five dysfunctions of a team.

The Core Concept

The core idea of the book, unsurprisingly, is the concept of the five dysfunctions of the team. It’s a map that allows one to trace poor performance outcomes down to their very root: lack of trust, due to the inability to open up and be vulnerable. And the relationship is not as simple as it may seem.

I suspect the author had to use a lot of systems thinking (see Thinking in Systems and The Fifth Discipline) to reach this conclusion. The insight lies in realizing that trust manifests itself in open conflict. When people are comfortable with conflict, it means that they trust each other. Of course, we assume that this conflict is free of personal attacks, constructive, and regular. Another word for it might be “debate.”

A team that is unafraid of expressing disagreement will more often reach solutions that work better because they will have taken into account more perspectives than an artificially harmonious team would have created.

The book includes a Team Assessment you can take to get a picture of where your team stands in regard to these dysfunctions.

Building Trust Through Personal Connection

One thing I found particularly valuable is a list of topics that can be brought up in ad hoc discussions to get to know team members better. This helps team members relate to one another on a more personal basis, as human beings with life stories and interesting backgrounds. Topics such as:

Number of siblings
Hometown
Unique challenges of childhood
Favorite hobbies
First job
Worst job

Key Takeaway

In the end, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team illustrates a simple but powerful idea: poor performance comes from a team’s unwillingness to embrace conflict as a productive use of its time, and the root cause of this unwillingness is lack of trust in each other. I love the definition of trust that the author provides:

(p. 195) In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.

Personal Applications

How can I use this? I’ll be on the lookout for groups that never seem to enter conflict. This can put me on a trail to tracing an eventual lack of performance to a potential lack of trust.
Why must I use this? Because lack of trust is the root cause of so many problems in collaboration. This is where failure accumulates. If I can find a way to sprinkle trust in the right place, it could make a huge difference in performance and morale for a team.
When will I use this? Whenever I’m sitting in a group discussion, I’ll mine for conflict and see how easy or hard it is to manifest it in the group. That will tell me a lot about the health of the group. I’ll need to learn how to make it productive, but getting to the conflict itself is the hardest part.

Félix rating:
👍

💡 New ideas

A solid team eats together and shares many (loud) laughs.

⭐ Star Quotes

Introduction

The Fable

Part I: Underachievement

Part II: Lighting the Fire

(p. 30) Moments of truth are best handled face-to-face.
(p. 44) There is nothing soft about 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.
(p. 45) Lack of debate points to a problematic lack of trust.
(p. 47) “So you don’t agree on most things, and yet you don’t seem willing to admit that you have concerns. That’s a trust issue if I’ve ever heard one.”
(p. 71) The ultimate dysfunction is the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition and attention at the expense of results.
(p. 88) ⭐ 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.
(p. 91) If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.
(p. 94) When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.
(p. 95) Most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.
(p. 101) Our 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.
(p. 103) If there is nothing worth debating, then we won’t have a meeting.
(p. 106) ⭐ If everything is important, than nothing is.

Part III: Heavy Lifting

(p. 121) Don’t ever slam one of your teammates when that person isn’t in the room.
(p. 137) When a company has a collection of good managers who don’t act like a team, it can create a dilemma for them, and for the company. It leads to confusion about who their first team is.
- Don’t complain about your management caucus or offsite to your subordinates! Where does your loyalty lie?
(p. 142) How good do our products need to be for us to win the market? The efforts we need to put behind future technology might come at the expense of having the market embrace our current technology.
(p. 148) 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.

Part IV: Traction

(p. 175) “I don’t think anyone ever gets completely used to conflict. If it’s not a little uncomfortable, then it’s not real. They key is to keep doing it anyway.”

The Model

An Overview of the Model

(p. 189) Without having aired their 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.
(p. 189) Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
(p. 189) Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where team members put their individual needs or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.

Team Assessment

Understanding and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions

(p. 195) In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.
(p. 203) When team members do not 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.
(p. 203) It is ironic that many people avoid conflict in the name of efficiency, because healthy conflict is actually a time saver. Those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution.
(p. 203) Conflict is productive.
(p. 207) In the context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in.
(p. 207) Reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered.
(p. 208) It is better to make a decision boldly and be wrong—and then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.
(p. 208) Only when everyone has put their opinions and perspectives on the table can the team confidently commit to a decision knowing that it has tapped into the collective wisdom of the entire group.
(p. 209) Like a vortex, small gaps between executives high up in an organization become major discrepancies by the time they reach employees below.
(p. 210) Leave meetings clearly aligned with one another. Review the key decisions made during the meeting and agree on what needs to be communicated to employees or other constituencies about those decisions.
(p. 213) Members of great teams improve their relationships by holding one another accountable, thus demonstrating that they respect each other and have high expectations for one another’s performance.
(p. 213) ⭐ More than any policy or system, there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.
(p. 214) ⭐ The enemy of accountability is ambiguity.
(p. 219) 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.
(p. 219) Teams that say, “We’ll do our best,” are subtly, if not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.
(p. 219) Letting someone take home a bonus merely for “trying hard,” even in the absence of results, sends a message that achieving the outcome may not be terribly important after all.
(p. 220) Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.

(Read 115) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team