The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

This is technically a re-read for me, but it had been something like 20 years. My group at work read this together over the holidays, then discussed it.

This is business fiction (“A Leadership Fable”), which is always tricky. Some of it is written so poorly.

But, thankfully, Lencioni is really, really good at this. The story is about a new CEO of a Silicon Valley startup. She leads her executive team through a series of off-site meetings to try and figure out why they don’t work together.

There is drama. A couple executives bail out. Revelatons occur. People argue. And it all rings so true. The conversations seems absolutely authentic to me – I’ve been in multiple versions of all of them. There’s a lingering background tension because humans bring baggage to work with them. We just don’t usually talk about it.

Here are the “five dysfunctions” of the title –

1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results

That list does it zero justice, because Lencioni does such a great job of unpacking it all and putting it into context. You genuinely need to read the book because you can’t understand it comprehensively unless you read the “fable” that Lencioni has written.

The underlying point is valid and true: we are humans. We suck, in many ways. We have emotional hangups that we bring with us to work, most of which we’re not willing to discuss. And the key to a great team is to bring this stuff out in to the open.

(A lot of what he talks about was also mentioned in Trillion Dollar Coach.)

Book Info