What prevents a team from succeeding in its mission? This is the central question of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The book presents the five dysfunctions like a pyramid - each one builds on the next. And to solve all the dysfunctions, you need to start at the bottom and most fundamental dysfunction.
Here’s an overview of the five dysfunction. Each one discusses what a healthy environment looks like, what the dysfunction looks like, and how to overcome the dysfunction.
Trust is confidence that your peers have good intentions and aren't out to harm you. Teams that trust one another are comfortable being vulnerable, and can admit mistakes and weaknesses.
If you have an absence of trust, then you don't feel safe being vulnerable and admitting your weaknesses, because you fear your vulnerability will be used against you.As a result, teams that lack trust hesitate to ask for help, spend a lot of time managing behaviors and appearances, and hide their mistakes from one another. People who are afraid of being vulnerable receive feedback poorly, and they retaliate. As a result, productive feedback is stifled.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should practice exchanging feedback in structured environments. In these safe environments, they can identify strengths and weaknesses without repercussions. Examples include personality profiles (like Myers-Briggs type), identifying each other's single biggest contribution and area for improvement, and 360-degree feedback.
Functional teams engage in ideological conflict. Because they trust each other, they feel comfortable expressing their true opinions and publicly disagreeing over important issues. With trust, they know that feedback isn’t meant to damage a person, but rather to improve them.
When there is a fear of conflict, these conversations get swept under the rug and the team is unable to resolve critical issues. Teams that fear conflict don’t tap into the full expertise and experience of their members and end up channeling their unspoken conflicts into personal attacks.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should actively seek out sources of conflict instead of avoiding them. Leaders should give real-time permission for individuals to debate with one another, and hold back their urge to protect the team from conflict and disagreement.
Committed teams are those that have full buy-in from everyone. Because they’ve been able to passionately and productively debate ideas, they can move ahead with a decision knowing that everyone’s opinions have been considered.
When there is a lack of commitment, teammates are unclear about priorities and expectations.
Teams that suffer from a lack of commitment lose opportunities due to delays, distractions, missed deadlines, and repeated discussions of the same issues.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should review major decisions and responsibilities at the end of each meeting and assign deadlines to individual team members.
High-performing teams hold each other accountable to high performance standards. They are able to do this because everyone is clear on what is expected of themselves and their teammates (they have already engaged in healthy conflict to develop a plan that everyone is committed to). Moreover, they’re comfortable being vulnerable and sharing feedback, so they can raise questions of performance in other people without fear of retaliation.
When there is a lack of accountability, teams encourage low standards and force the leader to become the sole source of discipline. Higher-performing team members resent lower performers. Mediocrity becomes the standard.
To overcome this dysfunction, teams should engage in peer pressure tactics, which is scalable and reduces the bureaucracy needed for oversight. This means publishing team goals and standards and instituting regular process reviews. They can also receive team rewards, which motivates teams to work together and point out individuals who aren’t pulling their weight.
Great teams are focused on team results, not individual milestones. This is possible because individuals know that they will be called out by their peers if their poor performance ends up hurting the team.
If a team isn’t focused on team results, its members will gravitate toward working on what’s good for them personally or for their department, to the detriment of the organization as a whole. This connects to the previous dysfunction - when accountability is absent, a team member will naturally pursue whatever is best for herself.
To overcome this dysfunction, organizations and leaders should encourage rewards based on the achievement of team outcomes. They should publicly declare ambitious goals, which will inspire the team to meet them. Both tactics provide the incentive for individuals to work as a team toward common goals, rather than pursuing individual ambitions.
Five Dysfunctions of a Team explores the dysfunctions that prevent teams from working cohesively as a unit and outlines some key strategies that teams can employ to identify and resolve them. The book does this through a parable about a troubled (fictional) company called DecisionTech, whose executive team exhibits all five of the dysfunctions.
DecisionTech seems to have everything going for it. They have a seasoned executive team, a solid business plan, plenty of startup capital from investors, and leading-edge technology.
Unfortunately, they find themselves unable to capitalize on these advantages and are instead mired in dysfunction. With missed product delivery deadlines, a growing turnover problem, and an eroding cash position, the company is on the brink of failure.
The problem is the executive team, which is:
Amid this turmoil, the Board of Directors asks the CEO and cofounder to step down, replacing him with their new choice, Kathryn Petersen. Kathryn may lack experience in tech, but she is brought in for her track record in building great executive teams.
All the executives are highly skilled, experienced business leaders who have achieved notable success at previous companies. Unfortunately, they are far less than the sum of their parts. Each exhibited some dysfunctions in their approach to teamwork.
Jeff was afraid of conflict, and never used the opportunity of meetings to discuss important issues. This led to ambiguity and lack of commitment on the part of the team, with nothing ever being decided or accomplished. He was also unwilling to hold his team accountable because he didn’t like being seen as an authority figure.
Mikey was known for her acerbic style and difficult personality. She had a low opinion of her teammates’ intelligence and was dismissive of their ideas, frequently making sarcastic and hurtful comments to her colleagues.
Martin was uncommitted to team priorities and group discussions, rarely paying attention during meetings. He only dealt with his teammates in the most remote and detached manner, never engaging them on a personal or emotional level.
JR displayed a lack of commitment, being inattentive to detail, missing deadlines, and blowing off assignments that weren’t immediately relevant to his work. He was also inattentive to team results, only being interested in one measurement of success: his personal sales figures.
Carlos was unwilling to open up to his colleagues, rarely saying what he actually thought. He also displayed a lack of commitment, failing to update his colleagues on progress and adhere to deadlines.
Jan didn’t trust her fellow executives to make wise decisions with company money and held them back from making important investments and taking necessary risks.
Nick was uncommitted to team priorities and vague about his responsibilities because he lacked a clearly defined role at the company.
The team needs to reevaluate its approach to teamwork. When Kathryn announces that the team will be going on two off-site retreats to work on their dysfunctional teamwork, there is resistance.
Still, Kathryn is adamant. The only alternative was a continuation of the status quo: poor results, bitterness, and lack of clarity around team priorities.
Over the course of the retreats, Kathryn builds a model identifying the five dysfunctions that prevent DecisionTech’s executives from working effectively as a team.
By thinking about DecisionTech’s flaws, you can improve your effectiveness as part of a team.
Have you ever been part of a team that was unable to work together and achieve its stated goals? How do you think you might have contributed to this dynamic?
Can you think of a real-world example of a team (whether in sports, politics, business, or anywhere else) that was made up of talented individuals that were unsuccessful working as a group? What do you think were the reasons for this team’s failure?
Of the characters in the book, which one most resembles someone you have trouble working with? Describe this person, and share an experience that frustrated you.
DecisionTech suffers from an absence of trust.
“Trust” is an often-misused word, and tends to be used to signify predictability in someone’s behavior (as in, “I trust that you will get this done”).
When discussing interactions between members of a team however, it means something deeper. Trust is the quality of being able to feel safe and unjudged by one’s teammates. It is the ability to be vulnerable with one another (by being willing to admit mistakes and reveal weaknesses). The root of this is fear that exposing your weaknesses will be used against you. You don’t believe that other people have your best interests at heart.
Without trust, teams miss important opportunities and channel their energy into unproductive behavior, suppressing their true feelings. Instead of honesty and openness, you get politics—people acting and speaking based on how they believe they will be perceived by others, not on what they truly feel. Without that foundation of openness and honesty, team members become quick to attribute disagreements to malice and are more likely to hold grudges.
In such an environment, colleagues are reluctant to ask for or offer help, because they either don’t feel comfortable being wrong, or are afraid of looking inexperienced in the eyes of their colleagues if they step outside their field of expertise.
The consequences to the organization are severe: issues don’t get resolved, mistakes are repeated, and team meetings become meaningless theatrical displays. Since such meetings achieve nothing and waste everyone’s time, colleagues dread them and look for ways to avoid spending time with one another.
Taken together, Dysfunction One prevents colleagues from taking full advantage of each other’s skills.
Carlos is criticized by his colleagues for being too reserved and for holding back too much during meetings. This stems from his unwillingness to be vulnerable in front of his colleagues, which is itself a product of the mistrustful and overly political environment at DecisionTech. Carlos is masking his true thoughts because he fears that speaking his mind will lead to sarcasm, hostility, or even outright retaliation from his teammates—so he keeps silent. Unfortunately, this keeps the vicious cycle going and only serves to further drag the team down, as everyone would actually benefit more from hearing his perspective.
When asked her greatest strengths and weaknesses, Mikey gives highly guarded, tight-lipped responses, while other members of the team reveal some of their innermost fears and insecurities. This is a product of her inability to be vulnerable in front of her peers, as is her caustic and defensive attitude toward her colleagues, which prevents them from seeing her insecurities.
Passionate, ideological conflict is necessary for teams to learn from past mistakes, take decisive action, and tap into the full team’s talent and experience. This requires healthy conflict, but dysfunctional teams have a fear of conflict.
Fear of conflict is a direct outgrowth of the first dysfunction, absence of trust. Without the guardrails that trust provides, teammates will be fearful that any conflict will devolve into personal sniping and unproductive arguing—so they avoid conflict altogether. Trustful teams don’t have this problem, because their conflicts are about substantive issues, not personal feelings.
Productive, ideological conflict is different from interpersonal conflict. Ideological conflict is driven by concepts, ideas, and goals.Teams avoid these discussions because they fear (often correctly) that they will get heated and become uncomfortable. But that’s ok! Passion, emotion, and even frustration are all natural and important parts of the process.
What’s not ok is when conflict is rooted in interpersonal politics. This kind of ideas-free conflict achieves nothing and only leads to bitterness and resentment that lingers after the argument is over.
In an environment absent of trust and healthy conflict, teams substitute artificial harmony for productive conflict, pretending to agree with one another in order to avoid the discomfort that comes with toxic conflict. Without regular, healthy conflict, hostilities and tensions simmer just beneath the surface, coming out as personal attacks, sarcastic and biting remarks, and passive-aggressive undermining.
The consequences of fear of conflict are also deeply harmful for a team. Mistakes that might have been exposed or resolved through open debate go undiscovered and unfixed, leading to wasted time and effort as the team continues pursuing the same wrongheaded course. Since these teams also shy away from discussing controversial topics, major opportunities are squandered through inaction.
When Mikey refuses to accept responsibility for marketing’s role in the company’s lack of success, Carlos knows that she’s in the wrong. “If the company as a whole is struggling, then clearly we’re not succeeding on an individual level either,” he thinks to himself. However, he does not press her on this point because he thinks she’ll snap under pressure of being called out by a colleague. This is a wasted opportunity, and as a result, the discussion goes nowhere.
These questions will help you identify sources of discomfort and examine why you might be holding back from your colleagues.
Do you feel comfortable admitting your own weaknesses among your team? Why or why not? Describe a recent example.
Do you have a hard time quickly and genuinely apologizing to your teammates when you’ve said something hurtful or destructive? Describe a recent situation.
Do you generally find your team meetings to be boring because no one’s willing to disagree with each other? Describe a recent example.
If you have these dysfunctions, let’s think about the root issue. Do you think that an absence of trust might be at the core of these problems? Are people unwilling to show their weaknesses because they’re afraid others will use that against them? Reflect on this and how it applies to your examples above.
Teams need to be committed and on the same page in order to succeed. There can be no ambiguity around what goals the organization is trying to achieve, and all team members must fully buy in to the plan. Most importantly, they must decide.
Dysfunctional teams, however, fail to achieve commitment and lumber from one non-decision to the next.
This problem stems from a fear of conflict. When teammates haven’t had the opportunity to hash out disagreements through productive, ideological debate, they feel that their ideas haven’t been proper consideration. It is also harder to make any decision when alternative points of view have not been considered, because it feels there might be better options that lay undiscovered. The result is a lack of commitment: ambiguity about goals, confusion regarding individual responsibilities, and indecision.
Lack of commitment also stems from a desire for consensus and certainty.
Consensus—universal agreement—is impossible to achieve and is actually counterproductive. Striving for it will only waste valuable time and end up producing false consensus, in which alternative points of view remain undiscussed (which also increases the possibility that flaws in the plan will go undetected).
Certainty—or wanting to know 100% what all the effects of any decision will be—is likewise impossible to achieve. Teams that try to achieve this end up wasting time and energy in round after round of analysis and delay. As a result teams, lose focus and confidence in their decision-making, and become unable and unwilling to commit to anything. A decision is better than no decision.
Teams that suffer from a lack of commitment squander opportunities through their indecision, fail to keep their members on the same page about priorities and results, waste time revisiting the same topics over and over again, spread confusion to subordinates within the organization, and over time, lose the ability to commit to any decisions at all.
Kathryn shares an anecdote about her how her husband’s high school basketball coaching methods. While he is the leader and has final say on how games and practices will be run, he allows each member of the team to voice their concerns and objections to any particular plan. He always provides an explanation for why he’s making a decision—creating the conditions for buy-in and clarity.
Kathryn demonstrates to the team that there is no clarity around what the overarching goal should be for the rest of the year. Each member of the team believes that their area of expertise is the most important and should receive highest priority (i.e., Martin in engineering believes that it’s product improvement, Jan in finance says it’s cost containment, JR and Nick push for market share). Since they don’t trust each other and don’t resolve their disagreements through constructive debate, the result is a lack of buy-in and total ambiguity on what their priority should be. Everyone continues to work in silos, individual efforts are not harnessed to a common purpose, and the same discussions continue to take place with no resolution in sight.
Effective teams hold other accountable in order to correct problematic or counterproductive behavior and maintain consistent high standards.
Dysfunctional teams, however, are unable to call out their peers for unproductive behavior and falling below standards
This avoidance of accountability stems from the first three dysfunctions.
Lack of commitment has the most powerful effect in fostering avoidance of accountability. Without clarity and buy-in, teammates feel they have no right to call others out over team priorities that were either 1) unclear or 2) never bought into in the first place. Moreover, when a team is suffering from the indecision that defines lack of commitment, there simply won’t be any goals or priorities to which teammates can hold each other accountable.
Avoidance of accountability leads to low standards. When team members know they won’t face peer pressure for shirking their responsibilities or delivering poor results, there’s less of an incentive to put in the effort to do a good job.
This, unsurprisingly, has a harmful effect on team performance. Mediocrity comes to set the standard across the organization as people realize that they won’t be criticized or reprimanded for poor results. Even those who might otherwise be motivated to achieve at a high level quickly become discouraged from doing so—after all, why work hard when your peers are slacking off and facing no repercussions?
In this scenario, achievement-driven individuals leave the organization, with the few high performers that remain resenting their colleagues for their poor standards and failure to adequately pull their weight. Within this vacuum of accountability, it falls to the leader to be the sole source of discipline, placing an undue burden on them and further eroding morale and group cohesion.
Kathryn notes that Martin has a habit of pulling his laptop out during meetings, answering emails, and engaging in other work, instead of focusing on the discussion. This is distracting, interrupts the flow of the discussion, and signals that he is not taking his commitments to the team seriously. When Kathryn reprimands him for this behavior, the rest of the team is relieved—they had been too fearful of interpersonal discomfort to address it themselves, and so they let the destructive and problematic behavior continue.
Nick does not make his team available for a meeting that Carlos has called. Not only does Nick not hold these subordinates accountable for their unresponsiveness, but Carlos does not confront Nick either.. This avoidance of accountability leads to poor performance—Carlos simply doesn’t hold the important meeting. Even worse, none of the other executives think to criticize Carlos for failing to complete a task that he had committed to.
Functioning teams are focused on achieving results. They have an ultimate mission and clear, defined objectives along the way to help them achieve that mission.
Dysfunctional teams, however, don’t define their goals or establish clear, universal benchmarks for success.
This stems directly from the fourth dysfunction: without clear decisions, defined goals, and well-articulated responsibilities for everyone, teammates will be unable and unwilling to hold their teammates accountable to high standards. In the absence of accountability, people will naturally pursue whatever is best for themselves.
If individuals know they can get away with blowing off deadlines on team projects without having their feet held to the fire by their colleagues, individual egos will rule the roost. This leads to the team devolving into a collection of individuals working at cross-purposes, rather than a cohesive group working together to achieve common goals.
The effects are crippling for a team. The predominance of individual egos will prevent the team from taking advantage of new opportunities or growing to meet new challenges (because changes to the status quo might impact someone’s status), they will fall behind their competitors (because they haven’t even articulated how they should measure success), and they will easily lose focus as the excessive focus on individual ego and status pulls the organization back and forth between competing priorities.
Kathryn draws the analogy between the DecisionTech executive team and a basketball team with a roster of star players. While on paper, these teams laden with individual talent ought to crush the competition, in reality they frequently don’t. With all of the stars focused on achieving individual records, they don’t pay attention to team results. She points out that a good sports coach can focus a team on results because there is a clear and easy-to-define benchmark: the win-loss record. The key for DecisionTech is to define what “winning” is to them.
Martin becomes defensive when Jan and Carlos point out that the company may have over-committed resources to engineering, while under-investing in marketing and sales. He ultimately admits he has overstated the resources needed to build the company’s core technology because he doesn’t want DecisionTech’s potential failure to be blamed on his department—not because he thought that this commitment of resources was necessarily in the company’s best interests. He put his pride and ego before the good of the company—a textbook display of inattention to results.
Use these questions to see if you’re on the same page with your teammates.
Do you know what your teammates are working on? Explain why knowing this is important.
Can you think of a time where you had to personally hold a teammate accountable for not contributing to a shared goal? Describe the situation and what the hardest part about this was.
Have you ever had to make an individual sacrifice in order to help achieve a team goal? Describe the situation.
Now that we’ve identified the dysfunctions and examined their causes and effects, we can work through some strategies for overcoming them.
The overall goal is to build a healthy environment where all five dysfunctions are solved. Picture this high-functioning team:
This needs to be approached from the ground up, starting with the first dysfunction.
To review, Dysfunction 1 is an absence of trust, where people are uncomfortable being vulnerable with one another. This leads to people withholding feedback from each other, being unwilling to ask for help, and playing politics.
The general theme to fixing this is to provide structured environments for team members to exchange feedback, without threat of retaliation. Once team members get used to being vulnerable, they can do it freely in less structured environments.
Here are specific strategies to accomplish this:
This exercise requires teammates to answer personal questions about themselves and reveal some basic details about their lives (like how many siblings they have, where they went to school, and their hobbies). By revealing even these innocuous details to each other, teams can go a long way toward breaking down the barriers that inhibit trust. It is easier to trust someone and be vulnerable in front of them when you see them as a complete person, with their own unique life story, anxieties, and aspirations.
Here, every member of the team identifies the most important contribution and the biggest area for improvement for every other member of the team. All team members share their thoughts, focusing on one person at a time, usually starting with the leader.
In a trustless environment, this could be dangerous, but the structure of the exercise makes it safer than usual to identify weaknesses. And on the positive side, everyone gets to see the talent and experience of their colleagues. This also breeds self-confidence, fosters assertiveness (since teammates can act knowing that they are respected and admired by the group), and checks egos (since everyone is laying their weaknesses on the table in front of their teammates).
These are diagnostic tools that provide behavioral and cognitive descriptions and insights into individual behavior. They can be useful in identifying how people think, speak, and act. Examples include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Big Five Personality Test, Extroversion Introversion Test, and 16 Personalities Test.
Once you understand that someone’s psychology is wired a certain way, it becomes easier to interact with them, and see their behavior through a new lens. You can empathize with how they feel and how they behave.
These should be approached with some caution: people are far more complicated than a score on a test, and the tests shouldn’t be used as a guide for how to deal with individuals in all situations. They should always be administered and the results explained by a licensed, third-party professional.
Here, teammates issue specific judgements on their peers’ performance and engage in multiple rounds of constructive criticism. It’s called 360-degree because each person receives feedback from their supervisor, colleagues, subordinates, and from themselves.
As a warning, this should only be used as a developmental tool, separate from the formal performance evaluation process. Otherwise, politics will sneak in.
Leaders must demonstrate their own vulnerability by being willing to lose face in front of the team. They should create an environment that does not punish vulnerability and let people take advantage of others who expose weaknesses.
Leaders should also encourage team members to admit mistakes, ask for and offer help, and reveal their shortcomings.
Teams that make use of these strategies build trust and develop the ability to be vulnerable with one another. As a result, they are able to ask for help and admit mistakes (which helps nip nascent problems in the bud), make better use of each other’s talents, and avoid personal politics. These teams look forward to meetings as opportunities to learn from their colleagues.
Kathryn uses both the personal histories and the team effectiveness methods. They end up learning a lot about each other that they hadn’t known before—that Carlos is the youngest of nine kids, that JR is a twin, and that Nick had played high school basketball against Kathryn’s husband! They also come clean about their own shortcomings, like Jeff and his fear of failure, Nick and his arrogance, and Martin and his difficulties with emotional connection. All this helps each team member understand each other on a more human level and feel safer interacting going forward.
To recap, Dysfunction 2 is fear of conflict, in which teammates avoid having productive, ideological debate and steer away from discussing controversial topics. When this happens, problems go undetected, mistakes are repeated, and opportunities are squandered.
The general theme to fixing this is by encouraging teams to deal directly with sources and topics of disagreement, rather than ignoring them. Once they see that conflict can be a productive endeavor, they will get comfortable making it a more regular part of their decision-making process.
Here are some specific tactics teams can use to get comfortable leaning into conflict.
This involves teams bringing up previous disagreements and forcing them to work through issues that they would otherwise avoid. This direct acknowledgment is key, since not talking about a conflict doesn’t resolve the underlying issue at all—it just causes it to manifest in other, more destructive forms (like personal grudges).
When employing the mining technique, it’s important to limit the discussion to one disagreement at a time, to avoid getting sidetracked by smaller, tangential disagreements. Once the main disagreement is resolved, move on to the next one. Assign a member of the team to take on a supervisory role if needed.
Here the leader coaches and encourages the conflict. When people get uncomfortable with conflict, the leader reminds the team that debate is a productive and necessary part of team-building. Since dysfunctional teams are often accustomed to team leaders suppressing debate or shielding individuals from conflict, this exercise reverses that effect and gives the team the confidence and permission structure to continue on with debate.
To promote healthy and productive conflict, a leader must resist the urge to protect the team from peer criticism. Stifling a lively debate is one of the worst mistakes a leader can make. They must also model appropriate conflict behavior by never engaging in personal attacks themselves and always bringing their own sources of disagreement to light.
Teams that employ these strategies are able to engage in constructive conflict free of personal grudges. They learn to discuss and resolve issues as soon as they arise and focus on ideological arguments, rather than personal rivalries.
Kathryn uses both the mining and real-time permission strategies. She declares that the group is not going home without having articulated what their goal should be. She then nurtures and encourages the discussion as it unfolds, even observing at one point, “This is the most productive conversation I’ve heard since I’ve been here. Keep going.” Later on, she facilitates open debate by urging the team, “Let’s have this out. And let’s not pretend we’re doing anything wrong...this is not a religious battle. It’s about strategy.”
Think about these questions to see how you can get more comfortable with your teammates.
How much do you know about your teammates on a personal level? Do you find yourself working better with people when you know more about their lives?
What’s one conflict from the past that you hold a grudge about? How can you bring this up and resolve it, in a safe environment, with the other people involved?
How can your team build a safe, structured space for exchanging feedback and disagreeing? What’s an idea that you want to try in the next week?
As a refresher, Dysfunction Three is lack of commitment. This is when teams don’t have clarity around priorities and fail to get their members to buy in to the plan. It leads to ambiguity around team and individual priorities and wasted time, energy, and opportunities due to indecision.
To solve this dysfunction, teams need to create clarity around specific responsibilities and expectations and encourage decisiveness. Below are some tools that can help teams move in this direction.
At the end of every meeting, review key decisions and agree on what needs to be communicated to stakeholders who were not at the meeting. Think through the messaging to each successive layer of the organization. This reveals any points of disagreement between the team and fosters clarity about next steps. It also gives clear instructions on what should be conveyed to subordinates, so that all parts of the organization are receiving the same message.
Assign clear timing around project deliverables. This will reduce ambiguity, since everyone will know when and what they are expected to deliver. Deadlines must be rigorously enforced, both for final and intermediate decisions, so that team members can remain in sync throughout the full life cycle of a project.
Explore alternative courses of action, while modeling for the worst possible outcome.
Doing so encourages teams to make decisions, since they will know that there is always a way to change course if they’re on the wrong path.
Worst-case scenario analysis demonstrates that downsides to a decision are seldom as bad as an overly cautious team might think they are. This eliminates the need for absolute certainty before committing to a decision and increases decisiveness.
Display decisiveness in low-risk areas before applying it to more consequential decisions. Start with decisions that have lower stakes, where the worst-case scenario is not all that bad.
Like the tactics above, this can demonstrate how much teams underrate their own decision-making capacity. By grabbing this low-hanging fruit, teams develop the confidence to apply their new, bold approach to everything.
A leader must be comfortable making wrong decisions. Since more is lost to inaction than to wrong action, leaders must reinforce the fact that consensus and absolute certainty are unattainable, and instead encourage action and decisiveness. The leader should push for decisions and sticking to deadlines once agreed upon.
Teams that use these tools are more decisive and clear about priorities. They are aligned on common objectives, able to learn from mistakes, confident in their ability to make decisions, and able to pivot quickly and effectively should those decisions turn out to be wrong.
Kathryn makes use of cascading messaging and deadlines with the DecisionTech team. When they finally decide on their overarching goal, she summarizes what the team has agreed to and guides them in assigning specific responsibilities to each department for the achievement of this goal. She also provides clarity around her expectations, telling the team that she will not accept behavior that is at odds with good teamwork practices. Furthermore, she assigns clear deadlines: the team will reconvene in two weeks, with the overarching goal to be achieved by the end of the year.
To recap, Dysfunction Four is avoidance of accountability. This is when teammates fail to hold each other to high standards of performance and force the leader to become the sole source of discipline. It results in the spread of low standards across the organization, an exodus of achievement-oriented people, and resentment towards those who refuse to pull their weight.
In general, this can be fixed by making clear what goals the organization is meant to achieve and incentivizing individuals to work for the group rather than for themselves. For accountability, teams should engage in peer pressure tactics, which is scalable and reduces the bureaucracy needed for oversight.
Below are some tools designed to achieve this shift in behavior.
This clarifies what the team needs to accomplish, everyone’s individual responsibilities to the team, and a code of conduct so people know how to behave.
Creating public goals and standards puts everyone on the same page. It facilitates accountability, since everyone knows what the proper measurement of success is and what each individual’s responsibility is toward the achievement of the goal.
This shifts performance incentives from individuals to teams, rewarding individuals based on how their team performs, not how they perform personally.
This discourages turf wars and rivalries, since anyone’s failure becomes everyone’s failure. There’s no point in hoarding resources for your department if it’s going to harm other departments and drag down the team as a whole. Instead, team rewards encourage cooperation and efficient pooling of resources across departments.
A leader must be willing to step back from being the sole source of discipline, and encourage peers to hold one another to high standards. This is more scalable and reduces the overhead needed to build high-functioning teams.
When disagreement arises, the leader must also serve as the judge to decide cases, then return power back to peer accountability.
Teams that make use of these practices hold each other to high standards, knowing that everyone sinks or swims together. These teams create a positive, self-reinforcing cycle, in which individuals know that they’re going to be responsible to their peers for their performance, so they work harder to deliver results. This actually helps poor performers as well: rather than letting them establish counterproductive working habits (which will only harm them in the long run), a culture of accountability gives such individuals the opportunity to improve themselves through constructive peer-to-peer criticism.
Nick demonstrates his willingness to hold his teammates accountable by requesting that the full DecisionTech executive team attend a two-day sales training session for the salespeople. He makes the case (correctly, and with Kathryn’s full endorsement) that since the company needs to improve its sales, everyone should learn to think and act like salespeople. When Mikey complains about having to attend a training session that she believes isn’t directly relevant to her job, Nick immediately pushes back at her and holds her accountable in front of the entire team. He asks her what else could be more important. When she can’t come up with a suitable reply, she backs down.
To recap, Dysfunction Five is inattention to results. It’s when teammates let their personal ambitions and egos get in the way of achieving team priorities. Inattention to results leads to a failure to capitalize on new opportunities, lost ground to competitors, and whipsawing back and forth between competing personal agendas.
The best way to resolve this dysfunction is to define clear goals for the organization and articulate how each individual’s work aligns with these broader goals.
Clearly express and publicize results and expectations. This brings clarity, as everyone knows precisely which goals the organization is working toward, and how their work fits into the overall goals.
Link rewards to the achievement of specific outcomes, rather than vague behaviors like “working hard” and less useful metrics like hours worked.
This provides a financial incentive to get things done for the team. Teams should be cautious about relying too heavily on this approach, since it reduces motivation to a simple function of financial incentives (when, in reality, they’re far more complicated than that).
A leader needs to make it clear that results, and nothing else, are the sole measurement of success. Those who receive recognition should be those who contribute toward defined objectives. The leader needs to avoid playing favorites and rewarding anything other than results.
By having tangible measures of success, teams become better able to attract and retain achievement-focused employees. It also becomes easier and more efficient to evaluate performance. Lastly, teams that focus on results avoid the distraction and wasted energy that comes from individual team members pursuing their own agendas at the expense of the team.
The DecisionTech executive team decides (after much passionate, ideological debate) to focus on closing 18 new deals with customers as the overarching goal for the coming year. They are drawn to this goal because it is clear, ambitious (yet still achievable), addresses the main problems facing the company, will involve commitment from every member of the team, and will facilitate the achievement of future goals.
Use these exercises to help get on the same page with your teammates.
Have you ever been part of a team where there was a lack of commitment around goals? After reading the section above, describe which strategy for overcoming this dysfunction would have been the best to use in this situation.
Do you feel your team holds each other accountable for performance? Why or why not? If it’s not perfect, what dysfunction is preventing them from holding each other accountable?
In thinking about your team in the future, what are clear, measurable goals you can set that will better define success or failure?
As a result of the team’s in-depth exploration of the Five Dysfunctions, DecisionTech undergoes a series of large-scale changes. These changes do not suit everyone’s personality and working style, but they are necessary: those who are unable or unwilling to adjust their behavior and thinking will only drag the organization down. The team emerges as a stronger and more cohesive unit by losing those members of the team who can’t make this transition.
The team ultimately decides on new customer acquisition as the company’s overarching goal for the year, landing upon 18 new deals as the target number. They reason that the achievement of this goal will generate positive press, create references for the subsequent round of customers,and prove that there are customers interested in DecisionTech’s products.
JR’s attitude indicates that he was not a good cultural fit for the company DecisionTech needs to become in order to succeed. His ego, inattention to detail, and refusal to set aside his own agenda demonstrate why he had to go.
He was also afraid to be vulnerable, having confessed to Jeff that he didn’t know how to sell in DecisionTech’s emerging market without a strong brand name. The way he chose not to fail was to quit—showing that he was always more concerned with his reputation than with helping the company succeed.
JR’s sudden departure expands Nick’s role and gives him a greater commitment to DecisionTech’s success, one which he was sorely missing when he was floundering looking for a way to define himself at the company.
Furthermore, the decision to head up sales is one he made himself, which only strengthens his commitment and buy-in to the new approach.
After observing Mikey’s destructive and egotistical behavior over the course of the retreats, Jan decides that she is a poor fit for the company.
She cites Mikey’s pattern of uncooperative (and borderline abusive) behavior towards her colleagues, like the constant eye-rolling, her hurtful remarks (at one point she calls Martin a SOB), and her general lack of emotional intelligence in being able to see how harmful her presence has become.
Mikey also displays a general and consistent contempt for the idea of working more collaboratively with her colleagues (like not wanting to attend the sales training, despite it being a stated company priority which everyone else has committed to).
Kathryn tells Mikey that her total inability to work as part of a team far outweighs her talent as a marketing expert—consequently, she is doing more harm than good.
By committing to a clear goal and removing those who are unwilling to work within the new team framework, DecisionTech starts to see positive results, as sales grow significantly, the company makes its revenue goals for three out of four quarters, and they move into a tie for number one in the industry.
Because the executives trust one another, have learned how to constructively disagree, are fully committed to team priorities, hold one another accountable, and are focused on team results, they make the transition from a dysfunctional team to a functional one.