The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Lencioni’s framework for effective teams

Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions

Patrick Lencioni’s 2002 book, ‘The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable’, is a bit of a modern classic in the world of work.

In it, Lencioni tells the story of a team overcoming challenges and growing together to become a high-performing team. It’s easy to read, and the contents within it have become a bit of a staple of modern management and leadership development work.

The five dysfunctions are typically shown as a pyramid which creates a framework for diagnosing and addressing issues that teams face, enabling them to improve their effectiveness and collaboration.

You can find lots of information about them at Patrick Lencioni’s company website, and via other trainers and providers including Five Behaviours here in the UK, who are a Wiley brand.

In this post, we show the five behaviours as a sequence, though per the pyramidal view, the steps are somewhat sequntial and do build on each other.

1 – Absence of Trust

The foundational dysfunction is the absence of trust among team members. This is the one that we show to the left in the diagramme above, but it typically shown at the bottom of a pyramid.

Without trust, team members are unwilling to be vulnerable with one another, which means they avoid sharing their weaknesses, mistakes, and concerns. This comes up in many models of team development.

Trust is built when team members are transparent and honest with each other, fostering a safe environment where individuals feel comfortable taking risks and admitting faults. There is a lot of work that can be done at an individual and team level to improve the trustworthiness that individuals experience and create within their teams.

Leaders can cultivate trust by demonstrating vulnerability themselves and encouraging open communication. They can also focus on creating psychologically safe teams, and helping individuals grow and develop as people.

2 – Fear of Conflict

When trust is lacking, teams are unable to engage in healthy and construtive conflict.

Typically there is a fear of conflict leads to artificial harmony, where team members avoid discussing contentious topics and suppress differing viewpoints.No one is really willing to say what they think or constructivelly challenge because they are concerned about the consequences of doing so.

This avoidance prevents the team from tackling important issues and finding the best solutions. Constructive conflict, characterized by passionate and open debate, is crucial for innovation and problem-solving, something we’ve covered in our podcasts on these topics. 

Leaders should model and encourage respectful disagreement and debate to harness the benefits of healthy conflict. They should also create the cultural conditions for effective and constructive conflict, support the growth of their employees so they are less personally threatened by conflict and strive to create psychological safety in their teams.

3 – Lack of Commitment

Without healthy conflict, team members do not buy into decisions. If decisions are just anointed without a through appraisal and testing process, it’s hard for people to really get behind them.

When opinions and ideas are not thoroughly discussed and debated, team members may feel their voices are not heard, leading to ambiguity and lack of commitment to the team’s goals and decisions.

Leaders can foster commitment by ensuring that every team member’s perspective is considered and by clearly communicating decisions and expectations. Again, there are lots of simple things leaders can do to help with this, including improving their meeting and decision making processes, increasing transparency, asking for committment and buy in and creating psychological safety.

4 – Avoidance of Accountability

A lack of commitment leads to avoidance of accountability. When team members are not fully committed to the decisions, they are less likely to hold each other accountable for their actions and performance. Also, if I’ve not bought in and actually committed to something, it doesn’t feel as bad to me if it doesn’t happen. I don’t really have that much “skin in the game”. In fact, I might even like to watch it fail a bit as then I’ll be able to say “I told you so”, or similar.

Typically, avoidance of accountability results in lower standards and performance.

To help overcome this, effective teams establish clear standards and hold each other accountable to these standards.

Leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for accountability by addressing performance issues promptly and constructively. They can also do helpful things like co-creating team social contracts, which can help create cultures of accountability.

5 – Inattention to Results

The final dysfunction occurs when team members prioritize their individual goals and needs over the collective goals of the team. For example, as a leader of a function it’s easy to believe that the performance of your function is all that really matters. However, the truth is that there are often bigger organizational priorities outside of your function than within, and you would best serve the organization by supporting them than prioritizing actions within your function.

This inattention to to overall organizational results, when it happens, undermines the overall organization’s performance and success.

Leadership teams must focus on collective results to achieve high performance.

Leaders can counteract this dysfunction by setting clear team goals, regularly reviewing progress, and rewarding behaviors that contribute to the team’s success.

As per the note above, you can find lots of information about them at Patrick Lencioni’s company website, and via other trainers and providers including Five Behaviours here in the UK, who are a Wiley brand.

You might also enjoy learning more about trust, which is a key part of this model. Other models are available, including Tuckman’s model of team development and Cog’s Ladder. They’re different, but also similar. A lot of the things they cover are congruent with these five dysfunctions.

We also think it’s worth having a look at social threats in the workplace, as well as reading up on our favouriate, psychological safety.

You can listen to a podcast about psychological safety in teams below:

We like the simplicity of this model, and we really like the readability of Lencioni’s book.

We think it’s a helpful model for leaders to be aware of, and a great little framework for facilitators and management development people to know as well. It’s the type of thing that can be covered quickly in passing, but which can also meaningfully be expanded into a multi-day team development programme.

It is worth calling out that the steps do need to build on each other, and that addressing these challenges does take some time and effort. They may also require embarking on some personal change as well for the leaders and managers involved.

We use this as a baseline for several programme we do and have a UK license to use the Wiley products. Contact us if you’d like to discuss.

Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. Jossey-Bass.

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