The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Your leadership team agreed the year's priorities in January. By the end of March, every executive can walk you through a department plan that is on track, and the one number the business cares about most is behind. When you raise it, each of them explains, accurately, why the miss happened somewhere else.

Figure 1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

What it is

Patrick Lencioni describes five ways a leadership team fails and stacks them as a pyramid. From the base up they are absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. His argument is that each layer rests on the one beneath it. In his account, people who can't admit a mistake to each other hold back in debate, and people rarely back a decision they never argued over. Few people then chase a colleague over a commitment they never truly shared, so each executive falls back on the department's own numbers.

The order makes the model useful. When the team misses a result, work down the pyramid to find where things first went wrong. Lencioni built the model from his consulting work, and the order has not been tested in controlled studies, so treat it as a guide to where to look.

How it works

Absence of Trust

Who on this team will admit a mistake or ask for help in front of the others?

Lencioni means the kind of trust that lets people say they were wrong, which goes further than knowing a colleague is reliable. You build it by going first. Tell the team about a mistake of your own, or ask for help with a problem you have right now. Then watch how the room treats the next person who does the same, and make sure nobody pays a price for it.

Fear of Conflict

Which objections do people raise in the corridor and never in the room?

Without trust, a team settles for polite agreement and the real doubts go unsaid. Before a decision, ask each person what could make the proposal fail, and give them time to answer. Call on the quiet ones by name. When someone raises a concern, deal with the concern itself, so everyone sees that it is safe to disagree about an idea.

Lack of Commitment

Would everyone in the room describe the decision the same way?

Lencioni argues that people who never got to weigh in don't fully back the call, even when they nod. End every decision by stating what was decided, who owns it and the deadline. Then ask each person to say in their own words what they will do and what could stop them. Anyone who still disagrees says so now, and then commits to the decision anyway.

Avoidance of Accountability

When a colleague slips on a commitment, who tells them?

Without a clear shared commitment, people hesitate to challenge a peer, and the problem goes to the boss or goes nowhere. Put the commitments and the progress on one page the whole team reviews at every meeting. Agree that when a commitment slips, the colleague who notices talks to the person directly before raising it anywhere else.

Inattention to Results

Which departmental goal is pulling against the result the team needs together?

Without accountability, people fall back on their own status or their department's numbers. Pick the few results the whole team owns and review them together at every meeting, where everyone can see them. Then look at how each department is measured. If a target rewards one team for something that hurts the shared result, change the target.

When to reach for it

A team that is busy and polite in meetings but keeps missing what it agreed to deliver
A decision everyone nodded through that people then carried out in different ways
A team you have taken over that feels off when you cannot yet say why

“I'm 100% committed to giving you these resources because our business needs you to succeed more than my team this quarter.”

A worked example

The leadership team at Tallowmere Windows, a fictional maker of custom windows for home builders, agreed in September to cut the lead time on custom orders from five weeks to three. Sales started quoting three weeks the next morning, and production kept scheduling to five. By November a third of custom orders were late and two builders had complained.

The general manager took the team back through the September decision from the base of the pyramid up. The plant manager admitted he had known the glass supplier couldn't deliver any faster, and hadn't wanted to be the one who slowed down a growth plan. He had mentioned it to a colleague in the corridor after the meeting and never in the room.

Sales had taken the decision to cover every order from the next day, while production had taken it to start in January, once a faster supplier was in place. When the first late orders arrived in October, the sales lead complained to the general manager instead of talking to the plant manager.

Underneath all of it, sales was measured on orders booked and production on cost per window, and nobody was measured on delivering on time.

The earliest point where the team could have acted differently was the September meeting, so they started there. They agreed to send out the decision question two days before each leadership meeting and to set aside ten minutes for objections. Every decision would end with a written record of who would do what by when, and the team would review on-time delivery together each month. The general manager also added on-time delivery to the targets for both sales and production, because their separate targets had pulled the two departments in opposite directions.

Try it this week

Pick one recent decision that caused rework or confusion and walk back through it with your team. By the end you'll have one change to try at your next leadership meeting, with an owner and a date to review it.

Write the decision at the top of a page and list the five layers underneath it, with trust at the bottom.
Ask the question for each layer from the base up, starting with the work and letting each person choose what they share about themselves.
Mark the earliest point where someone could have acted differently.
Agree one change aimed at that point, such as sending the decision question in advance or ending with who does what by when.
Name the owner of the change and book a review of it at the meeting after your next big decision.

Try it with AI

Copy this prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or any AI assistant and fill in the part in square brackets. It will walk you through the model one step at a time, using your own situation.

Prompt

I want to understand why my team fell short on this: [describe a recent decision or result that went wrong, and who was involved].

If you can open links, read https://www.colincox.com/library/five-dysfunctions-of-a-team first. It explains Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a pyramid that runs from the base up through absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Work up the pyramid from the base, one layer at a time. Ask me one or two questions about what actually happened at each layer, and wait for my answers before you move on. When I'm vague, ask me for a specific moment. Don't ask me to share anything personal about the people on my team.

Then tell me the earliest layer where the team could have acted differently, and why you think so. Finish by helping me choose one change to try at our next leadership meeting, who will own it, and when we'll review it.

Leave out names and anything confidential before you paste in your situation.

From Colin's work

I was once on an executive team where everybody in the room was leading a team of about 60 people. At our quarterly meeting, one of the leaders told the whole group that his main priorities were at risk. He'd had key people leave, and he didn't have time to hire before a date that could not move. He was super stressed.

We got back from a break, and another department head spoke to him in front of the whole team. He said, "I'm going to lend you people this quarter. And I want all of you to know that I'm gonna take a hit for this. My team is going to feel like I'm not protecting them."

He went on, "I'll handle that. I'm committed. There's no like passive aggressive disagree and commit. I'm 100% committed to giving you these resources because our business needs you to succeed more than my team this quarter. So I'll take the hit."

It was emotional. The leader who had raised the risk saw his peer hadn't had to do that. His peer had just saved his bacon, and the peer was going to take the pain for it without holding a grudge.

Go deeper

Read the longer article on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Related tools

Source: Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, 2002

Want help putting this to work with your team? Book a free thirty minutes with Colin.