Lead Others · Guide
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Find the real cause when your leadership team agrees in the room and then fails to deliver
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. Without trust people will not argue honestly, without honest argument they do not really commit, without commitment nobody holds a peer to account, and without accountability people put their own department ahead of the team's results.
The order is what makes the model useful. A problem you can see at the top, such as missed results, usually has its cause lower down, so look beneath it before you try to fix it. The trust at the base means people can admit an error or ask for help in front of each other. Lencioni drew the model from his consulting practice, so treat the order as a starting point for diagnosis.
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
Try it this week
Choose a recent decision that caused avoidable rework or confusion, and walk through it with your team using the model to organize the discussion. Start with the work, let people choose what they share, and do not ask anyone to disclose personal experiences as a test of trust.
- Ask what information arrived late, which objection went unspoken and what each person believed had been agreed.
- Ask where someone needed help and hesitated to ask, which commitment needed a direct conversation between colleagues, and which departmental goal conflicted with the result you wanted together.
- Identify the first point where a different action could have helped, whether that turns out to be a relationship problem, a process problem or both.
- Choose one change for the next leadership meeting, such as circulating the decision question in advance, reserving time for objections or finishing with a shared account of the commitments.
- Review how that change affected the next decision, and choose the next improvement from what you observe.
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
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