"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team": Teams That Need It Most Can't Use It

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. One of my favourite books and from experience these problems don't look like problems when you're in them.

Absence of trust looks like "we have a great culture here." Usually said by the person with the longest private list of people they don't actually trust.

Fear of conflict looks like "we're all aligned". It's everyone agreeing in the meeting and arguing about it in Slack five minutes later.

Avoidance of accountability looks like "We trust our people to figure it out" and then telling people what to do and how to do it.

The pyramid is useful for naming things you already kind of knew. The naming doesn't fix it, though. Usually there's one person in the room who already knew exactly where the team was stuck.

The model only works if people are willing to be honest about it. Which needs trust. And a willingness to argue. And people who actually hold each other to what they said.

So the teams that need it most are the least able to use it.

The book is optimistic. Here are the problems, here are the exercises, here's how to fix it.

It doesn't talk much about the irony: if your team doesn't trust each other, they'll be suspicious of a trust-building workshop. If your team avoids conflict, they'll nod along to the pyramid without saying what they actually think.

From My Experience

• The team can fix its trust problem by starting shipping commitments in public and letting people see who followed through.
• When we launched a project, it had no agreed-upon success metrics. A few weeks later the CEO thought it was going well but the team thought it was failing. They were both right but about different things.
• The person who transitioned from being active during meetings and then stayed quiet in every meeting eventually quit.
• "We'll look into it" is where good ideas go to die. I started asking "what specifically and by when?" in every meeting. It made me unpopular for about two weeks.