"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".

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.