The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Introduction

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team provides insight on ways in which behaviours within a team can prevent success.

I read this book around October 2023.

TL;DR

  • Teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage. Above all other factors, finance, strategy, tech, it is the most important.
  • People are imperfect, so teams are inherently dysfunctional.
  • The 5 dysfunctions of a team are:
    • Absence of trust - Unnwillingness to be vulnerable
    • Fear of conflict - Maintaining artificial harmony
    • Lack of commitment - Feinging of agreement with no intention to follow through
    • Avoidance of accountability - Lack of constructive challenge on meeting of agreements leading to low standards
    • Inattention to results - Focus on individual results rather than collective success of peer group team.

My Commentary

  • Good Basic Principles - The 5 dysfunctions are a good primer to assess the effectiveness of your team, and can help identify opportunities for improving the performance of your team. They flavours of these in many other leadership / team management books.
  • Assumed At Will Employment - The book, as do many written by American authors, makes assumptions about the ease of replacing staff. The realitiy is that if you have a dysfunctional team member it is often not as quick as suggested to make a change, which has side effects not contemplated by the book.

The Dysfunctions

Absence of trust

  • Team Building / Ice Breakers
    • Exercise A
      • Answer 5 questions
        • Hometown
        • Number of kids in family
        • Interesting childhood hobbies
        • Biggest challenge growing up
        • First job
      • What your life was like as a child, but not interested in your inner child. It’s not a therapy session
    • Exercise B
      • Individual Ideation - 5m
        • Single biggest strength
        • Single biggest weakness
      • Share with group - Xm
  • Trust is not the same as assuming everyone is on the same page, or that they don’t need to be pushed. Trust is when a team member pushes you, that they’re doing to because they care about the team.
    • Push with respect, assume positive intent
    • Doesn’t work if there’s not buy-in or alignment on the team/organisational goals

Fear of conflict

  • Description: lack of constructive conflict, reached via people holding back rather than constantly working through issues and cycling through conflict
  • Examples
    • Deferring decisions. e.g. half and half, not agreement on next steps

Lack of commitment

  • Description: where there isn’t collective buy in to a proposal/plan.
  • Conflict important because it enables people to feel listened to, if not they won’t get onboard
  • Doesn’t mean everyone agrees, but give opportunity to make a case against, and if disagreement then explain why so they understand if not agree with the rationale.
  • Does not mean consensus, rare. This just becomes an attempt to please everyone, which in turn displeases everyone
  • Disagree and commit

Avoidance of accountability

  • Description: when you avoid giving feedback to others, particularly peers, because your avoiding the interpersonal discomfort
  • Hard, but as important to challenge peers. Why can it be difficult:
    • If they’re helpful
    • If they get defensive
    • If they are intimidating

Inattention to results

  • Description: team members seeking out individual recognition/attention at expense of collective (team/company) results/goals
  • Method:
    • Collective goals should be simple enough to grasp easily, and specific enough to be actionable.
    • E.g. profit isn’t actionable, should be more closely related to what individuals do on a daily basis.
  • Loyalties and confidentialities
    • Is your first team your DRs or your peer group?
  • It needs to be your peer group, if you’re to adhere to focusing on team rather than independent results/goals * A more complicated idea in matrix orgs, which product engineering focused companies tend to be

Quotes

“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”

Other Ideas

Meeting Discipline

  • Everyone should have full attention
  • If the topic strays into information only relevant to a subset of the team, and should be taken offline, call it out rather than disengaging.
  • A meeting without conflict isn’t worth having… if it’s not engaging everyone it’s failed. They should be an interactive affair. Is this true?