Thought Leaders: Patrick Lencioni on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The following interview with Patrick Lencioni is a condensed version of HR.com's live, one-hour online learning seminar.

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Patrick Lencioni is the founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a specialized management-consulting firm focused on organizational health. He has been described by The One-Minute Manager´s Ken Blanchard as "fast defining the next generation of leadership thinkers."

Pat´s passion for organizations and teams is reflected in his writing, speaking, and consulting. He is the author of four business books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002), which continues to be highlighted on The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller lists. Death by Meeting (2004) followed suit with appearances on both the USA Today and Business Week lists. His earlier successes include The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (2000) and The Five Temptations of a CEO (1998). Pat has also completed a companion guide on teamwork entitled Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide (2005).

Pat´s work has also been featured in numerous publications such as Fast Company, INC. Magazine, USA Today, Entrepreneur, The Drucker Foundation´s Leader to Leader, and The Harvard Business Review.

When Pat is not writing, he consults to clients and speaks to large organizations. His time spent with senior executives provides an endless source of learning and is critical to the development of his original theories.

KE: Patrick, not all groups are teams. What is it that makes a group a team?

PL: I like to say that teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice. Teamwork is something that a group has to choose to do and it requires a significant sacrifice and cost, but the benefits are great. A group of people can work together and not be a team. A team has a common purpose, makes sacrifices for one another, holds each other accountable for what needs to get done, and defines its success by its mutual collective objectives and not by the individual success of the team members.

KE: In your book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you lead us through a fable in which a new CEO steps into a highly dysfunctional team and helps guide them into a new way of being. How much is that story based on your real-life experience?

PL: It is not specifically based on my life but it is certainly based on archetypal examples. I love hearing from readers who say, "Did you work with my company before you wrote your book?" They are very sincere in that. They think that I had insights into their particular organization, so evidently it has hit a universal nerve. It is based on real experiences but not real people. It is based on concepts that come from the real world.

KE: What I loved about your book was that I felt like I was sitting around that boardroom table in the middle of that meeting, listening to the various people. I could relate to having those individuals, or folks like them, in previous meetings so I can understand the universal appeal.

Pat, why are so many teams dysfunctional?

PL: I think it´s because they are made up of human beings and we are all fallible. We are all, ultimately, self-interested. When you put a bunch of fallible, self-interested human beings in a room together they are likely to do some pretty crazy things, unless they are given good and compelling reasons to work together. I think it is just human nature.

KE: I also think that we learn so little about how to be effective in a team.

PL: Exactly. It depends on what kind of environment or family you grew up in. It is not the science or art it could be. All too often business schools and education focus on overly-intellectual issues. These issues of behavior are a little harder to quantify and measure, but they are critical to the success of an organization.

KE: What impact does a poorly functioning team have?

PL: There are so many. They waste a lot of their time on politics. They don´t enjoy their work. They feel that they have to compete with people internally to get things done. It has impact on their personal lives as a result of that. It certainly impacts the customers that they try to serve, and the outcomes they are trying to achieve. It is just misery. Unfortunately, we have all worked in at least one job where we can relate to them. It is really a shame because we spend far too much time at work to feel like we are competing with our colleagues. We are suffering unduly. The consequences of not working as a team are great.

KE: I am assuming that the information we are discussing today applies to teams at all levels of an organization.

PL: It does. Most of my work is with CEOs and their direct reports, but we get comments from people in all kinds of organizations and from all levels. Everything from churches to schools to sports teams to the military encounter the same universal behaviors.

KE: Let´s start with the first dysfunction you describe in your book. What is it and what might be some signs that a team is struggling with it?

PL: The first dysfunction of a team sounds obvious, but it is not as simple as it might sound, which is the absence of trust. I am not talking about predictive trust which is the kind of thing where people can predict one another´s behaviors because they have worked together long enough. Any two people that know each other can do that. They can imagine how the other person is going to react to something they say because they have known them for a while. What I am talking about is vulnerability-based trust. It is the willingness of team members to be emotionally vulnerable with one another. That is not a touchy feely thing, it is when people can admit that they have made a mistake or that they have a weakness or that they need help. When people are completely open about whom they are as human beings, and they are vulnerable about that, that breeds trust on a team like nothing else.

Trust is so important because if people on a team are wondering if their team members are being honest about what they know and what they don´t know then they are going to spend a lot of time wondering what they should say and do and how they should interpret what everyone else says and does. When everyone on a team is comfortable being vulnerable, then the team members can just speak their minds without fear of reprisal.

A team that doesn´t have vulnerability-based trust is going to struggle to succeed in any other area. Trust is the first and most important area.

KE: What´s the role of the leader in helping a team overcome this dysfunction?

PL: The most important thing that a leader can do is be vulnerable first. If the leader can´t be vulnerable then the other members of the team are not going to be comfortable being vulnerable. They have to tell people who they are, acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, and when they make mistakes they have to be the first to call them out. If they can´t do that, then other people are not going to.

I once worked with an executive who did 360-feedback with his team and he never went over the results. When finally the head of HR convinced him to go over the results with the team he stood there and said, "The feedback indicates that one of my weaknesses is that I don´t listen well. What do you guys think?" As he went around the room everyone denied that he had a problem listening. This guy could not admit that any of things that had been written about him were true and as a result the rest of the team wasn´t going to admit when they made a mistake. The company spiraled into the ground and it was really because they lacked trust and that came from the leader. Leaders need to celebrate their strengths and weaknesses and admit when they have made a mistake.

KE: How about the next one, fear of conflict.  What are some characteristics of a team that is afraid to disagree?

PL: A good sign of fear of conflict is meetings where people don´t speak up. It is also where there is a lot of back channel conflict where people behind the scenes are saying things about one another. Sometimes people complain about things but they don´t do it in groups or in front of the whole team. Those are some telltale signs of the fear of conflict.

KE: It seems like most teams operate either under the consensus mindset in which everyone must agree, or they have a dictatorial style in which the leader decides, and no one is allowed to question. I have to believe that either style is a barrier to innovation and effective decision-making. What are your thoughts on this?

PL: I completely agree. Intel has a wonderful saying, "Disagree and commit." I believe that people can´t buy into an issue if they don´t weigh in on the issue. As far as innovating, if people are not comfortable engaging with each other in productive ideological conflict, you are going to leave so many good ideas on the table and you are going to leave yourself vulnerable to some very bad decisions. The absence of conflict on a team has such a cost in terms of the absence of innovation.

KE: How do you encourage a team to begin the process of healthy debate?

PL: We try to teach the leader to be a miner of conflict. They have to demand debate at meetings. When they see two people and they have an inkling that they are not in agreement over an important issue, the leader must demand that they put it on the table. It can be uncomfortable in the beginning but it is ultimately very liberating. People want to air their differences and they want to achieve some sort of resolution. We explain to teams that conflict is uncomfortable, particularly if you are not used to it. We encourage the leader to give people real-time permission to engage in conflict. That means that when the team does engage in their first, second or third debate they need to recognize that there is going to be anxiety around that. Once they start to debate and you can see the anxiety level going up, interrupt them and remind them that what they are doing is exactly what you want them to do. We do this with senior executives at Fortune 500 companies and they always let go of the anxiety and can dive right into solving the issue. It is really important to remind them that what they are doing is not only not bad, but very helpful and necessary for the team.

KE: The third dysfunction you described is lack of commitment. What might that look like?

PL: When teams make decisions and then revisit them over and over that is a lack of commitment. Sometimes teams find that they are not following through on decisions and three months later they meet and people say, "Well, I never thought it was a good idea in the first place." That is a sign that they didn´t have enough conflict and that people didn´t buy into the decision. It is when people are leaving meetings nodding their heads and then go out into the parking lot or the hallway afterwards and say, "I think this a terrible idea." That is a sign of lack of commitment. We, as leaders and team members, need to make sure that any information about why people disagree surfaces at the meeting. At the end of the meeting the leader needs to make a decision and the people need to commit to that decision. The only way to get that is if people feel they have been heard. When we don´t have enough debate, we are dooming ourselves to revisiting the issue down the road. We have to get people to speak up. The role of the leader is to force clarity and closure at the end of that discussion.

KE: Patrick, what is the fourth dysfunction and how do we know if our team has it?

PL: This one is, for me, one of the most powerful dysfunctions. We have it here in my organization and it is because I have it too. When people don´t commit to a decision they fail to hold each other accountable after the fact. If I go to a meeting and I know that people have not really bought into the decision, when I see them not following through later on, I fail to hold them accountable because I know they never really thought it was a good idea in the first place. When team members are not holding each other accountable because of a lack of commitment that is a very difficult thing for the performance of the team. It is important to note that what I am talking about here is peer-to-peer accountability. Peer-to-peer accountability is our best friend in an organization. I am not talking about leader to subordinate accountability because that should not be the primary source of accountability on a team. Ironically, the only way to get peers to hold each other accountable is for the leader to model that behavior. If the leader sets a very clear example that they are going to confront difficult issues and hold people accountable, then peers will begin to do it for one another. I know about this because I am particularly bad at it. I do not like to hold people accountable. I like them to be my friends and I don´t like to make people feel uncomfortable, so I beg out of the issue. I don´t like to hold people accountable because I am too afraid to jeopardize my own personal relationship with them, which ultimately leads to the team struggling with the issue as well.

KE: Your final team dysfunction is inattention to results. What are the characteristics of a team in this situation and what do you do with clients to move them toward a focus on results?

PL: People often pay attention to their ego, or their career, or their budget, and fail to look at the collective results. I see this all the time. People will go to meetings and pretend to be concerned about the greater good of the organization, but will leave and go take care of themselves. I like to use the example of Scotty Pippen. When Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls he became the leader of the team because he was the best player on the team. They still had a great team and a great coach and they were favored to go to the championship. In the playoffs that year, Scotty Pippen and his team were tied with the New York Knicks with five seconds left in the game. The ball went out of bounds and it was going to be Chicago´s ball. The coach called a timeout and brought the team to the sidelines. They were preparing to take the last shot to win the game. The coach decided that the best person to take that shot was not Scotty Pippen, but another guy who was a better shooter. When Scotty Pippen saw that he wasn´t going to get the last shot, he refused to go out on the floor. The best player refused to go out on the floor and no one understood why. The Bulls ended up winning the game, but that is not the important point. I wish that every executive that I worked with had the audacity of Scotty Pippen to stand up in public and admit that they care more about themselves than the team. If people did that then we would know whom to fire.

People need to know that they will be held accountable for the collective outcome of the team and not their individual needs. They are not going to know that unless people are committing to decisions. People don´t hold each other accountable if they don´t commit. They are also not going to commit unless they know that there has been healthy debate up front. They know they are not going to have debate and conflict, if there isn´t vulnerability-based trust. That is how all of this fits together.