The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
An easy read on what behavioral tendencies prevent teams from working towards a common goal.
Content and Structure
The book outlines a simple model that counters the typical “soft” factors that get in the way of teamwork. These factors are distilled into the five eponymous dysfunctions. The dysfunctions are presented through an easy-to-read story (“The Fable”): A newly appointed CEO (Kathryn) inherits a dysfunctional leadership team. She makes it her goal and the team’s to shed the dysfunctions and find a path to successful collaboration. To do so, she runs a series of workshops, introduces the team to each dysfunction, and works through solutions and practices to overcome them.
The author achieves two goals with the story: readers learn the model and the dysfunctions in a lightweight way. At the same time, the author conveys a possible change process. He shows setbacks and resistance and sets expectations: Counteracting entrenched (and in part very human) behaviors that stand in the way of teamwork through education, practices, and leadership is, despite the straightforward root causes, a continuous and exhausting process for everyone involved.
In a significantly shorter second part (“The Model”, roughly 1/6 of the book / ~50 pages), the author goes through the five dysfunctions individually and describes methods to counter them. This section works well as a summary while being a good reference to come back to in the future.
As a result, I could absorb the content easily because the behaviors and motivations of the people in the fable served as a steady anchor. At the same time, the deliberately dry section on the model helps me put the book’s knowledge into practice more easily and avoid having to comb through the narrative when facing concrete questions.
The book also addresses the role of leadership. It does so implicitly by focusing on Kathryn’s character in the fable, and explicitly in the “The Model” chapter. There, each dysfunction includes a section on the role and responsibility of leadership.
However, this general type of knowledge transfer has advantages and disadvantages for me, which I will go into more detail on at the end.
The Model
The model described in the book structures the dysfunctions as a pyramid.
The individual dysfunctions build on one another, so you read it bottom to top. Fixing a dysfunction therefore requires that all underlying dysfunctions have been addressed.
The holy grail of teamwork, according to the model, is that the entire team works toward a shared goal and lets the outcome be guided by that goal (see “Inattention to Results”).
Each layer below, starting with the most fundamental (psychological safety, see “Absence of Trust”), prevents this from succeeding, according to the model.
The presence of any single dysfunction is enough to make an entire team dysfunctional.
Dysfunction 1: Absence of Trust
I understand the first dysfunction as “impaired psychological safety.” It manifests as team members not being open with one another because they fear possible consequences. The book summarizes this as a lack of willingness to be vulnerable.
In my view, team members may, for example, fear a loss of standing, a snide remark or reaction from colleagues (e.g., eye-rolling), etc. They pay more attention to how their statements and actions will land than to what they actually think.
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.
Especially combined with imposter syndrome, it’s easy for the fear of saying something wrong or foolish to creep in and inhibit open communication within the team.
Only when every team member is convinced that everyone acts in good faith and is working toward a shared goal is the foundation for trust, in the sense of the first dysfunction, established.
They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict
Productive conflict is a key prerequisite for successful teams.
Part of the value of teamwork is that team members can contribute a wide range of relevant perspectives and a broad knowledge base. Reconciling these perspectives often means resolving contradictions or at least explicitly addressing them.
Arriving at a shared picture is not automatic: Everyone on the team has a good view into a different problem area. Naturally, issues in that area are tangible and therefore feel most important. Others on the team see different problems and thus prioritize differently.
And there is no way that you could figure that out on your own. I don’t think anyone here is smart enough, and has the breadth and depth of knowledge, to know the right answer without hearing from everyone else and benefiting from their perspective.
Only by juxtaposing perspectives does the phenomenon soften and self-correct in all directions involved. But that comes with the painful process of conflict, because each person starts with conviction about a different prioritization.
Overcoming the first dysfunction (Absence of Trust) and communicating openly is essential. Beyond that, the need for harmony (or simple fear of any conflict) gets in the way.
Conflict generally has a negative connotation. So it seems counterintuitive at first that avoiding conflict counts as a team dysfunction.
Productive conflict means the team members name and address the conflict purely on the merits. It is clearly distinct from emotion-driven, ego-based conflict, which inevitably arises when productive conflict is absent.
Ironically, team members who avoid every conflict ensure that substantive contradictions only surface once they’re no longer bearable and the pain outweighs the aversion to conflict.
When this dysfunction occurs, it doesn’t necessarily show up as harmony in the team. It can also manifest as a multitude of unproductive, barely resolvable conflicts that are emotional at their core.
Dysfunction 3: Lack of Commitment
The third dysfunction arises when team decisions are not supported by everyone on the team. This happens especially where some hold a different opinion about a decision. If that opinion remains unspoken (see Fear of Conflict), the unaddressed conflict makes it hard to support the group’s decision.
There can be additional reasons. The author introduces the “First Team” concept, which is also covered extensively in “The Manager’s Path.”
“First Team” refers to the team a person is closest to - the one that gets their primary loyalty. This easily creates a loyalty conflict when a team consists of leaders (e.g., a board, an executive team, or a division leadership team).
In such cases, loyalty often goes first to one’s own area of responsibility. The result is that managers reject decisions they perceive as detrimental to their own domain. They must then choose between loyalty to their peers on the leadership team and loyalty to their direct reports.
Your peers must therefore be your actual “First Team.” Especially for group decisions, your primary loyalty has to be to that team.
This also feels counterintuitive at first: Managers who put their own team above all else are often well regarded by their staff. Loyalty to one’s direct reports is seen as virtuous.
But this behavior is highly detrimental to those very people: A conflict unresolved at the leadership level gets pushed down into the organization. Employees in the manager’s domain inherit an attitude and behavior that runs counter to the decision made above. The conflict thus spreads to other departments and even the rest of the company. At the same time, those employees have no way to resolve the conflict themselves.
Conversely, the leadership team can only achieve agreed goals if people who favored a different decision still support the group’s choice.
The prerequisites are that the team works toward a common goal (see “Absence of Trust”) and that concerns about a decision’s impact on that goal are raised openly within the team (see “Fear of Conflict”).
If everyone’s concerns have been put on the table and the group decides with the shared goal in mind, anyone in a goal-oriented team can support the decision.
The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.
The team (or at least the accountable decision-maker) made the call after considering all raised aspects. Refusing to support it jeopardizes the success of the decision. Achieving the goal, however, requires the team to act in unison.
Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability
If a team member doesn’t live up to their responsibilities, it’s important that the team holds that person accountable. Especially when group decisions are not supported by all, it’s easy to try to get off the hook. Those who opposed the group decision can always claim they never agreed with it in the first place. Eliminating Lack of Commitment is therefore the foundation for holding team members accountable.
If someone still doesn’t honor agreements, it’s the team’s job to call it out openly. If that doesn’t happen, there’s no immediately perceptible consequence for acting against the team’s interests. It appears unimportant to the team or not a problem. This can quickly lead to agreements no longer being perceived as binding.
If a team has sufficient trust (see “Absence of Trust”) and addresses perceived deviations from jointly made decisions or actions counter to shared goals in good faith and on the merits, this establishes a culture of accountability.
Especially in a team where we feel comfortable and may even have friendships, it’s hard for us to hold others accountable. But it’s precisely the ongoing failure to carry one’s weight or acting against team interests that puts personal relationships at risk.
Conversely, it can actually feel respectful when the team underscores the importance of an individual’s contribution. The resulting peer pressure, in a functional team, works positively - contrary to naive expectations - and elevates the work of individual members.
Some people are hard to hold accountable because they are so helpful. Others because they get defensive. Others because they are intimidating.
Leadership’s role is especially interesting here: if a team fails to uphold accountability on its own, leadership must step in as the last resort. It must be clear this is an undesired exception and that the team as a whole shares responsibility for maintaining accountability.
Dysfunction 5: Inattention to Results
At the top of the model sits the fifth dysfunction, which can be seen as the core problem of a dysfunctional team: Team members do not work toward the shared goal but pursue their own, separate agendas.
These can be personal goals that team members consciously put above the team’s goals. They may be about status, career advancement, or money. Misguided bonus schemes that reward individual performance over group outcomes can create goal conflicts.
It can also simply be that there is no shared understanding of the team’s goals, and everyone pursues a different aim with the best intentions.
All the previous dysfunctions set up the conditions for teams to work objectively toward fulfilling a shared goal. Ensuring that such a goal exists, that it’s clearly defined, measurable, understood, and shared by everyone, is the final prerequisite for a successful team under this model.
Especially because the team must be able to orient around outcomes and progress toward this goal, it’s important that team goals be achievable within an appropriate time frame.
Key Takeaways
Aside from the dysfunctions themselves, the book contains a few insights that stood out to me.
Takeaway 1: A successful team relentlessly works toward a shared goal
The most conspicuous dysfunction is the tip of the pyramid. If a team’s actions are not aligned with a clearly defined common goal, that’s a clear sign of a dysfunctional team.
Takeaway 2: The dysfunctions are easy to grasp but hard to root out
Reading the five dysfunctions, they feel easy to avoid. At their core, though, they’re grounded in behaviors we’ve learned and reinforced over years or decades. They’re partly embedded in our values (e.g., loyalty to the people we manage) and partly just human nature (e.g., prioritizing personal goals over team goals).
It therefore takes a long-term, deliberate process to unlearn these behaviors.
They trust one another. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas. They commit to decisions and plans of action. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans. They focus on the achievement of collective results. If this sounds simple, it’s because it is simple, at least in theory. In practice, however, it is extremely difficult because it requires levels of discipline and persistence.
Takeaway 3: Transparency about the dysfunctions is a prerequisite to overcoming them
For measures to address the dysfunctions to work, the causes, markers, and effects must be clear to the teams involved. People generally act according to their own moral compass. They believe they are doing the right thing. The dysfunctions often arise from misguided actions taken with good intentions. Only when people realize that their actions harm the very goals they intend to achieve will they be willing to rethink and change them.
Takeaway 4: Toxic team relationships endanger the entire team
Individuals who oppose the process and don’t share the team’s common goals can effectively prevent the dysfunctions from being shed. Even in an otherwise well-intentioned team, a single person can jeopardize everyone else’s psychological safety and thereby block the foundation for the other success factors. If no common path can be found with such individuals, the only route to a functional team may ultimately be for those people to leave the team (or the company).
Takeaway 5: Ideally, we screen explicitly for team fit during hiring and the probationary period
If we focus primarily on subject-matter performance and communication, shortcomings in teamwork can surface too late. It’s easy, as an individual contributor, to rack up impressive solo output - and it’s also easier to evaluate only that.
That means everyone here will be interviewing candidates and pushing to find someone who can demonstrate trust, engage in conflict, commit to group decisions, hold their peers accountable, and focus on the results of the team, not their own ego.
Takeaway 5: Dysfunctional leadership teams endanger the entire organization
Even if every department delivers excellent work, a successful company needs all departments working toward a shared goal. If the leadership team is dysfunctional, achieving a common goal is at risk. The resulting friction losses compound the higher up the dysfunction occurs in the organization. Conversely, a company where everyone pulls toward a shared goal has immense efficiency upside.
Addressing the dysfunctions at the company and culture level likely holds a widely underestimated potential.
Takeaway 6: Causes and consequences can sit in very different places
Dysfunction 3 in particular carries the risk that a leader misguides their department. If you observe a department (or someone within it) acting against the leadership team’s decision, the conflict often cannot be resolved at that level. The person is acting according to their manager’s directives, and interventions from outside the department only escalate the conflict. You need awareness of where the root cause lies (the leadership team) to resolve the conflict at the right level.
Conclusion and Thoughts on the Book
Relevance
At points, it becomes clear that the book was written before the Corona pandemic. All meetings in the book (except for one phone call, in which the communication medium is not given special attention) happen face to face.
In reality, I experience significantly increased complexity through distributed work. On the one hand, this naturally makes me question the relevance of the solutions presented in the book. At the same time, I recognize that the identified dysfunctions occur just as much in distributed teams. The challenges for a distributed team to shed them are considerably greater, however, since there are additional hurdles to overcome. To establish the necessary foundation of trust in the team requires much more if you generally only see each other in video conferences of varying transmission quality. The barrier to doing other things alongside the meeting - especially when you get the impression the topic isn’t relevant to you personally - is much lower than in a meeting held in a physical room.
The problems that result from this are also shown by the book, even without referencing remote work. However, it doesn’t provide direct guidance for the problems and hurdles of the post-pandemic era.
This would be welcome, however, it’s not a deal breaker. The consequences of the Corona period and the much greater normalcy of remote work today, after some reflection, seem more like an accelerant for the dysfunctions depicted in the book than as a source of fundamentally new dysfunctions.
The book is therefore still relevant to me, even if you can’t read the concrete effects of remote work from it.
Classification of the Book
The book leaves me somewhat torn: That the book is told primarily as a story makes it very easy to understand and also helps me as a reader to think more structurally about team dynamics in general, but also about my teams in particular. But the book lacks evidence for the outlined observations. It builds completely on the effectiveness of the story and the logical derivations from the author’s observations. I can therefore poorly assess the robustness of this model after reading the book.
The Good
Five Dysfunctions of a Team was an easy read for me and presented a very comprehensible model. The dysfunctions ring true, and I could map a lot of them directly to observations from everyday work.
I believe that working through the topics in the book pays off for every leader. I can even imagine a team benefiting simply from developing a shared understanding of the dysfunctions.
Some of the examples and behaviors outlined in the book happen with the best intentions. That the book highlights the downsides here already has significant added value.
Especially the effect of putting one’s own area of responsibility above the shared goals with peers in the spirit of well-meaning loyalty, in my experience, is not transparent enough for many.
Likewise, technicians in particular tend to clearly separate responsibility and competence, as we strive for in software architecture. That in everyday team life this comes with the risk of thinking too little about the interplay of individual responsibilities and implicitly pushing this task onto leadership is made very clear by the book.
That alone already justifies reading the book for me and makes it a valuable tool.
The Bad
On the other hand, I find it difficult to classify the model presented in the book in terms of completeness and correctness. The aspects mentioned sound plausible and align with everyday observations I have made myself.
Still, this cannot be completely dismissed: Patrick Lencioni does not provide scientific evidence for his claims. He reports from the observed practice of his management consulting and makes these observations tangible in the book.
He has a great fondness for using tangible stories and anecdotes to make his points easy to understand and impressive. In the book, he doesn’t replace the logical derivation of the dysfunctions with them, but transports them within (and later also outside) the story.
I still miss a classification of how the content of the book relates to the state of science. That would help confidence in the model but also create points of connection. So I could, for example, more easily trace in studies which methods exist for measuring the influencing factors.
With regard to the usefulness the book has for me, I don’t want to overemphasize this. At the same time, also because of the double-edged nature of story-based argumentation, it leaves a certain aftertaste.
The Ugly
The downside of this type of argumentation becomes clear when looking at other publications by the author: Patrick Lencioni regularly publishes content on social media, such as on his LinkedIn profile. In doing so, he presents a sharply formulated thesis in a florid way. The fable here gives more the impression of anecdotal evidence. This post illustrates the effect of this style well:
A friend of mine recently turned down a job offer worth millions. Why? Because the people at the company never asked about his life. They valued his skills, but not him as a person. This is a powerful reminder: culture matters more than compensation. People don’t just want to be recognized for what they do. They want to be known for who they are. Leaders, your people are not just skillsets to be managed. They are human beings to be understood and valued. That’s how you build a culture worth staying for.
This illustrates the effect that a parable or anecdote makes a statement more credible without actually having any form of evidentiary power. The parable emotionalizes the narrative and makes the statement more tangible.
This is not meant as an argument ad hominem. But it shows why I can’t shake a certain caution when reading the book.
Where does this leave us?
For me, it is therefore important to clearly distinguish what this book is - and what it is not:
It is a simple model and tool to move teams toward collaboration. It explicitly motivates engaging with the dynamics of a team and provides plausible logical arguments with which you can address frequently observed obstacles to collaboration.
The model does not have scientific evidence. The book does not cite studies on which properties or factors cause the success or failure of a team. It does not include an objective definition of a team’s success factors, but is a subjective picture arising from the observations of a single person.
Impact of the Book on Me and My Work
So what did I take away from the book at a high level?
The most important thing for a team is that they pursue a clear, shared goal. The goal must be explicitly stated and everyone on the team must have the same understanding of the goal. For that to work, and for the team members to put the shared goal (whether intentionally or unintentionally) above other, individual, or local goals, basic conditions must be created in the team that lead to open, appreciative, and goal-oriented communication and thus to productive conflict.
Even though that sounds simple and obvious, my understanding of the concrete aspects of good teamwork and how the different mechanics influence each other has improved significantly through the book.
All in all, I can see why the book has a cult following. For me, that’s partly due to the convincing rhetoric, with all the consequences described above. But it’s also because the book offers a space to think in a structured way about often diffusely perceived human behaviors that make a team dysfunctional.
I’ve derived concrete actions for myself from it - mostly in actually sharing the model when I feel like it would make an observed situation more tangible - and can recommend it with the before mentioned reservations.