The key ideas

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Patrick Lencioni, 2002

The company has experienced executives, money and the best technology, yet it trails its competitors. The new CEO starts not with strategy but with how her team talks and how it stays silent. A business fable about five dysfunctions that, in the author's model, keep people from working together, and an honest look at what the model does not prove.

Who it is for

For managers, members of project teams and anyone who has noticed that strong people sometimes work worse together than they do apart.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

What the book is about

A Silicon Valley company has almost everything: experienced executives, strong technology, investor money and an influential board. And yet it trails two of its competitors. Deadlines slip, good people leave, and meetings are full of polite silence.

The new CEO is a woman who looks nothing like a Valley star. Her plan seems odd: not a new strategy, but a few days out of town with the executive team.

Patrick Lencioni is a management consultant and the founder of the consulting firm The Table Group. This book is a fable: the company and its characters are the author's invention. The five dysfunctions model sums up his consulting experience; it is not the result of scientific research. Read it as a map that helps you notice problems, not as a proven law or a test for diagnosing a team.

Idea 1. When the problem is not strategy

Kathryn Petersen joins a company called DecisionTech. For her first two weeks she changes almost nothing. She sits in meetings, talks to people and watches.

She sees Martin, a brilliant engineer, who spends meetings behind his laptop. She sees Mikey, a talented head of marketing, who makes cutting remarks. She sees the politics behind the scenes, and she sees that the important conversations happen away from the shared table.

At the first off-site, Kathryn tells the team plainly: we have more experienced executives, more money and better technology than our competitors, and we are behind two of them. So the problem may not be resources.

Everyone in a department has a strong résumé, yet for months they cannot launch a joint project. Each of them is good alone, and together they barely talk.

As Lencioni sees it, strong people do not make a team on their own. Sometimes the missing resource is the ability to work together, and it never shows up in a report.

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About the author

Patrick Lencioni is an American management consultant and business writer, and the founder of the consulting firm The Table Group. He has written several business fables, among them Death by Meeting.

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Absence of trust: In Lencioni's model, the base of the pyramid: people are not willing to show each other their weaknesses and mistakes. The author's term, not a scientific category.
  • Artificial harmony: An image from the book: outward calm on a team that hides not agreement but an unwillingness to argue openly.
  • Productive conflict: In the author's model, an open argument about ideas and decisions, not about personalities.
  • Avoidance of accountability: The fourth dysfunction: team members do not hold each other to account for carrying out shared decisions.
  • First team: Lencioni's idea that for a leader, the most important team may be the team of fellow leaders, not their own department. The author's advice, not a universal rule.

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