The Top Five Team Dysfunctions That I Have Observed Over the Years

Have you read The Five Dysfunctions Of a Team by Patrick Lencioni?

It did not resonate with me. A member of our team is an organizational psychologist, and her comment about the book was,

“Organizational psychologists / leadership researchers, Gordon Curphy and Robert Hogan, discuss Lencioni’s model in their book The Rocket Model: Practical Advice for Building High Performing Teams. While noting [Lencioni’s] model’s advantages, they also note [some concerns].”

She then quoted Curphy and Hogan:

“Lencioni's book is explicitly a work of fiction; it is not based on research and its practical recommendations lack empirical support. For example, when the trust level among team members is low, Lencioni recommends that leaders put them through a series of personal disclosures. However, there is little likelihood that these activities can build trust in dysfunctional work teams. According to Katzenbach and Smith, the only effective method for teams to build trust and cohesion is to do real work. Similar problems afflict the four other dysfunctions.”

Hmmm.

Lencioni’s top five are:

1. Absence of trust
2. Fear of conflict
3. Lack of commitment
4. Avoidance of accountability
5. Inattention to results

Yet in the many decades during which I have been on teams, with one exception the only times that trust was an issue have been when the team was self-organizing. In the majority of teams, trust was not an issue. Nor was lack of commitment. Nor was inattention to results or having a goal. In most cases, the persistent problems were, in no particular order:

1. People did not know what they did not know - particularly with regard to various technologies or methods.
2. Leadership was poor or non-existent.
3. Conflict: people disagreed, and could not reach a consensus quickly, or talk things through effectively.
4. Hidden agendas. (That was not a trust issue, because the self-serving agenda was hidden)
5. Lack of leadership beyond the team - between teams.

What have you observed? Is it similar to what I have seen, or to Lencioni’s list?

Number 1 in my list is insidious. Today it is popular to refer to it as the “Dunning-Kruger effect”. If you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you remedy that – because you don’t even know that there is a problem? And paradoxically, people lacking knowledge often think that they know all there is to know – that’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.

One solution to this dilemma in a team is that good leaders make sure that their teams have the skills they need, and they check with experts. And they bring in experts to fill gaps. Another solution is for the team lead to establish a culture in which people are expected to question themselves, and to continuously learn and seek out what they don’t know. Someone needs to set that expectation, or it will not happen.

Which brings us to the second one, regarding leadership. The Agile community advocates for “self organization” and “self management”, yet this flies in the face of entire fields of research in behavioral psychology and leadership theory. What groups of people need, when they are working on complex and innovative things, is transformational leadership. That is proven. Case closed. Read the book Accelerate, by Nicole Forsgren and others, to learn about their research on this.

And then there is conflict. Lencioni lists “fear of conflict” as a core dysfunction; but in my 45 years on teams, leading teams, helping teams, and observing teams, I have seen my share of conflict – not a fear of it. People tend to fear power, but not conflict. People often seek out conflict.

A fear of conflict is usually better interpreted as being conformist. Many organizations have a conformist culture. But that is not really a fear: it is that people want to be accepted, and follow what is expected of them, and if “how we do things” is to conform, then they will conform. That avoids conflict, but conforming is the real driver.

I think that we need to look at actual research to see what behavioral psychology tells us about how people behave in groups, rather than swallow unquestioningly what some author tells us because it is his opinion.

There are some links to some widely researched leadership models here: https://www.agile2academy.com/engineering-leadership