BookNotes: Five Dysfunctions of a Team #1 (Introduction)

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Your team is full of talented people, so why does it feel like your weekly leadership
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meeting is a place where good ideas go to die?
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Today, we're going to find out, and the answer has almost nothing to do with talent.
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Welcome to the Manager Lab. I'm Greg Gillum, your host and CEO of Human Fusion.
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And this is the first episode of a seven-part series on one of the most practical
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leadership books ever written, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencion.
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If you've managed people for more than a week, you've seen this.
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A group of capable, well-paid, experienced people sit in a room together,
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and somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
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Decisions drag. Meetings are polite and pointless. People nod in the room and
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complain in the hallway.
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Deadlines slip, and nobody seems to know whose fault it is.
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Lencioni's big idea is simple and a little uncomfortable, to be frank.
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Teamwork isn't a talent problem or a strategy problem. It's a behavior problem.
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And because it's a behavioral problem, it's fixable.
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All right, let's look at how the book works. What makes this book different
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is that most of it isn't a lecture, it's a story. It's a business fable.
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A Silicon Valley tech company called Decision Tech has everything going for
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it. Great funding, strong product, an executive team stacked with impressive resumes.
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And yet the company is falling behind competitors with less money and less talent.
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So the board brings in a new CEO. We'll call her Catherine. She's older.
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She comes from manufacturing. And on paper, she looks like a strange fit for a tech startup.
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The executives are quite skeptical. Some are openly dismissive.
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Catherine quickly sees the real problem. It's not the product or the market.
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It's that her leadership team isn't actually a team.
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They're a collection of individuals protecting their own turf.
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So she takes them on a series of off-site retreats in Napa Valley and walks
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them, sometimes painfully, through what's broken.
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The story works because you'll recognize these people.
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There's the brilliant but cutting marketing head, the engineer who checks out
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of every meeting, the salesperson who promises everything and commits to nothing.
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You'll probably see yourself in at least one of them. I certainly did.
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So here's the model in one minute. After the story, Lencioni lays out his model.
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Picture a pyramid with five different layers. Each dysfunction sits on top of the one beneath it.
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So if you skip a lower level, the levels above it can't hold.
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So from the bottom up, absence of trust. That's number one.
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Team members won't be vulnerable with each other. They hide weaknesses and mistakes.
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Layer two, fear of conflict. Without trust, people won't argue openly about ideas.
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You get what Lencioni calls artificial harmony.
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Number three, lack of commitment. If people never got to weigh in honestly,
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they don't really buy into decisions. They just go along.
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Number four, avoidance of accountability. If people never truly committed,
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they won't call each other out when someone drops the ball.
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And fifth, that all leads to inattention to results.
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When no one holds anyone accountable, people drift toward their own priorities,
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their department, their ego, their career, instead of the team's results.
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Now, flip it around and you get the picture of a healthy team.
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Members trust one another. They engage in honest, unfiltered debate about ideas.
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That leads to a commitment to decisions even when they initially disagreed,
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and they hold each other highly accountable.
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And fifth, they focus on collective results.
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Now, why does this matter for you as a manager? And this is what I love about this model.
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It gives you a diagnosis, not just a feeling. Instead of saying,
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my team isn't just clicking, you can say, which layer is broken?
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And often the answer is lower down that pyramid than you actually think it is.
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You might believe your problem is accountability. People aren't delivering.
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But when you dig in, you discover that people never really committed to the plan.
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And they really never committed to the plan because they never felt safe enough
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to argue about it. And that's a trust problem.
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One more thing before we wrap. Lencioni is clear that none of this is complicated. It's just hard.
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It requires discipline and a leader willing to go first, to model the behavior,
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and to stay uncomfortable longer than it feels natural.
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Here's some key takeaways for managers. Number one, treat teamwork as a behavior,
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not a personality trait.
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Behaviors can be named. They can be coached and measured.
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Start describing your team's problems in terms of what people do, not who they are.
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Number two, diagnose from the bottom up. When something goes wrong,
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ask which of the five layers is weakest and then fix the lowest broken layer first.
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Three, identify your quote first team. If you lead other managers,
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your first loyalty should be to your peer leadership team, not just the people who report to you.
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We'll come back to this in episode six.
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Get the book in your team's hands. Before the next episode, read the fable,
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or at least the first section, and ask your team which character they see in themselves.
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And then fifth, run a quick gut check. On a scale of one to five,
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rate your team on each layer.
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Start with trust, then go to conflict, commitment, accountability, then results.
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Write it down. We'll revisited at the end of the series.
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In the next episode, we start at the foundation of the pyramid,
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trust. And I'll warn you now, it's not the kind of trust you think.
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It's not about whether you trust someone to hit a deadline. It's something much
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more personal and much more powerful.
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I'm Greg Gillum, CEO of Human Fusion. Thanks for listening to The Manager Lab.
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And until next time we meet here in the lab, do good work.