The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable | Patrick M. Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable | Patrick M. Lencioni | The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

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The Five Dysfuncti...

	The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Patrick M. Lencioni Jossey-Bass, 2002 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 218 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Insightful and Easy To Digest

I'm an organizational development consultant and I've used Lencioni's model as the basis for my course in team building in the United States, Italy and South Africa. I find that people all over the world relate to his insights, identify with the dysfunctions described in the book and have some "Ah Ha" moments regarding how to work together better.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Great business training material that uses leadership interactions so the audience can walk through the dysfunctions of a team and the complexity of improvement.

Great Book in many ways

I saw Lencioni locally and received one of the books by attending. The Five Dysfunctions is the best of four but all are great. I'm using the principles at work and with my softball team. In a nutshell results depend on accountability depends on clarity depends on conflict depends on trust. I have always struggled to identify dysfunction. Understanding function causes the dysfunction to stand out clearly! Enjoy this wonderfully written fiction and the critical concepts it reveals! An easy read and difficult to put down.

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Very readable.

When I bought this book, due to a friend's recommendation, I was not sure that this was the right book. His recommendation was right on. This book gives an excellent picture of how a team should operate and how 'poison' can ruin good teamwork.

Practical and applicable

The Five Dysfunctions is the product of long-term work on teams distilled into a few key bullet points and then expanded again into the fictional story of a team that fell into dysfunction and then recuperated.

The five issues, which are the real take-away from the book, are Absence of Trust (manifested as invulnerability), Fear of Conflict (manifested as artificial harmony), Lack of Commitment (manifested as ambiguity), Avoidance of Accountability (manifested as low standards), and Inattention to Results (manifested as a pursuit of status and ego) (p. 97). These five build upon each other like a pyramid, in that order.

The fictional account of a team discovering and discussing these issues takes up the first 185 pages. Lencioni then, in 40 pages, summarizes them all in the form of what is probably lecture notes, along with practical tips to what a leader and the team must do to address and fix the dysfunctions. For the time it takes, those 40 pages say the same if not more than the story, and are worth the read without the narrative. However, the narrative is of course more entertaining.

Pragmatically, Lencioni has tapped into the behavior patterns that really are the bane of every manager's existence. And while every manager can probably see them intuitively, most of us haven't taken the time to name them and articulate the issues and solutions. So for that, Lencioni has done what a lot of good leadership books do: opened our eyes to the obvious thing that was right in front of us all along. For that, it's a worthwhile read, but again, the shorter second section will suffice for reading the book.

James W. Miller is the author of God Scent

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