The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Introduction

Overview

Dysfunction 1

Absence of Trust

Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team. Without it, teamwork is all but impossible.

In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.

Members of teams with an absence of trust	Members of trusting teams
Conceal their weaknesses and mistakes from one another	Admit weaknesses and mistakes
Hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback	Ask for help
Hesitate to offer help outside their own areas of responsibility	Accept questions and input about their areas of responsibility
Jump to conclusions about the intentions and aptitudes of others without attempting to clarify them	Give one another the benefit of the doubt before arriving at a negative conclusion
Fail to recognize and tap into one another’s skills and experiences	Take risks in offering feedback and assistance
Waste time and energy managing their behaviors for effect	Appreciate and tap into one another’s skills and experiences
Hold grudges	Focus time and energy on important issues, not politics
Dread meetings and find reasons to avoid spending time together	Offer and accept apologies without hesitation
	Look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group

Suggestions for Overcoming Dysfunction 1:

Personal Histories Exercise

This low-risk exercise requires nothing more than going around the table during a meeting and having team members answer a short list of questions about themselves. Questions need not be overly sensitive in nature and might include the following: number of siblings, hometown, unique challenges of childhood, favorite hobbies, first job, and worst job.

Team Effectiveness Exercise

It requires team members to identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team, as well as the one area that they must either improve upon or eliminate for the good of the team. All members then report their responses, focusing on one person at a time, usually beginning with the team leader.

Personality and Behavioral Preference Profiles

The popular profiling tool is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Other option is Everything DiSc.

Many of these tools do require the participation of a licensed consultant, which is important to avoid the misuse of their powerful implications and applications.

360-Degree Feedback

They are riskier than any of the tools or exercises described so far because they call for peers to make specific judgments and provide one another with constructive criticism.

The key to making a 360-degree program work, in my opinion, is divorcing it entirely from compensation and formal performance evaluation. Rather, it should be used as a developmental tool, one that allows employees to identify strengths and weaknesses without any repercussions. By being even slightly connected to formal performance evaluation or compensation, 360-degree programs can take on dangerous political undertones.

The Role of the Leader

The most important action that a leader must take to encourage the building of trust on a team is to demonstrate vulnerability first. This requires that a leader risk losing face in front of the team so that subordinates will take the same risk themselves.

Connection to Dysfunction 2

By building trust, a team makes conflict possible because team members do not hesitate to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate, knowing that they will not be punished for saying something that might otherwise be interpreted as destructive or

Dysfunction 2

Fear of Conflict

Focus on ideological conflict (concepts and ideas) and not interpersonal politics (personality-focused, mean spirited attacks).

Teams that engage in productive conflict know that the only purpose is to produce the best possible solution in the shorten period of time and emerge from heated debates with no residual feelings or collateral damage, but with an eagerness and readiness to take on the next important issue.

When team members do not openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier, and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.

Teams that fear conflict	Teams that engage in conflict
Have boring meetings	Have lively, interesting meetings
Create environments where back-channel politics and personal attacks thrive	Extract and exploit the ideas of all team members
Ignore controversial topics that are critical to team success	Solve real problems quickly
Fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team members	Minimize politics
Waste time and energy with posturing and interpersonal risk management	Put critical topics on the table for discussion

Suggestions for Overcoming Dysfunction 2

Mining

Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a “miner of conflict”— someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them. They must have the courage and confidence to call out sensitive issues and force team members to work through them.

Real-time Permission

In the process of mining for conflict, team members need to coach one another not to retreat from healthy debate. One simple but effective way to do this is to recognize when the people engaged in conflict are becoming uncomfortable with the level of discord, and then interrupt to remind them that what they are doing is necessary.  This drains tension from a productive, but difficult interchange, giving the participants the confidence to continue.

Other Tools

Another tool that specifically relates to conflict is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, commonly referred to as the TKI.

The Role of the Leader

It is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their people engage in conflict, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be.

A leader’s ability to personally model appropriate conflict behavior is essential.

Connection to Dysfunction 3

By engaging in productive conflict and tapping into team members’ perspectives and opinions, a team can confidently commit and buy into a decision knowing that they have benefited from everyone’s ideas.

Dysfunction 3

Lack of Commitment

In the context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision. They leave meetings confident that no one on the team is quietly harboring doubts about whether to support the actions agreed on.

The two greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty.

Consensus: Great teams understand the danger of seeking consensus, and find ways to achieve buy-in even when complete agreement is impossible. They understand that reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered. Great teams ensure that everyone’s ideas are genuinely considered, which then creates a willingness to rally around whatever decision is ultimately made by the group. And when that is not possible due to an impasse, the leader of the team is allowed to make the call.

Certainty: Great teams also pride themselves on being able to unite behind decisions and commit to clear courses of action even when there is little assurance about whether the decision is correct. A decision is better than no decision.

Regardless of whether it is caused by the need for consensus or certainty, it is important to understand that one of the greatest consequences for an executive team that does not commit to clear decisions is unresolvable discord deeper in the organization. More than any of the dysfunctions, this one creates dangerous ripple effects for subordinates. When an executive team fails to achieve buy-in from all team members, even if the disparities that exist seem relatively small, employees who report to those executives will inevitably clash when they try to interpret marching orders that are not clearly aligned with those of colleagues in other departments. Like a vortex, small gaps between executives high up in an organization become major discrepancies by the time they reach employees below.

A team that fails to commit	A team that commits
Creates ambiguity among the team about direction and priorities	Creates clarity around direction and priorities
Watches windows of opportunity close due to excessive analysis and unnecessary delay	Aligns the entire team around common objectives
Breeds lack of confidence and fear of failure	Develops an ability to learn from mistakes
Revisits discussions and decisions again and again	Takes advantage of opportunities before competitors do
Encourages second-guessing among team members	Moves forward without hesitation
	Changes direction without hesitation or guilt

Suggestions for Overcoming Dysfunction 3

Cascading Messaging

At the end of a staff-meeting or off-site, a team should explicitly review the key decisions made during the meeting, and agree upon what needs to be communicate to employees or other constituencies about those decisions.

What often happens during this exercise is that members of the team learn that they are not all on the same page about what has been agreed upon and that they need to clarify specific outcomes before putting them into action. Moreover, they become clear on which of the decisions should remain confidential, and which must be communicated quickly and comprehensively.

Deadlines

One of the best tools for ensuring commitment is the use of clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honoring those dates with discipline and rigidity.

Committing to deadlines for intermediate decisions and milestones is just as important as final deadlines, because it ensures that misalignment among team members is identified and addressed before the costs are too great.

Contingency and Worst-Case Scenario Analysis

By discussing contingency plans up front or, clarifying worst-case scenarios for a decision allows teams to reduce their fears by helping them realize that the costs of an incorrect decision are survival and far less damaging than they had imagined.

Low-Risk Exposure Therapy

When teams force themselves to make decisions after substantial discussion but little analysis or research, they usually come to realize that the quality of the decision they made was better than they had expected.  They learn that the decision would not have been much different had the team engaged in lengthy, time-consuming study.

The Role of the Leader

More than any other member of the team, the leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong. And the leader must be constantly pushing the group for closure around issues, as well as adherence to schedules that the team has set.

Connection to Dysfunction 4

In order for teammates to call each other on their behaviors and actions, they must have a clear sense of what is expected. Even the most ardent believers in accountability usually balk at having to hold someone accountable for something that was never bought into or made clear in the first place.

Dysfunction 4

Avoidance Of Accountability

Accountability refers to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.

The essence of this dysfunction is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations.  Team members who are particularly close to one another sometimes hesitate to hold one another accountable precisely because they fear jeopardizing a valuable personal relationship.

Members of great teams improve their relationships by holding one another accountable, thus demonstrating that they respect each other and have high expectations for one another’s performance.

The most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of performance on a team is peer pressure.

A team that avoids accountability	A team that holds one another accountable
Creates resentment among team members who have different standards of performance	Ensures that poor performers feel pressure to improve
Encourages mediocrity	Identifies potential problems quickly by questioning one another’s approaches without hesitation
Misses deadlines and key deliverables	Avoids excessive bureaucracy around performance management and corrective action
Places an undue burden on the team leader as the sole source of discipline	Establishes respect among team members who are held to the same high standards

Suggestions for Overcoming Dysfunction 4

Publication of Goals and Standards

A good way to make it easier for team members to hold one another accountable is to clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed.

Simple and Regular Progress Reviews

Team members should regularly communicate with one another, either verbally or in written form, about how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards. Relying on them to do so on their own, with no clear expectations or structure, is inviting the potential for the avoidance of accountability.

Team Rewards

By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability.

The Role of the Leader

One of the most difficult challenges for a leader who wants to instill accountability on a team is to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism.

Connection to Dysfunction 5

If teammates are not being held accountable for their contributions, they will be more likely to turn their attention to their own needs, and to the advancement of themselves or their departments

Dysfunction 5

Inattention To Results

The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group. An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance.

Members begin to focus on individual status over team status:

Team status. For members of some teams, merely being part of the group is enough to keep them satisfied (e.g. non-profit organization, political group)

Individual status. This refers to the familiar tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career prospects at the expense of their team.

A team that is not focused on results	A team that focuses on collective results
Stagnates/fails to grow	Retains achievement-oriented employees
Rarely defeats competitors	Minimizes individualistic behavior
Loses achievement-oriented employees	Enjoys success and suffers failure acutely
Encourages team members to focus on their own careers and individual goals	Benefits from individuals who subjugate their own goals/interests for the good of the team
Is easily distracted	Avoids distractions

Suggestions for Overcoming Dysfunction 5

Public Declaration of Results

Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results. Teams that say, “We’ll do our best,” are subtly, if not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.

Results-Based Rewards

An effective way to ensure that team members focus their attention on results is to tie their rewards, especially compensation, to the achievement of specific outcomes.

The Role of the Leader

Perhaps more than with any of the other dysfunctions, the leader must set the tone for a focus on results. If team members sense that the leader values anything other than results, they will take that as permission to do the same

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence

Example of how to run a management:

• Annual planning meeting and leadership development retreats (three days, off-site) Topics might include budget discussions, major strategic planning overview, leadership training, succession planning, and cascading messaging
• Quarterly staff meetings (two days, off-site) Topics might include major goal reviews, financial review, strategic discussions, employee performance discussions, key issue resolution, team development, and cascading messages
• Weekly staff meetings (two hours, on-site) Topics might include key activity review, goal progress review, sales review, customer review, tactical issue resolution, cascading messages
• Ad hoc topical meetings (two hours, on-site) Topics might include strategic issues that cannot be adequately discussed during weekly staff meetings

Team Assessment: https://brightspotcdn.byui.edu/aa/d5/42a21d6f4afeb29a2de5777a1b9e/five-dysfunctions-of-a-team-assessment.pdf