How to Overcome Dysfunction in Your Team
How to Overcome Dysfunction in Your Team
What to look out for and what to do when things just aren’t working
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
I frequently come back to a phrase a former CEO and Founder I reported to used to say when he wanted to rally the team around a problem that was solvable but was proving intractable:
“Running 100m in under 10 seconds is hard, but simple.”
While he wasn’t talking to a group of elite sprinters, his point was taken.
This pithy phrase always seemed to help unlock the team in two very powerful ways. It first reminded us that what we were tackling should be hard but that the resolution should be relatively simple. In other words, the more complicated the solution started to look, the further off the answers were likely to be.
This is how I think about managing teams. It’s hard but simple.
The reality is that great teamwork remains a frustratingly elusive thing in many companies for a wide array of reasons, some of which we have a degree of control over and others where we have very little.
When it comes to focusing on the things we can control, one of the best (and seminal) studies on this topic was by Patrick Lencioni, a prominent author of books on business management, who wrote the best-selling book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.
If you get a chance, it’s well worth a read but I’ve pulled the main themes below that I come back to regularly with teams and share context that I hope will help you with your teams.
His primary conclusion is that “organizations fail to achieve teamwork because they unknowingly fall prey to five natural but dangerous pitfalls”. Critically, he adds that these are not independent issues, but should be looked at as an interrelated series of issues that need to be addressed collectively and comprehensively.
The 5 Dysfunctions of Team
They are described as follows in order of least to most problematic:
Absence of Trust
The most foundational part of any team is trust, and to build trust you need to be prepared to be vulnerable. When teams don’t feel comfortable talking about wins and losses or strengths and weaknesses, it’s near impossible to build any form of trust.
Fear of Conflict
Without a foundation of trust, you’ve now set the scene for the next dysfunction: fear of conflict. When you have a fear of conflict, you don’t challenge or debate issues rigorously enough and almost everything important is left unsaid.
In these situations, teams are prioritising a sort of “artificial harmony” rather than saying what needs to be said.
Lack of Commitment
When people don’t feel heard they’ll never really buy into a plan. This is why conflict is important - people need to be heard and to debate - and in the absence of this, you create a very weak bond between the team and their commitments.
Importantly, this is not about consensus. However, it is about getting everyone’s input and acknowledging their contributions whether you take their advice or not.
Avoidance of Accountability
One of the most critical - and healthy - signs of a high-performing team is a team that is comfortable holding itself accountable to each member.
While simple, it’s actually quite hard. We naturally like to avoid conflict so when you see a peer do something that doesn’t sit well with you - such as miss a deadline or get back to a customer slowly - it’s not in our nature to be immediately comfortable addressing it.
What makes holding your peers accountable even harder? A lack of commitment. If you haven’t bought into a plan in the first place you’re going to be even less likely to hold someone accountable for delivering on it.
As you can see, each of these dysfunctions builds and fosters further dysfunction.
Inattention to Results
This is what Lencioni considers to be the “ultimate dysfunction”.
What he describes is the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition at the expense of the results of the team. This is when you’re no longer operating as a true “team” but rather a collection of individuals focused on their own careers, promotions, and accolades.
This is made possible when there’s no accountability and an “everyone for themselves” culture begins to develop and thrive.
How to Pinpoint Dysfunction
While the descriptions above may well resonate with you, it can often be difficult to pinpoint some of the challenges by working “top-down” from these definitions.
To help provide more tactical guidance, Lencioni also shares tactical examples of how these dysfunctions often surface “bottoms-up”:
In other words, if you think your team is artificially harmonious then there’s a good chance this is being driven by a fear of conflict. If the team is comfortable with low standards, then it could be driven by avoidance of accountability.
The High-Functioning Team Model
The natural question that comes from all of this is that if this is what a “dysfunctional” team looks like, what does a high-functioning team look like?
The good news is we’ve already got a clear model to work from:
They trust one another
They debate, challenge, and disagree.
They commit to decisions.
They hold one another accountable for their commitments.
They focus on collective results.
It sounds simple because it is. However, just like the sprinter running 100m the difference between the theory and the practice is where the difficult work needs to take place.
If you’re struggling to align your team to a model like this the first step is practice. You are rarely going to change a team overnight - for instance, trust in particular takes a long time to build - so the first step once you’ve pinpointed the gaps is to start to get your team to make progress in these areas by giving them the opportunities to build the right habits.
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