Create teams that avoids the five dysfunctions

Dear reader,

When I was twenty years old I was still quite naive when it comes to leadership. Then I did my military service as reconnaissance squad leader. Before the recruits started, the squad leaders were trained in leadership. I learnt both the theory around FIRO and about formal/informal leadership. I also had the “pleasure” to practice this leadership training the following 9 months with the recruits that joined my squad. For example we had survival training where we all were pushed to our limits with no food or sleep. This changed me as a person and I discovered many new things about myself and about other people. So why I am writing about this? Because this was probably my biggest paradigm shift in life when it came to understand interpersonal communication or actually even see that it existed. In this post I am going to explain how to generate a paradigm shift for the people in your group to be able to avoid the five dysfunctions and to be able to create a very effective team that everyone enjoys working in.
Below I will explain hands-on how I use the theory from Patrick Lencioni´s book: “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and how to avoid them as much as possible.


Just to repeat from the book these are the Five Dysfunctions:

• Absence of Trust,
• Fear of Conflict
• Lack of Commitment
• Avoidance of Accountability, and
• Inattention to Results.

1: To be able to feel “real” trust you need to know the people you work with a bit more than just from work. Therefore start of with a two day kick-off for the team (usually people know each other from work but not so much outside work, hence the social part of the kick off is very important). The first day, use a normal kick-off setup with a lot of different exercises. For example; people should tell everybody about themselves (both work related and private things), as well as some team building activities in the afternoon and evening.

On the second day focus on group psychology, for example the theory from 1958 created by Will Schutz during the Korea war: Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO). (Read more about FIRO here). Also explain and talk about the theory around the five dysfunctions. Let the group do group exercises about the two subjects. This will give the team the fundamentals to avoid the dysfunctions, because they will have a common language to start understanding the main issues (i.e. you will get the group communicating with each other about these things). But do not forget that FIRO also tells you that there is a lot of work to get to the “openness phase”. Therefore you can not rush it, but you can give the team the tools to get there (which is a giant step to take and a great step for the team if they can get there, many teams never do) and most of the time you will help the team to get there even quicker than normal.

2: After the kick-off give them each a copy of the book (no I am not sponsored by Patrick Lencioni :-). Also in some cases you have people in the group that might not want to take part in this, some developers might not want to speak in bigger groups or share with the team. Therefore I also recommend you to give everyone a copy of the book “The 7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R. Covey. This might/ or will get these few people onboard as well since they might need a bigger paradigm shift to be able to be part of this change. Nonetheless your team will learn a lot form this book.

3: Keep on talking about these issues and talk about how important it is to have a good communication in the group. Since this might be a big change for some people, you need to repeat the message as often you can without sounding like their mother :-). In the long run you will see results and get team members that will enjoy working in your team/group, hence delivering more and producing better results.

4: Use processes and methods that support this way of working. For example “Scrum” that among other things increase communication with daily meetings and/or XP that creates interaction and understanding between team members.

Sounds simple? No it is not, it requires that your leadership is more a servant type of leadership and that you yourself lead by example. I believe that servant leadership will give you better results in the long run, however the world is not black and white, therefore you also have to be able to use other leadership styles if necessary (more on the servant leadership style in another blog post later).

Yet another long post, so I will save the: “be flexible on the product scope. Not time and quality” for a coming post.

Thank you for reading and please give some feedback!

Best regards
Anders