Building an effective team is tough… it would be a lot simpler if people weren’t so darn complicated! Patrick Lencioni provides some useful insight in to the causes of team dysfunction in his leadership fable The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team.
Rather than tell the reader the solution in a textbook manner, Lencioni frames his model for team performance within a short story. Here, we encounter a Silicon Valley organisation in the last throes of life. Previously a vibrant and growing organisation, they have fallen behind their competitors and the exec team are only that in name.
Enter Kathryn, newly appointed CEO and experienced leader, who sets about bringing the execs together in to a coherent team that return the organisation to its former power, and take it onward.
Over the course of a number of management retreats, Kathryn explains and addresses the five dysfunctions of teams, and works with her staff to eliminate them. Some of the team don’t like what they hear, and some get the sack because they just don’t fit, as Kathryn reintroduces the type of team spirit necessary to become winners and drive the business forward. It’s a simple read, yet I feel that the characters are all carefully designed to cover many of the personalities and reactions that you might encounter in your team.
Following the story, Lencioni returns to the model in textbook form, and offers advice and tools for assessing your team against the model, and methods for eliminating these dysfunctions from your teams.
I really enjoyed the style of the book; explaining the model in a story is a refreshing change and it allows the reader to reflect on where they have experienced those problems in their work life.
So that when the book turns to the model in detail, the reader has already seen an application of the tools and techniques in practice, and so digesting the concept is easy.
Now some might say that this approach (story then model) is an easy way to pad out a single idea in to a full book. And maybe they are right… I haven’t read Lencioni’s other books, though I may well do now. However if you are looking for a light read that may get you thinking about how you can improve performance of your team, then this may well be a good place for you to start.
