Five Dysfunctions of a team - bounswe/bounswe2016group12 GitHub Wiki

The holy pyramid of a dysfunctional team

Absence Of Trust

Among the five dysfunctions of a team, Patrick Lencioni cares about the "Absence of Trust" the most. In his opinion, it is very important for the members of team to trust each other. Before I watched the video, this statement seemed trivial. I would, of course, be more comfortable around the people I know to be good team member. However, Lencioni says he is not talking about the predictive trust (not the kind of trust you have when you know each other for a long time - "he would surely perform that duty" kind), that he is talking about the vulnerability based trust.

In a team, members should not forget that they are human beings and should not fear to express their feelings. They should be able to say

"I am sorry"

"I apologize"

"I need your help"

"You are very good at this, I admire you!"

etc, but without faking it. They should trust each other enough to say "yes" sometimes - they should not always insist on what they think is always correct so that the other members can express their opinions instead of thinking "why bother?". If even one person in the team is not "vulnerable" then it hurts the dynamics of the team.

Fear of Conflict

Teams require productive conflict in order to grow. Teams that trust one another are not afraid to engage in passionate dialogue around issues and decisions that are key to the organization's success. Teams that demonstrate this sort of teamwork typically discuss and resolve issues more quickly and completely than others, and they emerge from heated debates with no residual feelings or collateral damage, but with an eagerness and readiness to take on the next important issue. The ability to recognize conflict, understand the nature of conflict, and to be able to bring swift and just resolution to conflict will make team more succesfull and productive.

Lack of Commitment

This dysfunction describes the situation that team members do not explain their opinions clearly during meetings, and therefore the decisions are become hard to commit. This can be solved with healthy debates which all team members contributes.

Avoidance of Accountability

Avoidance of accountability emerges when lack of commitment exists. When teams do not commit, you cannot have accountability if they have not clearly bought into the plan. Peer accountability is a key for a high performance for a team. Since team members avoid of accounting each other, it leads to missing deadlines and key deliverables. Accountability of team members clarifies team's standards, objectives and which objectives are done by whom. Also accountability provides a performance improvement via peer pressure. Identifying and solving potential problems via asking without hestitation is also an advantage of accountability in a team. Avoidance of accountability may be solved with team rewards and making regular discussion of performance. Accountability should be honest and frequent beacuse of clarification of objects, purpose in a team. Otherwise, aggressive manner may result in emergence of new other problems such as not diplaying entire performance or frustration in the team.

Inattention to Results

References

See Also