The five dysfunctions
As part of my MA in User Experience Design, I co-designed an Augmented Reality (AR) experience platform prototype.
This blog post is part of the reflective piece I wrote to accompany it.
During my undergraduate degree, I worked on quite a few group projects and found them very stressful.
I can recall times when I:
Found it difficult to trust my fellow team members
Handled conflict poorly either through being too harsh or avoiding it altogether
Felt like I was the only person committed to completing the project
Given those past experiences and my feelings of regret remembering them over a decade later, it’s no surprise that Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of teams (2002) struck a chord with me when I read the learning content for this week.
These dysfunctions are behaviours that Lencioni has identified in teams that are not working well together and he describes them as a hierarchy (Lencioni 2002), as shown in figure 1. The memories I have of team work during my undergraduate degree correspond with three of the five dysfunctions. At the time, I knew the groups I was a member of weren’t great but I didn’t understand why. I also lacked the professional and emotional maturity, and confidence, to resolve these issues with my fellow team members through open and honest conversations.
Instead, I muddled through, took on more work than I could manage, complained about my team members to others, lamented about having to do group projects to anyone who would listen, and spent a lot of time worrying about how to resolve these issues. This is not behaviour I’m proud of at all. It didn’t help me, my team members, or my grades!
What do I need to do differently?
Reflecting on what I’ve learned from my undergraduate experiences and an awareness of these five dysfunctions will certainly go some way towards avoiding a repetition of past mistakes. What else?
Build trust
I think the best way to avoid an absence of trust is to proactively build it.
I’ve chosen to work with people who I have already started to develop friendships with. These are other students who started at the same time as me who I have “met” virtually through the previous module’s webinars and our cohort Discord channel. Through the conversations we’ve already had, I feel like I have spent time with them and am more comfortable being honest and making mistakes around them.
As the module continues, I plan to work on this further by:
Attending our group meetings
Being active in our group chats
Completing tasks assigned to me on time
I know there will be times when I can’t do these things so I’ll make sure I communicate with the rest of my team when this happens.
Embrace conflict
This is one of the techniques suggested by Lencioni and, to be honest, the idea of embracing conflict makes me feel uncomfortable. And I don’t think I am alone in that discomfort.
Lencioni (2002) recommends one of the ways to embrace conflict effectively is to understand your own and your team members’ levels of comfort with conflict.
According to my Myers-Briggs personality type (16Personalities 2022), I am sensitive which means I am “strongly emotional” and can feel “backed into a corner”. This does seem accurate. Most often, I feel so overwhelmed by a negative comment that I don’t know how to respond in the moment. I then feel frustrated for not ‘sticking up for myself’.
If I need to address conflict, my nervousness about the situation can cause me express issues in a way which is too blunt. This can come across as pointing blame and even though that isn’t my intention, I know that doesn’t change the negative impact this has on others.
The same site says I am conflict-averse so I “sometimes ignore and avoid conflict entirely”. For me, this seems to happen as a result of the issues I’ve described above.
As this module continues, I plan to improve on my ability to embrace conflict by:
Listening to my team members’ opinions, ideas and expertise
Being open and honest about any issues or potential issues
Trusting my instincts and speaking up about potential issues early on so that they can be addressed
Respect and trust that we are all working towards the same goal
Gain commitment
When a team is able to build trust and embrace conflict, gaining commitment becomes the next achievable goal (Lencioni 2002). What’s the best way to do this?
Making a clear distinction between commitment and consensus is one way. Not everyone needs to agree for the team to be able to move forward. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, famously uses this approach, calling it “disagree and commit” (Amazon Staff 2016). According to Bezos, this “will save a lot of time” (Amazon Staff 2016).
This approach sounds simple but I do wonder whether this is always applied equally. If one member of a team feels they are the always having to disagree and commit, how many times are they willing to sacrifice their own ideas and opinions before they begin finding it difficult to commit? And how committed are people to an idea they don’t agree with? Could it be used to shut down passionate debate in the same way that “let’s agree to disagree” sometimes is? Rather than encouraging team members up Lencioni’s hierarchy, could it move the team backwards?
I also wondered about the impact of cultural factors here too. For example, would this approach work so well in Sweden or any other Scandinavian country where collaboration and consensus are highly valued? In the past, I’ve worked on a few projects with Scandinavian clients and have found it frustrating when solutions seemingly need to be discussed with everyone in the company several times before a decision is reached. However, I also really admire the importance placed on allowing people to be heard and have their inputs considered. Disagree and commit would save time but what would be the cost?
As this module continues, I plan to support my team in gaining commitment by:
Making it clear that I am listening to and considering other people’s inputs
Disagreeing and commiting if needed (only after listening to others’ inputs)
Making sure everyone in the group is clear about what we are commiting to by clarifying understanding and actions
Mutual accountability
Accountability “refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team” (Lencioni 2002: 212). This is definitely not an easy task. If a member of my team isn’t pulling their weight, who am I to address that with them? I’m not their manager. Likewise, how might it affect me and everyone else if someone has to speak to me about something I’m doing that might hurt the team?
“In fact, team members who are particularly close to one another sometimes hesitate to hold one another accountable because they fear jeopardizing a valuable personal relationship. Ironically, this only causes the relationship to deteriorate as team members begin to resent one another for not living up to expectations and for allowing the standards of the group to drop.”
— Lencioni 2002: 212-3
So for our team members to maintain the positive relationships we have and value, acountability is essential. I think framing it in this way, will make it easier for the person holding the other to account and the one being held accountable.
As this module continues, I plan to create and support mutual accountability by:
Making it clear that I value feedback from my team members that helps me to improve and develop
Recognising that mutual accountability leads to better, long-term relationships with everyone in my team
Contributing to the team task board and meetings
Trying the Team Effectiveness Exercise (TEE) - more on this in another post
Focus on results
The opposite of this is “inattention to results” which “is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group” (Lencioni 2002: 216).
This is something I have experienced personally at work a few years ago. A company merger created new teams of people who had previously worked for competing organisations, with the expectation being that we were now to work and behave as one. However, without putting in the time and effort to build trust, embrace conflict, gain commitment and create mutual accountability, we were a very dysfunctional team. The lack of trust led to deliberate attempts to hide mistakes, pass blame and great efforts being made to cover people’s own backs. There was a false sense of harmony and the leaders who were known for being good at speaking out left the business to pursue other ventures. Not feeling in any position to change the organisational culture at the time, despite a few attempts, I resorted to caring only about what my friends and I could get from the situation. I was not focused on the organisation’s results. Again, this is not behaviour I am proud of.
So what can be done to avoid this situation? Firstly, working on the other four dysfunctions seems to help a great deal as this will put our team in a position where we are able to focus on the team results and successes.
As this module continues, I plan to focus on results by:
Making sure I am clear on what my tasks are and the results I am aiming to achieve
Avoiding distractions
Celebrating team successes and sharing responsibility for areas we can improve as a team
Thoughts
I’ve found the Five Dysfunctions of Teams to be a really useful tool for reflecting on my previous experiences of student group work and planning how to handle team work for my current project more successfully.
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AMAZON STAFF. 2016. ‘2016 Letter to Shareholders’. Available at: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders?tag=wwwinccom-20 [Accessed 6 July 2022].
LENCIONI, Patrick M. 2002. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Thank you for reading.
If you liked this, you might enjoy reading the full Untold Retold case study in my portfolio or exploring the blog posts below.
