When it comes to creating a healthy organisation, leadership teams must work incredibly well together, and in nearly all cases, they don’t. Instead, they each carve out a path to their vision of the organisation in isolation, and combat different departments into seeing things their way.
Business author Patrick Lencioni, says the way great organisations succeed is to overcome the five common dysfunctions of a team, illustrated beautifully in his book, which I thought I’d paraphrase here for those that have never heard of it.
1. Lack of trust
The first dysfunction of a team is the absence of trust. Without trust you simply can’t get anything done. To really introduce trust, everyone must feel safe enough to be vulnerable. This is never easy, but in leadership roles, it requires real work and courage. Can you admit to areas of the business you don’t understand very well, even though you might look silly bringing them up? Can you own up to a mistake you’ve made? Do you really put in the effort required to get something done? Most people in leadership roles have their guards up, but only when we’re truely vulnerable do we overcome the most basic step in becoming a world class team — trust.
Even within the Navy Seals, they will select for trust over performance. This means when it comes down to it, one of the highest performing team units on earth will actually sacrifice elements of performance if they have a candidate they can trust more. Because when your life is on the line, trust is critical.
In practice, what happens in most teams is we pretend to be invulnerable, and this is the real barrier holding us back. We think by being strong, by showing no signs of weakness, that moves us forward, but the truth is the opposite. Ask yourself if you really feel you trust your team, and if they trust you.
Without trust, we simply cannot overcome the next dysfunction.
2. A fear of conflict
Conflict is not bad, in-fact it’s very necessary in teams who want to perform well together and move organisations in the right direction. What happens when we can’t argue something out is we create the worst situation possible — an environment of artificial harmony.
When you have leaders pretending to be nice to one another, but behind the scenes there is constant undermining and back talking, it is the manifestation that your leadership team simply can’t have an honest conversation with one another. I’ve talked at length about radical candor here before, but if your leaders are afraid to go toe-to-toe over an important issue, behaviour will enter an awful place.
Ask yourself, do your leadership teams actively hash out problems, or do they play a political game of trying to influence from the edges. If so, you might have a fear of conflict on your hands, which needs to be addressed.
This is why we need trust first. When we have trust, we can have really passionate conversations, trying to flesh out the truth about something. Great teams actively seek out conflict so they can make the best decisions possible.
3. Lack of commitments
When teams don’t have real honest conflict, they often don’t commit to the decisions they make together. They miss deadlines - and nobody seems to think its a big deal. There is always something to blame it on. They sit in a passive state, creating a state of ambiguity.
What is the marketing team committing to delivering this week? Oh, it’s hard to know. They don’t really have commitments.
Imagine if someone feels they haven’t really weighed into a decision about how the marketing department should work, but deep down they have a LOT to say about it. Maybe they’ve even been a marketing executive in a previous life and know deeply how to run marketing teams. If they don’t weigh in because they are afraid of the conflict that conversation might bring, because they don’t trust the team to be vulnerable, then any commitment they make will be half-hearted. Only when everyone really thrashes something out, can they buy into a decision 100%. That’s why teams who don’t commit to things 100% will always struggle.
Great teams really force clarity on particular commitments. If you find it difficult to set commitments, one method is to use a goal setting framework called OKRs, which is easy enough to wrap your head around.
4. Avoidance of Accountability
The fourth dysfunction of a team is by far the most common. When people don’t make real commitments to things, they will avoid holding each other accountable about performance, behaviour and outcomes. What this ends up with is a team that accepts low standards by default.
Great teams have the wisdom and the courage to confront difficult topics like a team not delivering against objectives, but if everyone is reluctant to bring it up, something is going wrong. Which brings us to the last and pointy end of the pyramid.
5. Inattention to results
If we’re going to focus on results, then we really have to do a lot of work to get there. We have to trust everyone on the team, we have to be brave enough to have conflict and chime in on important issues. We then have to really commit 100% to the path we decide is best moving forward, and hold people accountable to those results.
And that gets us to achieve true, collective results.
