Talking about teams – Patrick Lencioni
Team Building. Anyone who has worked in corporate life will, at some stage, have been on a Team Building Exercise. Well meaning, sometimes fun, often teeth grindingly awkward and mostly useless. Yet most of us know that a great team with everyone pulling in the same direction can do amazing things.
Much has been written about lessons from successful sports teams, for example how Dave Brailsford perfected the art of “marginal gains” to turn Team Sky and Team GB Cycling into serial winners. However, while there are parallels, it can be difficult to apply the lessons when building a great technology team. The challenges of synchronising developers, designers, architects, QAs, business analysts, system administrators, DBAs etc. to create new digital products seem rather different than getting a bunch of pro cyclists to win the Tour de France.
Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions Of A Team provides a simple but deceptively powerful framework for diagnosing – and fixing – teams in a business context. He deals in turn with trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and attention to results. The book is written as a management parable telling the story of a new CEO who is starting to work with her new team. Rather at odds with some of Sinek and Bock’s ideas, in this case the wisdom comes from the top as she introduces each of the dysfunctions to her new charges and we learn how she overcomes them. It is somewhat contrived, but Lencioni’s storytelling approach makes for a very readable – and business applicable – book.
Lencioni provides a common language for team members to use with each other in order to get underneath the things stopping them working effectively together. I have found concepts such as vulnerability based trust (when you are prepared to disclose things that someone could use against you, but you trust them not to) or disagree and commit (particularly tough for the team leader!) to be really helpful when working with dysfunctional teams.
Lencioni includes plenty of research based insights. One that resonated with a team that I recently used the model with is the Fundamental Attribution Error. This is the tendency to falsely attribute the negative behaviours of others to their character (an internal attribution), while attributing one’s own negative behaviours to environmental factors (an external attribution). In other words, when someone else makes a mistake they are lazy, stupid etc., but when I make a mistake I was over-worked or was given the wrong information etc. It goes the other way too. So if someone else is successful they got all the breaks, or were in the right place at the right time, but if I am successful it’s because I was shrewd, skilful, smart etc. Be honest we all do it don’t we? The discussion we had on that alone did more to bring us closer than anything we’d tried previously.