"The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" - a leadership fable by Patrick Lencioni... my thoughts...

Book cover image source & credit: Wikipedia

One of the most profound things I've ever heard in life, thanks to a Program Manager, who once told me over breakfast: "Always treat an issue as an issue and not as a person." This point comes out pretty strongly in Patrick Lencioni's book, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A leadership fable".

The author, through his protagonist, Kathryn Peterson, CEO at DecisionTech, Inc., demonstrates the five primary dysfunctions in a team -

Absence of trust
Fear of conflict
Lack of commitment
Avoidance of accountability
Inattention to Results

- and he does so, effectively, in the form of a story.

Overall, it is an easy read and the writer employs the story-telling method very well to talk about how ineffective teams can mar an organization, fatally. He pronounces it's obstacles and what may be done to overcome them to form a cohesive unit together. He has clarity in thought when it comes to listing down his model in the form of a pyramid.

I'm an avid movie lover and not surprisingly, the part that I enjoyed the most in this work is the one where the author nicely likens meetings with movies. In fact, he suggests why meetings are even better, convincingly! For instance, meetings are interactive, whereas movies are not. (Board) meetings, say, are just about the same length as an English film - between 90 and 120 minutes. He even goes on to write about how movies don't require us to respond or act in a certain way, after watching them - well, most of them anyway - but meetings do... in the sense that they impact us and we are required to follow up on action items and implement solutions and what not; and goes on to explain why they are stereotyped as "boring", quite interestingly!

Lencioni has put together the effectiveness of team building, and calls a spade a spade. He does mention in more than one place that building a working team is pretty simple but not easy. And that is relatable.

He introduces us to more than believable characters, like Mikey - not the easiest person to get along with, and an all-too-familiar member of most teams, and Martin, the intellectual CTO, who has his own eccentricities. I particularly thought that the English accent hunch of Martin made his character even more emphatic.

I learnt a new idiom - "on the carpet" - and a phrase - "in one fell swoop". Not to mention, words like 'den mother', 'exacerbated', 'indictment' and 'Sarcratic' (a sarcastic version of the Socrates method).

A book like this can easily get preachy and it's good that he chose to stick with the narrative method to deliver the message loud and clear. Lencioni does well in not getting into lecture mode, which can get especially tricky with such topics.

It is quite an effective read for any small or big organization... and stuff that we probably already know but fail to observe or simply ignore.

My verdict: 3.5 out of 5, mainly for the subject and its importance.