--- title: "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team.html" published: "2009-12-08T18:56:15+00:00" updated: "2011-04-04T22:39:25.523000+00:00" tags: ["Anti Patterns", "Learning Phase", "people patterns"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "A summary of Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team, from absence of trust and fear of conflict to inattention to results, a must-read for team leaders." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # The Five Dysfunctions of a Team As part of my reading, one book i came across was [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787960756?ie=UTF8&tag=iserializable-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0787960756) [![The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (J-B Lencioni Series)](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/amazon-five-dysfunctions.jpg)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0787960756?ie=UTF8&tag=iserializable-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0787960756) it’s a great book and i recommend that every team leader, at any level, read this. it connects very well to many other things I’ve seen and learned in the wild, but manages to tell and explain things at a very simple and yet real world level that i think most would be able to relate to, even if they have no leadership experience. ### what are the five dysfunctions? ### 1) Absence of Trust you can detect this easily if you have meetings where no one disagrees with each other, but everyone probably disagree or don’t care what others are saying. also, meetings are very political in nature. As a team you need to be able to trust each other, so that you can expose weakness in a “safe” manner without fear. this allows raising real issues that need to be taken care of. Also, lack of trust leads to the second dysfunction: ### 2) Fear of conflict if you don’t trust each other, then you won’t want to confront any of your team mates in real world productive dialog about things that are hurting the team and company. without conflict people also won’t air their real opinions about things going on, which leads to the third dysfunction: ### 3) Lack of commitment many times, people will not commit to any decision made by the team if they feel they had not been heard. most people are ok with at least saying what they want to say and they they are able to commit even to a group decision they were against. as long as they were heard. without that, they will not feel committed to decisions. fear of conflict and commitment also leads to: ### 4) Avoidance of accountability if people can’t openly confront each other about the real issues without fearing hurting each other, then people may not feel accountable for their (lack of) actions for the team and company. Sometimes the leader takes on the role of the “accountability confronter” but this should really be on all the team. otherwise people can sit quietly on issues they don’t like and quietly expect the leader to do all the hard lifting of confrontation, but a trusting team should be able to openly and honestly confront each other on business issues. all these lead to: ### 5) Inattention to results in this state, especially with lack of accountability, team members put individual needs above the team’s needs. if as a team we cannot deliver results – specific goals the team sets itself on a weekly, monthly  or yearly basis, – then what _are_ we doing? ## Read next - [My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do?](https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.html): How a team leader can teach a team the language of commitment, spotting words like I'll try, setting end dates and flagging slips before deadlines pass. - [Dev Anti Pattern: Unworkable Machine](https://www.5whys.com/articles/dev-anti-pattern-unworkable-machine.html): The developer whose machine is always broken: common phrases, causes such as boredom or bug recreation, and fixes like using a virtual machine. - [Creating Team Trust](https://www.5whys.com/articles/creating-team-trust.html): Johanna Rothman explains how a team lead builds team trust, starting with yourself: deliver what you promise, stay consistent, and negotiate. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/