The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The fable is thin. The model has lasted twenty years, which tells you something.

The pyramid — absence of trust at the base, then fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results at the top — is valuable less as a description than as a diagnostic sequence. Its real use is telling you where to intervene. Teams come to us convinced their problem is accountability: people agree things and nothing happens. Almost always the actual failure is two floors down. Nobody is committing, because nobody is genuinely arguing, because it is not safe to disagree with the person running the meeting. Fix accountability at the accountability layer and you will get compliance and no change.

The limits are worth naming. This is a model of an intact leadership team of seven or eight people who sit in a room together. It does not survive being cascaded through an organisation as a framework, and I have watched several attempts. Once it becomes a programme with a workbook it stops doing the one thing it is good at, which is giving a specific group of people a shared language for what is going wrong between them.

Use it with a real team, in a room, probably once. Then throw the workbook away and do the work it pointed at.