“If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competitor in any time”
Patrick Lencioni
The top reason startups fail is lack of market need. Running out of cash is the second one. But if you dig deeper, one of the reasons startups run out of cash or don’t find product market fit is ineffective teams.
Patrick Lencioni’s first book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, is a book that Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark, recommends to all of his portfolio CEOs. I’ve written about it previously on VC Cafe. In his second book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (originally published in 2002), Lencioni adopts the winning formula of sharing management/coaching advice in the form of a fable/story, which sucks you into the story and its cast of characters while delivering key principles, many borrowed from team sports.
The setting is of a generic enterprise tech company, DecisionTech, who despite having more funding, more seasoned executives and a better product, is lagging behind the competition. The company’s new CEO, Kathryn, was appointed by the Chairman despite her lack of tech industry experience because she is excellent in building effective teams. She decides that the company’s top priority is not revenue or market share, but to start working as a team.
After two weeks of just observing how the company operates and getting the flavour of the intense office politics, the CEO holds a management offsite, where she outlines the five dysfunctions of teams, each building on one another. The ‘price’ of the dysfunctions is stated on the right hand side of the triangle:
- Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group. This leads to minimal collaboration, fear of admitting mistakes, ‘every man for themselves’ culture.
- Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate. The CEO suggests that trust is the basis for creating healthy debate. If we agree on team goals, we’re going to have to ‘wrestle’ on resources, deadlines, etc, which cannot happen without debate.
- Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization. Given the team hasn’t bought in to team goals (because they avoid conflict and therefore don’t debate), it leads to an indifference to whatever happens outside of their own departments.
- Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers, superiors on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards.
- Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success. Lack of accountability on a team level brings the individuals in the team to put their own priorities (ego, recognition, career development etc.) ahead of the team/company’s results.
Critique
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is 20 years old but I found the story compelling and the model stands the test of time. That said, the book has also attracted critics like psychologists Gordon Curphy and Robert Hogan, authors of The Rocket Model: practical advice for building high performance teams, for being too simplistic, not based on research and for lacking empirical support to Lencioni’s advice.
For example, the first dysfunction on which everything else rests is the absence of trust, but suggesting managers should be vulnerable to one another can be a tough pill to swallow and might not lead to trust per-se.
Interestingly, in another book I recently read on the subject of relationships, ‘Connect: Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends and Colleagues‘, that came out in Feb 2022, and is based on the most popular ‘touchy feely’ course at Stanford GSB. The authors also claim that vulnerability is essential for building trust, but you have to ‘feel it out’.
Is your team dysfunctional?
No team is perfect, but to address dysfunctions within a team, you first need to know understand the health of the team. Startup CEOs would benefit from understanding the answers to these questions:
- Do team members openly and readily disclose their opinions?
- Are team meetings compelling and productive?
- Does the team come to decisions quickly and avoid getting bogged down by consensus?
- Do team members confront one another about their shortcomings?
- Do team members sacrifice their own interests for the good of the team?
If the answer to more than one of these questions is ‘no’, you have some work to do. You can take a more accurate assessment in https://www.tablegroup.com/product/dysfunctions/
Overall, the Five dysfunctions of a team is a good quick read, and a reminder of the importance of teamwork. If you’re a startup founder and you feel like your team members are pulling in different directions or not focused on a team effort, I highly recommend it.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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