The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable | Patrick M. Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable | Patrick M. Lencioni | The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

books:

The Five Dysfuncti...

	The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Patrick M. Lencioni Jossey-Bass, 2002 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 224 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

A Great Book to Improving Teamwork

If you are in search of a book on teamwork, then I highly recommend The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. I started out reading this book because of a class assignment and turned out really enjoying it. I found the book to be a very easy and interesting read that I could relate to. Patrick Lencioni wrote this book as a fictional story that illustrates the reality of teamwork and the issues teams' experience. In this book, Patrick explains the five dysfunctions of a team and also briefly explains how to overcome the dysfunctions. The suggestions to overcome the dysfunctions are brief, but he did write a book called Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team that goes explains them in more depth. The Five Dysfunctions explained through out this book are set up like a pyramid. They include: Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, Avoidance of Accountability and Inattention to Results.
I recently transferred departments at my place of employment and in just the past month and a half I have witnessed a department spiraling out of control. We are without a full-time supervisor and director and I could not pinpoint the exact problem until I read this book. Our team is experiencing every dysfunction that Lencioni explains in his book. I wish I could buy a copy if this book for each of my co-workers because I feel they would benefit just as much as I did from this book and I believe it would open up their eyes to what are department is experiencing and solve many of the issues.
I will be graduating in December with my degree in Health Administration and I already have more confidence that I will be a better team leader because of Lencioni's book. I will keep this book and use it as a tool to help teach my future co-workers about the dysfunctions and the importance of being a team player rather than an individual player out to better their own career and goals. I plan on reading more books written by Patrick Lencioni and highly recommend his work to anyone interested in learning more on teamwork and leadership.

for more information click here

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Great business training material that uses leadership interactions so the audience can walk through the dysfunctions of a team and the complexity of improvement.

Great Book in many ways

I saw Lencioni locally and received one of the books by attending. The Five Dysfunctions is the best of four but all are great. I'm using the principles at work and with my softball team. In a nutshell results depend on accountability depends on clarity depends on conflict depends on trust. I have always struggled to identify dysfunction. Understanding function causes the dysfunction to stand out clearly! Enjoy this wonderfully written fiction and the critical concepts it reveals! An easy read and difficult to put down.

for more information click here

Very readable.

When I bought this book, due to a friend's recommendation, I was not sure that this was the right book. His recommendation was right on. This book gives an excellent picture of how a team should operate and how 'poison' can ruin good teamwork.

Practical and applicable

The Five Dysfunctions is the product of long-term work on teams distilled into a few key bullet points and then expanded again into the fictional story of a team that fell into dysfunction and then recuperated.

The five issues, which are the real take-away from the book, are Absence of Trust (manifested as invulnerability), Fear of Conflict (manifested as artificial harmony), Lack of Commitment (manifested as ambiguity), Avoidance of Accountability (manifested as low standards), and Inattention to Results (manifested as a pursuit of status and ego) (p. 97). These five build upon each other like a pyramid, in that order.

The fictional account of a team discovering and discussing these issues takes up the first 185 pages. Lencioni then, in 40 pages, summarizes them all in the form of what is probably lecture notes, along with practical tips to what a leader and the team must do to address and fix the dysfunctions. For the time it takes, those 40 pages say the same if not more than the story, and are worth the read without the narrative. However, the narrative is of course more entertaining.

Pragmatically, Lencioni has tapped into the behavior patterns that really are the bane of every manager's existence. And while every manager can probably see them intuitively, most of us haven't taken the time to name them and articulate the issues and solutions. So for that, Lencioni has done what a lot of good leadership books do: opened our eyes to the obvious thing that was right in front of us all along. For that, it's a worthwhile read, but again, the shorter second section will suffice for reading the book.

James W. Miller is the author of God Scent

for more information click here