Commitment: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In this episode, Traci Barrett and Rob Harr talk about the third of Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions: commitment. Learn how vulnerability-based trust and healthy conflict are linked to commitment and understand how buy-in and clarity can lead to building commitment from your leadership team.
Check out the other episodes in this series:
Traci:
Hey, Rob! How's it going?
Rob:
Hey! I'm good, Traci. How are you?
Traci:
I'm good. So we're in the middle of this super fun series we've been doing about The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. And hopefully, everybody's following along with us, but I do want to do just a little recap of where we are to this point. Because we're going to be talking about something super important today that does not work without our first two building blocks.
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Traci:
So, the foundation of the pyramid of the five dysfunctions is trust. And we talked a lot in our first episode about how the vulnerability-based trust is just essential for any team and that that's basically members being comfortable and a safe environment to be open and even oppose one another's opinions or admit their failures, weaknesses or fears. And that's the basis of this entire model. And Patrick Lencioni spends probably the most time in his book talking about trust.
And then the next phase up the pyramid is healthy conflict, which is a fun one for us to talk about. That's our passionate, unfiltered debate around the important issues to a team. And that conflict can't be aggressive, it can't be artificial harmony. It really needs to be right there in the center, healthy. And no politics, no pride, no competition, the humble pursuit of truth.
So we've talked about those two things, which kind of leads us to where we are today, which is talking about commitment. Are you ready for this one?
Rob:
I think so. I'm committed to it.
Traci:
Perfect. That's where we need to be. We are committed to getting there today. This is a fun one. I mean, this is one that I think when people hear about it, it clicks, it makes sense. And it also is a light bulb goes off for people like, "Oh, this is a big problem for us." Or, "This is why we really don't get the ball down the field." And what Patrick Lensioni means by commitment in his book is a group of intelligent driven individuals on a team that buy into a decision, even if they don't naturally agree on that decision.
So the big, big emphasis is that we're not talking about consensus. We're not talking about, we're making sure there's a majority, every single person on the team agrees, and then we move forward. We're talking about buy-in on a team decision.
Rob:
Yeah. We're talking about that being together on something and pushing the ball down the field or the rugby kind of idea of scrum like the team is moving together, trying to achieve something. And this is a big case where you're only as strong as your weakest link.
Traci:
And I think that's kind of the trick that weakest link or the person that sort of half in and half out, members of the leadership team that say they're okay with this decision, but then outside the four walls or not. You start to see the breakdown of things happen. So this is a very... It's almost, there's a finesse, there's a trick to this one to achieving commitment. And once again, a lot of the ownership falls on the leader. The leader making sure that everybody has bought into what we're deciding upon.
But you can see how the first two, why we recapped at the beginning of this— the first two being trust and healthy conflict—you can see how if you don't have that trust. And if you haven't had that really healthy debate where everybody gets their opinion out on the table, and there has been a good amount of opinion, ideas, perspective given before we've moved to a decision how it just won't work.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think the other big thing that I think about commitment is it's not a decision. It's not a point in time thing. It's a series of continuous actions that show commitment and it's that renewal of it, right? It takes work to stay in a commitment place and to not let those cracks show up and not let that dissent creep in, especially when we talk about things and we're representing the actions and ideas and decisions that have been made by a team. It's almost so damaging when something happens or new information comes to light or whatever. And somebody says like, "Well, I'm just not sure." But they don't say it back to the group that made the decision. They say to somebody else. That erodes all kinds of stuff here.
Traci:
Right. And I like how you said. It's a renewing because it takes time for decisions to be executed.
Rob:
Yeah. Sometimes a lot of time, right?
Traci:
Sometimes a lot of time.
Rob:
It's so interesting. We were just having this conversation on our team the other day, and one of the things that somebody had brought up was like, "Hey, do we have a new goal for this year?" And I looked at him and I said, "We haven't achieved the goals from last year yet. Our goals don't have a yearly new cycle on them. We're going to keep chasing the things we set out to do at the beginning of 2020 until we get there." And it's going to take another 12 months at least. And it might take longer.
And I think about commitment and goals and saying all that stuff. It's so easy to think in how the government asks us to do tax planning, right. Oh, it's a new year. It's a new me. And it's like, okay, once you get to a certain stage in our business, you need commitment over time to achieve those things. Otherwise you'll be halfway through before you change focus again.
Traci:
Yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point. It's hard for this model to work—actually for the entire pyramid to work, but especially this—if you haven't committed previously to key principles for your team. If you haven't sat down and articulated together, your mission, your vision, your core values, your strategy, set those goals so the whole team knows where they're going, remind them of those goals if we haven't gotten there yet that we haven't given up on them, just like you're saying. It's like renewing that energy around those goals.
If you haven't set those key principles and also talked about what your behavioral commitments are to achieve those—good communication, good interpersonal behavior—if those things haven't been committed to upfront, it's really hard to achieve commitment on some of these maybe smaller issues or action items or these decisions you're wrestling with because people don't know where it fits in the big picture.
If the big picture is articulated, then you can keep bringing them back to that. So why do I need you to buy into this decision, even though I hear your opinion and I honor it, and I know, but what we need to do is this at this moment, because this ultimately is our vision and this is where we need to get by the end of the year, or this is the type of client we're going after. And these are our core values. And so this, isn't why we're going to take this client on. Whatever decision that it is that you're wrestling with. If you can tie it to the bigger picture of your team, then it will make sense to people why there might be some dissension or why you as a leader might decide to lead the team in a direction that even though you don't have a majority of everybody saying yes to where you're going.
Rob:
That's right. And you know, I also another big point in all of this is the criticality of the decisions that are being made and can decisions be something you can come back from. One of the things that we talk about a lot is this whole idea of okay this is what we think the best guess is to try next, right? This is the decision we're going to do. Let's commit to it. And at the same time being open to being really wrong about that. Right. And if you're wrong, if the decision wasn't critical, if it isn't something that is the last decision you're going to make, then you can do the other thing, right? There's still room for learning and that's where you get back into the previous two models we talked about where you could have conflict about decisions that have been made and a good discussion and all of that, because there is that trust to be wrong about it.
And it's not just commit and never look back. It's commit for the moment until we've decided as a group to not commit anymore. There's this whole thing about like you want to have the fallacy of sunk costs, right? You don't want to overinvest in things that are not ever going to pay off, but you don't want to under-invest either. Underinvestment is a serial way of getting nothing to work. So you've got to find that balance of, have I committed enough and tried enough to see if there's promise here, but not so overinvested, chasing the wrong thing where it's like, “Well, we've started this now we just have to finish it and keep making the wrong decision.”
Traci:
Right. And I think that takes a good leader, having their finger on the pulse or the whole leadership team, really having a finger on the pulse of we have bought into this decision. We are going to see it through, but we also are keeping our finger on the pulse of whether it's working or not. And if it's not working and we have to pivot. Either pivot majorly, or just pivot minorly, we'll come back together and had that discussion.
Traci:
When we go in and coach teams, what we see more often than not is our teams that have stalled. They have stalled because they're waiting for consensus. They're waiting for every single person to agree. Or fear. They're fearful about really jumping off that cliff and really going after this one thing. And so that fear has paralyzed the entire team.
But I think if they have the mindset that you're talking about, which is, “look we need to make a decision. We need to go after this. If things start to go right, we can pivot.” Nobody's going anywhere. We're all committed to, again, what our ultimate goal is. We fit it into the big picture and we can come back together.
And I think that leads to kind of the second part. You have buy-in, but you also have clarity. And so every decision you're committing to there needs to be a massive amount of clarity around that decision. And I think that's what you're hinting out here is we need to say what we've decided to and agree on that completely. We always say clarity is kind, ambiguity is unkind. We do not want to leave the room without really articulating what we've decided on.
And I tell every leader, leave that last five minutes on the clock to say to the team, what exactly have we decided on here today? And then write it down so the whole team can see there's no room for misinterpretation. There's no room for one leader who didn't really agree to go off and ask for forgiveness later because it's so crystal clear that nobody misses what we're agreeing to. And that's super key.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think a great way to do that is to set goals. One of the great things that I think works because we're talking about this in the context of business is I like to set when we make decisions to set clear goals that we can measure against. And if we set goals that measure the right things, then it helps with that clarity because then there is that piece where it's like, “Now we're going to... Here's how we're going to measure this commitment we just made this decision. This is what success looks like. And this is how we'll know if we fallen short. And then we can march to that and report back on it and talk about those important things.”
Because I think that one of the things we see a lot at Sparkbox is there's two reasons to make decisions. One is data-based and two is to get data, right? If we can't make database decisions, let's do something to get the data we need. And I think that we can iterate through that. And that helps with commitment because it helps with that momentum when you see potentially the realization of those goals.
Traci:
Yeah. And we measure the things we care about and value. We do. Think about the things that we keep track of. And we really need to think about that when we're sitting together as a leadership team, what are the things we really value? What are the things we're trying... Like you say that we're trying to go after, we're trying to accomplish, we need to measure those things.
So I think that's a really good point when we're asking that question, what exactly have we decided here? And what does success look like in this decision? Let's all define it together? What does success look like? What is the accomplishment of this goal look like so we can picture it and envision it as we go after it?
Rob:
Something else I've learned along the way about goals and measurement and commitment and all that is this whole idea of what gets measured, gets done. And if you're able to measure it and able to talk about it and bring people back, those things will get done.
Now there's a little bit of warning there that if you try to measure too many things, teams lose focus. So, I don't think that you can have 20 different goals or commitments or measureables you're trying to get your leadership team after. But if you can get that down to that three to five. Of three to five things, we're going to do. Three to five things we're committing to that we're going to measure, that we're going to report on that, that we're going to start every single meeting with. People will get those done. They'll get creative. And that's what we really want.
Traci:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that everything that Lencioni talks a lot about in achieving commitment is that everybody in the room is super, super clear on not just what we've agreed to as a team and bought into. Even if we disagree. Intel came up with that great phrase, “disagree and commit.” We might disagree, but we're going to commit. But he also talks about even discussing the details of how the decision is going to get communicated to the rest of the team, rest of the company.
Traci:
So if the leadership team has made a decision, we don't leave the room until we have articulated exactly what we've decided upon, how we're going to measure it and then we also decide upon even the logistics of how is it going to get communicated. When is it going to get communicated. Via email, our town hall meeting? Are we going to talk to each person in the company live, one-on-one? We literally, depending on the size of the decision, some of these decisions are small and some of them are large.
But one thing we hear over and over again, especially when we survey an entire company is I don't know what's going on, or it was never communicated to me. Or I was the last one to know. Or my team didn't hear about it, but my colleagues team that they're on, heard about it right away.
So this kind of again, clarity where we all agree, “Okay, we're going to go forth as a leadership team. We're going to communicate this by the end of the day. So-and-so is going to send out an email or each person is going to meet with their own smaller teams.” But that's all decided upon. And he talks about how it sounds rather methodical and rather picky to really get down to these details. But when he sees teams that are really good at doing this man, there's just not a lot of dissent, there's not a lot of going back on decisions, there's not a lot of like water cooler gossip about decisions. Everybody just feels safe because they all have the same knowledge. And everybody knows what the goal is. It's clear.
Rob:
And I think that just along those same lines about who communicates those, I would say as an owner of my business, I like to find people that I'm trying to support. I think it helps my company see the leaders that we've put in place and giving them the power and authority to make those and communicate those things. And like a lot of times that's one of the things that I like to influence heavily is, "Hey, why don't you communicate this?" "Well, why don't you do that, Rob? This is your company." I'm like, "No, no. I've got plenty of authority. I've got all the authority I need. You're right. I own the company. I've been doing this for 12 years.
But I've asked you, and you've taken the mantle on this area of the business. Having you communicate this decision to the team and all of their eyes will put you in a place to own it. And when there's questions about it, they can come to you and then you can be the authority here. This is good for our leadership team. I think that's like a secret unlock if you want to build trust in other leaders in your company, if you're the owner is giving people the authority to communicate important things.
Traci:
I think it also helps with shared ownership. You know, the owner of the company, shouldn't be the only person feeling ownership of the company. So when you can share that authority and share that mantle, then you have people, they care more deeply. They just start to really feel like, "Oh, he entrusts me so I must be a part of this too." And they start to take on that ownership.
I also think asking our teammates, our leadership teammates to go forth and communicate a decision also helps to gauge how true their buy-in really is. I love watching when somebody doesn't really agree with the decision we're making, but they begrudgingly say, "Okay, fine. I buy-in." But then when I tell them, okay, we're going to go out now and communicate it. And you each have to communicate it to your team before the end of the day. Then all of a sudden that person is like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, what did we just agree to?" I'm not sure how I feel…”
Because when leaders know that they have to go and communicate that decision, they really start to think about what's going on here instead of just being sort of half in the conversation. So it's another way of just making sure as a leader, you don't leave the room without everybody really, really taking ownership of what we've just decided.
Rob:
Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. One of the things that internally at our company we've seen over the last couple of years is for some of those bigger pivotable things that we're communicating, we actually write the note from the leaders from the director's team where everybody's co-signing it. And there's one person assigned to write it, but everyone's adding their name to the bottom and everyone has a chance to review. And that helps with both the clarity, the commitment, and having this unified front to the rest of our company. And I think that's just huge.
One of the things that I do a lot of one-on-ones with people on our leadership team. And one of the things that I tell everybody when we have conversations is this is the room that we can disagree about whatever we want. Let's have it out. You and I will still be friends. We'll still be coworkers. We can still have a relationship at the end of this. I said, "But as soon as we walk out that door, I need to know that you've got my back 100% and you need to know that I'm 100% behind you. We're committed to what we decided in here." And I think that helps with that unity, right? How do we get to this place where we can disagree and have that healthy conflict based on trust to then go out and say, this is what the best option available to us is right now.
Traci:
Yeah. And I think if you have strong trust, if you have gotten really good at healthy conflict, achieving commitment is not as hard as it sounds. And that's why these build on each other so beautifully. If I just came into a team and I didn't talk about trust or healthy conflict, but I was just coaching the team on achieving commitment. It would be really hard to squeeze all this into your brain because you'd be like, "How are we supposed to get there?" But because we understand trust fully, and we've worked on that first and we have mastered, at least, maybe not mastered, but we're working continuously on healthy conflict. Then we can get to achieving commitment rather quickly.
Traci:
I think that only other thing I'd probably want to remind leaders of when it comes to achieving commitment is to remember that the leader is the tiebreaker. And I think that as also something sometimes I see with teams is leaders struggle with lots of different things. Whether it's imposter syndrome or wanting to be liked or just their own nervousness around a big decision. But if there is a tie, the leader is the tiebreaker. They need to step in and say, "Look, I know that we're a little bit at an impasse here. We've heard everybody's opinions. We've heard everybody's points of view. I know this is tough, but this is the way we're going to go." And make a decision, point the group.
And the group, I see oftentimes just shoulders relaxed, somebody just a great sense of relief that the leader has stepped in, made the call and moved the team forward. So I just encourage leaders that are listening to this just don't shy away from that. Hear everything you need to hear, ask all the questions you need to ask, get everything out on the table and then go with your gut and make that decision and move your team forward. Don't let them get stalled and stuck.
Rob:
Yeah. I think that I want to point out what I think is the most important thing you just said there and it's listening. And I think that is so important that yes, it's a lot of times these aren't democracies. We don't get a vote at the end, the most popular thing wins or there is ties and all of that. But if you really want commitment, people who are involved in the healthy conflict based on trust have to felt heard and listened to because if they don't feel that they will not be able to commit.
I've been consulting for 20 years working on software projects and all kinds of other things and what I've consistently learned and observed is that when people felt heard and listened to, they are willing and they are able to commit to things that may not even be in their best interest or may not even be completely aligned with what their view is if they felt like what they had to say was considered.
Traci:
Yep. And that's exactly right. And all the Gallup research, all the research that's done on this shows that time and time again, that people just want to be heard. They don't necessarily need their idea adopted. But if they've been heard and they feel like their leadership understands their position, then they can move forward with whatever the decisions that's been made. People just want to be understood, considered, and heard.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think that when we put it that way, one of the most underrated skills for a leader who can inspire their teams is a great listener.
Traci:
Yes. Oh yeah. There's way too many leaders that just love to hear the sound of their own voice. And they just don't realize what a disservice that is not just doing to their team, but to them as a leader. As leaders, our ultimate goal should be the people that work for us want to follow us, not have to follow us. And people who want to follow you are the people that feel that you have high empathy that you're listening, you're putting yourself in their shoes, you're thinking things through, you're weighing it up, you're humble, you're able to see your own mistakes. So, I mean, listening is—as you put it—an underrated skill, for sure. But man, it should be the number one tool in your tool belt as a leader.
Rob:
Yeah. And it's interesting to me. I think about all of the things we've talked about, the first two parts of this series, vulnerability-based trust and healthy conflict. This is the first time that we've really talked about one of these pieces, commitment where there is a little bit more of a formula, right? This is, Hey, there's a pattern you can follow. There's some intentionality you can go through. This one's not a mystery on how you build it and how you get there.
Traci:
Exactly. That's true. And it can be achieved. And when it is achieved, it works. It works and you see movement. I mean, our goal is productivity, success. We want all the businesses we work with to be successful. We want you to be profitable and achieve those goals. And like you said, this isn't difficult. This isn't rocket science, right? But sometimes we just miss the little things. Just the little skills that we have to slow down and implement in order to move the team forward.
Rob:
Yeah. That's what we want.
Well thanks, Traci. I appreciate you.
Traci:
Thank you. Until next time.
Rob:
All right.
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The Overly Human podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. Thanks so much for listening.
