Conclusion: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In this concluding episode of our mini-series, Traci and Rob answer your questions about Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Let’s explore how trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and team results combine to make a great organizational team.
Check out the other episodes in this series:
Rob:
Hey, Traci, how are you?
Traci:
I'm good, how are you?
Rob:
I'm doing really, really well. Thanks for asking.
Okay, so we have just wrapped up the five part series...six part series on Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. During the last couple of episodes, we had asked our listeners for questions and they delivered. This is a little bit different than we typically do, but we're going to go back and take turns and talk through these questions that people have submitted so that we can provide some more details on some of the things people had questions on in the series that we just did.
Are you up for that?
Traci:
I'm up for it. Sounds fun.
Rob:
Okay.
Announcer:
Welcome to the Overly Human podcast, where we discuss all things human in the workplace, because it's not just business, it's personal too.
Traci:
You have the list of questions, so you're going to go ahead and read some off, and then we'll take a stab at answering them.
Rob:
Yup. Okay. Let's start here, then.
The question is, Rob gave a disclaimer about power structures at the beginning of the episode about accountability. Can you talk a little bit about power structures for those who are not as familiar?
Maybe we ought to start with a good definition.
Traci:
Yeah. You gave a disclaimer about power structures in relation to accountability. I think when we think about that, it's... And I believe you were talking about the different levels of people who hold power, and holding each other accountable and this comes into relation with the peer-to-peer accountability versus just the leader being the one who holds everybody accountable. Is that right?
Rob:
Yeah, that's right. It's really looking at the difference between what peers get and what the leader gets from an assumed position, having power over somebody else. I think that absolutely colors a lot of what humans see in the interactions.
We talk about this a lot on staff is, there are some kinds of feedback that I may never get because I am someone's boss or the owner of the company, or lots of different things. Those are the power structures we're talking about, is those implicit contracts that everyone understands that if we're not careful, nobody gives voice to.
Traci:
Exactly. I think when we talk about accountability when we're doing our workshops, we try to get that out in the open. We try to get teams to talk about what are the barriers to peer-to-peer accountability, and do people feel safe holding a leader accountable, even if you're in a quote-unquote “lower role” or a “lesser role” than maybe the CEO or COO or anybody on a leadership team. Can you, when you're all working together on a project or you've all come to an agreement about a goal that you've set, hold each other equally accountable?
That's a really interesting conversation and it actually does a great job of uncovering what some teams, some of their internal politics might be. It's really fun to see teams that are able to hold their leaders accountable. They feel safe, they feel known. They feel equal in that sense of a relationship where they can call out a leader, just as a leader can call them out.
That's what we're looking for is this, even if our roles aren't the same, or maybe even the hierarchy isn't equal, that on a relationship-level and on a project-level when we're holding each other accountable, there is an equality there. There's an equality of being able to say, you're not holding up to your end of the bargain, and that's a beautiful thing. It takes a lot.
That's why there's a pyramid here and we have to start with trust. It takes a lot to get there. We don't start with accountability. We start with trust and healthy conflict. Then we're able to work our way up to that. When you can, boy, you have a productive team, you have a safe team, you have a team that really meshes well together.
Rob:
Yeah. That's right. That's exactly what the point that needs to be made and probably is the foundation of a lot of the questions we got was, this starts with trust. We don't get to skip to accountability and results because that's what we're after, we start with trust and conflict in a healthy way. We build on top of that to get to these other more advanced or higher order things that allow that really cohesive group to work well together.
Traci:
Yeah. Absolutely. Trust is a big thing. We had a couple of questions about trust that were sent to us as well, but I think it takes the longest for people to really feel that you have it, and it's real, and you can see it work out in the workplace and really put it to the test. I think this model is a great model for being able to test your team to see if you really have the deep kind of trust we're talking about here.
Rob:
Okay. I've got another one here.
Traci:
Okay.
Rob:
All right. This is kind of in the same vein, so that's why I'm going to group them together. It says I am not sold on peer-to-peer accountability working outside of a managerial level leadership team. There are too many factors not to mention DE&I risk. How do you encourage peer-to-peer accountability in a way that ensures some of your team members don't feel pressure to be a “team player” in scenarios that could be considered harassment?
Traci:
That's a good one.
Rob:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Traci:
That is a good one.
Rob:
There's very few softballs here.
Traci:
Well, I feel, my gut reaction to this is, you have to teach the model. It's like what we were just saying, that you have to explain to people that it starts with trust, how you get trust. You have to then move through each stage of the model for them to understand what peer-to-peer accountability means.
We're talking about when a commitment is made and agreed to by a team, that you're staying committed. I also think it's about communication and clarity. We talked about that in that episode, that when you come to a commitment as a team, that this is what we're going to do, and whether it's a project or whether it's a change in culture or whether whatever it is that we've agreed we're going to do, that once we agree to it, we actually say, “Okay, we're going to also commit to holding each other accountable. What does that look like?” And have that play out, because if people don't understand what it looks like, they're not going to know how to behave in the way that we're talking about here. If we don't agree to not just the commitment, but also the commitment to accountability, then nobody's going to do it.
So it takes practice and it can become habitual on a team, and expected and accepted, but it has to be explained, taught, committed to, openly communicated. These are questions that a lot of teams, if you're not living out this model, have never said at a team meeting. We agree to a lot of things in meetings, but you don't often hear leaders, or whoever's running the meeting at the end of the meeting say, “Okay guys, here's a recap of what we've committed to, now are we going to hold each other responsible and accountable to living this out? Because we have a due date of next Monday. What do we need to do between now and next Monday to make sure we're holding each other accountable?” That language I don't hear too often.
But if you have really adopted this model and your leadership is communicating in that way, then it takes away that fear. It takes away that considered harassment that they're asking in this question, because that's something separate. We talked about that in healthy conflict. You have aggression, you have harassment, you also have silence and people not speaking at all, but you have healthy conflict in the middle. That's what we're looking for here when we're holding each other accountable, is a healthy way of holding each other accountable.
Rob:
Yeah. I think that it's not only the studying of these things, it's practicing them. As you do them, you have to get good at them. Teams don't just read this book or pick up this model and say, “Tomorrow we will start behaving like this” and go super deep and try to hold each other accountable on tricky things. Trust is a practice that we build over time that we can then practice good, healthy conflict on top of, which then we can get good commitment on common things from each other, which then allows us to even have the peer-to-peer accountability. You can't skip any of these things.
There is absolutely a place for reporting directly to HR or whatever the case may be, if there's harassment or things that are against the values and things that the collective group has decided we're not going to do. We're trying to also define the fear of things we're talking about in this case, or holding each other accountable to, it's the shared goals that we've decided that we hold together, and the shared contract of behavior that we've agreed is acceptable.
Traci:
Yeah. I think you make a great point about time. It does take time. I often tell people at the end of these workshops that you have to give each other grace because it does take time for it to come naturally. A good way of learning is to come back and say, after a project is done or a goal was met or not met, to say, “What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Why did we miss this deadline? What could we do differently?” And get people to speak honestly about it. If somebody says, “Well, it's because Joe missed this deadline.” Well, did anybody go and talk to Joe? Maybe Joe needed help. Maybe Joe wasn't being a self-starter. What is it? Let's get it out there, and in this safe way, discuss where we missed the mark so we can be better next time.
It's not because we want to get in some sort of blame game, it's because we want to be better. If we always couch it that way, we can make progress.
Rob:
Yeah. We want to understand the why behind things. This is something I was reading recently. We've all heard of The Five W’s. The who, why, what, when, stuff that we can ask questions. Then there's another model that I've recently stumbled across the military uses, which is the 5 Whys. It's continuing asking why for root cause analysis to get to the root of something. We keep asking why until it's really, really simple.
There's this famous story about a monument and there being too much bird droppings that they have to keep cleaning and spending all this money. What do they do? They're actually destroying the monument because they're using all these abrasive chemicals to clean up the bird droppings and disinfect it. So they started asking why. Well, the birds are there to get the bugs. Well, why? Because the lights are on. Well, why? And they get down to it and they keep asking why until they ended up in this place where they change the schedule for the lights by an hour so the bugs and the birds can't be there at the same time. That's the root of their problem. They ask why a whole bunch of times.
Now this works really well when we're trying to diagnose things that are going on. At the same time, we have to understand that this is mostly a human model. Sometimes asking people why a bunch of times they did something, the reason is because they did. There's a balance there.
Traci:
Yeah. I love that example because it really... I'm a big proponent of getting to the root of the problem. So many teams miss the mark because they're in a hurry and they just want to do the bandaid solution or take the first thing that's said. When you're really trying to live out this model, it takes, like we just said, it takes time and we need to slow down and figure out what's going on and the why behind it. What are the root problems that are tripping us up? I like that.
Rob:
Okay. Maybe here's a softball. What are some signs that a team trusts leadership?
Traci:
Ooh, well, I think probably the first thing that pops to mind for me is that they'll come to you with their mistakes or their issues, and they'll ask for help. I think that's a big one. If you have people calling you up or walking in your office and they're saying, “Hey, I messed up, I need your help.” Then you know they feel safe with you. I think that's a really big one. If they challenge you in a meeting, they feel safe and they can challenge you. I think that's also a sign that they trust you.
When we talked about trust, we talked about people knowing each other. I think if you feel like your staff knows you and you know them, they most likely trust you. I think one sign of that, at least I found with my team, is that they can joke with you. They can poke fun at you and feel safe about that.
I can remember a really... It's so funny that this sticks in my head, but I can remember being in a meeting, we had this big HGTV event and Vanilla Ice was coming. He had this show on DIY, remodeling show, and his real name is Robert Van Winkle. I remember we were going over the guest list and I said to my team, “Who is Robert Van Winkle?” They made so much fun of me because they were like, “That's Vanilla Ice, how could you not even know who Vanilla Ice is?” I was so embarrassed. I can remember feeling my face being red, but they were making so much fun of me, and we were laughing so hard. I remember at that moment thinking, that's the type of team we had. They knew they could poke fun at me. They knew I wasn't going to get angry. We just knew each other really, really well. Yeah, that developed over time, but it also was because there was a high level of trust there that we could be ourselves with each other, but the respect was still there too.
I think if you feel that balance of safety, respect, knowing each other, safe, and you believe that you have that, I think that's a good sign that your staff trusts you.
How do you know your staff trusts you?
Rob:
Well, the clue that I've started listening for is when they bring something to my attention and they use our values to talk about why they disagree or how they think about it. We talk a lot about our values and what we believe and how we collectively try to make decisions, but the fact that they'll bring something that's a challenge, to be like, “Hey, we say this, and this is how I interpret this, in this situation” has provided so much illumination for me over the years, like, “Oh, this is great. We're having a honest conversation about the interpretation of our values and how they apply to situations.”
And I've learned so much. I feel like those conversations can only happen if there's real trust that I will do my best and make decisions in accordance to what we say we believe, and proving that over time.
Traci:
Yeah. And I think on the flip side, a sign that you're not trusted would be the opposite of that. You're not being challenged. People aren't bringing things to your attention. You're the last person to know. There's almost a feeling of eggshells around you. People get quiet when you walk into a room. Those are some signs that some things maybe aren't right, and maybe you need to do some investigation on how people feel about you.
Rob:
Yeah. Okay, here's another one. What simple things have helped build trust in organizations you have worked with? I'm going to let you take this one because this is your wheel house.
Traci:
I think I love the exercises that Patrick Lencioni talked about in the book. I use them all the time with teams and they're really simple ways of building trust. And they all revolve around knowing each other. The more we know each other, the more we're going to trust each other. And I don't mean that we have to be the best of friends, but if we just know who the other person is, we tend to have more grace and have more understanding and empathy towards each other. We don't assume the worst.
The history profiles exercise that we talked about in the trust episode, where everybody talks about something that they overcame in their childhood, I think is a really powerful exercise. Just to give us a teeny tiny little peek into what it was like being you growing up.
I think the DiSC profiling, DiSC workshop is super powerful. I think it's really fun, first of all. I also think it's just really good to understand what our behavioral style preferences are, how we tend to show up, and what's good about that and what can sometimes be bad about that.
I also think another simple thing is to just add in your meetings... We often give teams samples of meeting agendas, and we always have that, start your meeting with one personal, one professional best. When you're having a meeting with the team, to start with some sort of personal question, even if it's silly. What's your favorite movie or whatever. One personal, like we say, do the one personal best for the week. You'll hear people say, I helped my kid learn how to ride a bike, or I successfully reorganized my pantry. Just sometimes those little things give us a little peek into who the person is. Those peeks into their lives help us to know them better, maybe like them better, understand them better. Then that really helps when we're working together, working on a project or whatever, something might pop into mind like, “Oh, okay, now I get why he's leaving, because I remember he said it's baseball season with his kids.” Those types of things help us to have better relationships with each other, better personal interactions with each other.
Rob:
Yeah. Well said.
All right, here's another question. Can you dig more into this from a perspective of radical candor being measured not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear. What can companies do to ensure this truly permeates throughout their culture, especially when there are some natural silos created within a leadership group structure?
I think that this is a great question first off, but this gets to the heart of— and we talked a lot about this in the communication episode—is it's not what I intend to say, it's what you hear and how you interpret it. This is that impact versus intent. I don't ever want to live in a world where we say intent is completely irrelevant because there is implications for that, but impact is more important. We have to know people, to your point about, well enough to know that how our communication is being received and interpreted that you have to have deeper conversations sometimes.
I love to have conversations with people that have to be direct in feedback and then ask at the end, “Well, how did that make you feel?” Let's talk about that, because I think we talked about this another episode, that people won't remember what you said, but they'll remember how you made them feel at the end. All that gets wrapped up into radical candor and telling truth and all of that, in a way that people can actually turn actionable things into it and do something with it.
Traci:
Yeah. The quote in that book is, "Clarity gets measured at the listener's ear, not at the speaker's mouth." I love that quote because so often you'll hear people say, “Well, wasn't I clear in what I said to you? Why didn't you get it done? I was crystal clear.” It's like, “Well, you thought you were clear, but to me it wasn't clear.”
And so we, as leaders, have to get very good at saying, “Did I miss anything?” or, “does everybody understand what I'm trying to say?” Asking those questions instead of just giving directives and walking out of the room, because that's no guarantee that you were clear. We all receive information differently.
I think one of the things I love about that book is that radical candor is challenging directly and caring personally. That's the goal, is to have both. You're direct while you're caring. I think that gets back to what you're saying. You have to be sensitive to the context of the situation, to how you're being perceived, and radical candor really only works if you have both. The person needs to feel included, cared about, and part of feeling cared for is the leader actually taking that extra step and saying, “Have I been clear? Do you guys understand? Do you need me to explain it in a different way?” Because everybody processes information differently and at different rates and we have to be sensitive to that.
Rob:
I think it's easy to say, but radical candor is not brutal honesty. Those are two different things that we have to know that are different. The whole idea of radical candor is knowing and delivering things that are truth that are hard to hear in some cases, in a way they can be interpreted and be clear about them.
The other thing that goes perfectly in this is that commitment step that we talked about in the pyramid, is being able to ask everybody, do you know what we've agreed upon? Are you committed? That's one of those steps, that's that check and balance of, okay, this is what we're committing to. Does everybody in a way going to say yes. Then if you have the trust and the conflict piece figured out, somebody who's not clear on that can say, “Hey, I'd like to get some clarity before I commit to a thing that I don't know what it is.” We can build these checks and balances and these little check boxes into these systems so that there is built in places for people to stand up and say, “Hey, hold on. Can we hash this out a little bit more? I'd like to make this clear for me.”
Traci:
Yeah. And I think part of this question asked how do companies ensure it truly permeates their culture? I think with anything here, if you really like this model and you believe in it, whether it's radical candor or whether it's the five behaviors of a cohesive of team, you can measure against that. Just like I always encourage teams to put their core values on reviews and have each person rank how they are doing, red, yellow, green, against their core values, you can also add this into a peer review of how are people showing up with caring personally and challenging directly. For challenging directly, one to five, how am I showing up for caring personally?
This helps you, as a leader, and each person on the team understand, “Well, I seem to be a little stronger on the challenging directly and a little low on the caring personally, so I need to work on that. I need to work on my delivery. I need to work on my empathy.” Or if it's flipped and I'm high on caring personally, but not challenging directly, I know I need to get more brave. I need to say what I need to say and stop pussyfooting around.
I think there's easy, simple, quick tools and tricks that we can implement if we're serious about this, but the leadership has to be serious. It can't just be a one-time workshop or one-time teaching. If you want it to permeate your culture, then you need to start operationalizing it and really putting this language into your culture.
Rob:
Absolutely. We can't ever escape the fact that leadership matters and being able to demonstrate this behavior to our teams in a public way where we have to be vulnerable with them and let them see us be vulnerable as leaders, that will do more to help instill that into our culture than anything else. People want to be led and they want to follow people who are willing to demonstrate the things they say are important to them.
Traci:
Yup, absolutely. It's a good reminder.
Rob:
27:41 I've got one more.
Traci:
Okay.
Rob:
Okay. Last question. How do you adapt all of this for quick growth in a company? What's happening if things are scaling like crazy, all of that fun stuff. Is there any way to get there quicker? We've said, “time” three or four times now.
Traci:
Well, I think it falls partly on the leadership and it falls partly on the long-term members of the team. I think if you really are adopting this model to your team, The Five Behaviors, that it needs to be part of your onboarding. You really need every person that's onboarded needs to understand what I call is the culture's language.
What is the language that your culture uses? If it's DiSC profile, then they need to know what their DiSC profile is, and that of the team they're working with. If it's five dysfunctions, they need to know this is the model, “Here's a quick little overview of that model. You'll hear our leadership talk about it often in our team meetings, so I want you to understand what it is.”
And also having quarterly updates. If you do a workshop or you do a teaching on this as a team and you go through the book, then you need to be updating quarterly on how is it going. I tell teams, there's a online survey that you can take and send out to your team—we do it for all teams before we do a workshop, to measure how they're doing on each level of the pyramid. And then I strongly suggest that six months or a year later, you take that same survey so you can, again, track how you're doing.
It's just like anything in life, there's different phases and some areas are going to be stronger and weaker. Then those areas might flip because you've worked on them and maybe forgotten the other areas you used to be strong. I think that ongoing commitment to the model will help with your quick growth, because it'll just be just like you're teaching them your systems—how you're designing, your dev work, whatever it is that you're teaching them, your project management philosophies—you're going to teach them your culture philosophies as well.
That just has to be baked into onboarding. Too often, people forget that. They think on-boarding's like getting your key card, your benefits and learning what team you're on and how projects work. And that's a big part of it, but too often they leave out the core value training or the five dysfunction training. You need a culture piece to your on-boarding.
Rob:
Yeah. It's intentionality. That's the answer for so much of this, is being able to be intentional with it. The things that we put our time into and the things we figure out how to measure will get done. If we take our eye off the ball, then things will drift. I think that's just the name of the game that we have to accept.
Quick growth is an interesting piece of it, it's talked a lot about in our industry in general, is how do we scale rapidly or whatever else we want to do. I think that sometimes we need to take a step back and sometimes figure out what scaling smartly is, that's in a way that takes these things into account.
Not only what onboarding looks like for, like you said, projects and getting work done, but also how we treat people and finding people that are going to act within the values that we've said are important, and that are going to be good cultural adds and bring diverse perspectives. With that, operate in a way that is trust-based.
I think this has been a whole nother episode on trust because we've said it so many times, but that's how foundational this stuff is and how intentional we have to be to bake that in and let people know that this is where things start.
Traci:
Yeah. I think too, the last thing I'll say about quick growth and companies, or growth period. One thing, that it can be hard for the team who's mastered something like this, mastered five dysfunctions or done a lot of work on a DiSC workshop or whatever, and then all of a sudden you add a new group of people to the mix. Sometimes you can see that there's a little friction. People get sad because they're like, “Oh, we had this great thing and we had it all figured out. We all were trusting each other and now there's all these new people…” and they can lose hope or ground.
It's really on the leader to make sure that we are basically painting the picture of this is a good thing. Our growth, if we need to grow as a company, that adding new people, yes, we do have to bring them up to speed on things and yes, will it change our culture? Of course it will. It just changes things. We have to learn to adapt. That is a skill that we should all be striving for.
Especially for bringing in, I know a lot of people have DEI initiatives and they're hopefully bringing in a more diverse population into their workplace. That also is an interesting thing to think about with this model. We have to understand, and we talked about this in the conflict episode, is understanding how different cultures deal with conflict and who might be more reserved, who might be more emotional, and remembering that when we think about diversity and inclusion, that we're really... The biggest hiccup when you talk to people who are in a minority group, is feeling like you don't belong, and that being a systematic thing.
We all universally as humans know what it means to not feel like you don't belong, but for minorities, they feel that all the time—it's a systematic thing. We have to break that down.
So when we're adding new people to our team and they're diverse on top of it, or from different cultures or backgrounds, we need to make sure they don't feel like outsiders. We need to make sure that they feel like they belong, that we have awareness of who they are, that we're educated and have some empathy. And so we don't want this model to be a way that the team becomes more insular and not welcoming of new team members or scared of new team members. We will always want it to be a model that has room for more. Room for more cultures, room for more people, room for more opinions and be open and happy for that.
Rob:
Yeah. That's a mouthful, isn't it? I mean, it's so important that these things, we look at them not as a destination, but as a journey.
Traci:
Absolutely.
Rob:
I think that viewpoint shaped so much of all of the things we talk about on this podcast, as you don't arrive somewhere and just get to be there and be in happiness and be in nirvana in that spot. This is all work that has to be plugged away. Part of our monthly, weekly, daily practice to build these things, to continue onto the journey, continue learning and adopting because things are going to change. The people are going to change. The people involved are going to change. The thing we're trying to achieve is going to be slightly different.
And we have to be able to walk that walk and prepare each other to take that journey together, which is really what these five steps are all about, is this is the framework of how we approach problems together to get the desired results. That's it. There it is, I guess. That's probably a good way to wrap it up.
Traci:
Yeah. Perfect. Well, this was fun. We're going to have to do more questions in the future. I really liked it. Thanks for everybody who sent in a question. We appreciate it.
Rob:
Yeah. Thank you. This was a lot of fun. I think this wraps up our Five Dysfunctions of a Team mini-series.
Thank you, Traci. This has been fun.
Traci:
Yeah. Thank you. It's been great.
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