Book Review

Excerpt from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
By Patrick Lencioni

INTRODUCTION

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is powerful and so rare.

A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, "If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time."

Whenever I repeat that saying to a group of leaders, they immediately nod their heads, but in a desperate sort of way. They seem to grasp the truth of it while simultaneously surrendering to the impossibility of actually making it happen.

And that is where the rarity of teamwork comes into play. For all the attention that it has received over the years from scholars, coaches, teachers, and the media, teamwork is as elusive as it has ever been within most organizations. The fact remains that teams, because they are made up of imperfect human beings, are inherently dysfunctional.

But that is not to say that teamwork is doomed. Far from it. In fact, building a strong team is both possible, and remarkably simple. But it is painfully difficult.

That's right. Like so many other aspects of life, teamwork comes down to mastering a set of behaviors that are at once theoretically uncomplicated, but extremely difficult to put into practice day after day. Success comes for those organizations that overcome the all-too-human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them.

As it turns out, these principles apply to more than just teamwork. In fact, I stumbled upon them somewhat by accident in my pursuit of a theory about leadership.

A few years ago I wrote my first book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, about the behavioral pitfalls that plague leaders. In the course of working with my clients, I began to notice that some of them were "misusing" my theories in an effort to assess and improve the performance of their leadership teams - and with success!

And so it became apparent to me that the five temptations applied not only to individual leaders, but with a few modifications, to groups as well. And not just within corporations. Ministers, coaches, teachers and others found that these principles applied in their worlds as much as they did in the executive suite of a multinational company. And that is how this book came to be.

Like my other books, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team begins with a story written in the context of a realistic but fictional organization. I have found that this allows readers to learn more effectively by losing themselves in a story, and by being able to relate to the characters. It also helps them understand how these principles can be applied in a non-theoretical, real-world environment, where the pace of work and the volume of daily distractions make even the simplest of tasks seem arduous.

In order to help readers apply the material in their own organizations, there is a brief section following the story where the five dysfunctions are outlined in detail. That section also includes a self-assessment, and suggested tools for overcoming the issues that might be plaguing your team.

Finally, although this book is based on my work with CEOs and their executive teams, its theories are applicable for anyone interested in teamwork, whether you lead a small department within a company or are simply a member of a team that could use some improvement. I sincerely hope this book helps your team overcome its particular dysfunctions so that it can achieve more than individuals could ever imagine doing alone. That, after all, is the real power of teamwork.

Luck

Only one person thought Kathryn was the right choice to become CEO of DecisionTech, Inc. Luckily for her, that person was the Chairman of the Board.

And so, less than a month after the previous chief executive had been removed, Kathryn Petersen took the reigns of a company that just two years earlier had been one of the most talked-about, well-funded and promising start-up companies in the recent history of the Silicon Valley. She could not have known just how far from grace the company had fallen in such a short period of time, and what the next few months had in store for her.

PART I - BACKGROUND

Underachievement

DecisionTech was actually located in Half Moon Bay, a foggy, coastal farming town just over the hills from the San Francisco Bay. It was not technically part of the Silicon Valley, but the Valley is not so much a geographic entity as a cultural one. And DecisionTech certainly fit within that world.

It had the most experienced - and expensive - executive team imaginable, a seemingly indestructible business plan, and more top-tier investors than any young company could hope for. Even the most cautious venture firms were lining up to invest, and talented engineers were submitting their resumes before the company had leased an office.

But that was almost two years earlier, which is a lifetime for a technology start-up. After its first few euphoric months of existence, the company began experiencing a series of ongoing disappointments. Critical deadlines started to slip. A few key employees below the executive level unexpectedly left the company. Morale deteriorated gradually. All of this in spite of the considerable advantages that DecisionTech had supposedly amassed for itself.

On the two-year anniversary of the firm's founding, the Board unanimously agreed to "ask" Jeff Shanley, the company's 37 year-old CEO and co-founder, to step down. He was offered the job of heading business development, and to the surprise of his colleagues, he accepted the demotion, not wanting to walk away from a potentially huge payout should the company eventually go public. And even in the difficult economic climate of the Valley, the company had every reason to go public.

None of DecisionTech's 150 employees were shocked by Jeff's removal. While most of them seemed to like him well enough personally, they couldn't deny that under his leadership the atmosphere within the company had become increasingly troubling. Backstabbing among the executives had become an art. There was no sense of unity or camaraderie on the team, which translated into a muted level of commitment. Everything seemed to take too long to get done, and even then it never felt right.

Some boards might have been more patient with a stumbling executive team, DecisionTech's would not. There was just too much at stake - and too high a profile - to watch the company waste away because of politics. DecisionTech had already developed a reputation within the Valley for being one of the most political and unpleasant places to work, and the Board couldn't tolerate that kind of press, especially when the future had looked so promising just a couple years earlier.

Someone had to be accountable for the mess, and Jeff was the man at the top. Everyone seemed relieved when the Board announced the decision to remove him.

Until three weeks later when Kathryn was hired.

Copyright (c) 2002 by Patrick Lencioni. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com, or call 1-800-225-5945.


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