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Perpetual: Reads | The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Why Perpetual recommends it

Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a leadership fable, but the model at its core has become one of the most widely used team frameworks in business: a pyramid of absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results, each dysfunction enabling the one above it.

Lencioni’s insight is that these dysfunctions are sequential, not independent. Without genuine vulnerability-based trust, teams avoid healthy conflict; without healthy conflict, commitment to decisions stays shallow; without real commitment, no one holds each other accountable; and without accountability, individual ego quietly wins out over collective results.

The fable format, following a fictional tech company’s dysfunctional executive team, makes the model stick in a way a straight framework wouldn’t, because readers recognise their own leadership team in the characters’ avoidance, politics and unproductive politeness.

This is one of the frameworks we return to most often when diagnosing why a leadership team’s decisions aren’t sticking, because the root cause is so often lower down the pyramid than where the symptoms first show up.

  • Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results build on each other in sequence
  • Teams that avoid healthy conflict usually have shallow, superficial commitment underneath
  • Peer-to-peer accountability, not just top-down accountability, is what protects results
  • Vulnerability-based trust is the foundation everything else in the pyramid depends on

A useful diagnostic is asking your leadership team which of the five dysfunctions feels most true right now. The honest answer usually points straight to where trust actually needs rebuilding.

We give this book five out of five stars.

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