Las cinco disfunciones de un equipo

Every so often I have to pick up one of these management books lying around the office and give it a read. This at least wasn't entirely painful and follows the “I'm going to tell you a story” while scattering little business bon mots throughout.

I expected more. Sure the story was interesting. But it did not convince me rather it made me question the model, by involving things like Mayer - bridge and Messiah leadership style.

I picked this up from a Little Library this morning, recognizing it from when I read excerpts of it in a Clinical Supervision class in grad school. I read several of Lencioni's articles in the Harvard Business Review, as that class was married to the publication as The One True Source of Knowledge. Lencioni is thus partially to blame for my near-lethally allergic reaction to that magazine. Now, when I see an article come through my work e-mail with an HBR link, I have to launch myself from my desk in search of an Epi pen.

Anyway, Lencioni spends nearly 200 out of 228 pages of the book telling tales. No joke, the first several parts of the book consist of The Fable. It's about a blue-collar-adjacent retiree (at 57) who is brought out of the shadows to lead a tech company in the Valley and whip them all into shape. It's dreadful writing, which is probably why it sells so well to the Fortune 500 dweebs.

Starting on Page 181 and going through the rest of the 228 page book (if you don't count the page about contact info for CONSULTING, god help us - oh and where the author thanks God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), you get The Model This is helpfully written in great big, bold, serif text so you know you've gotten to The Good Stuff (tm).

Lencioni's core 5 Dysfunctions are good to pay attention to: Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, Avoidance of Accountability, and Inattention to Results. He sets these up on a pyramid with Absence of Trust as the foundation - makes sense. It reads a little like a Corporate Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and that's well enough.

I didn't plan on lighting the book on fire until, skimming through the TEAM ASSESSMENT (don't forget your business serif), I stumbled upon this shiny little firecracker: “The profiling tool that I use is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). However, a number of other personality profiles are also popular, and one of the best and most common is Everything DiSC. The purpose of most of these tools is to provide practical and scientifically valid behavioral descriptions of various team members...”

Folks - neither MBTI or DiSC are scientifically valid. The phrase itself, “scientifically valid” is an oxymoron. These tools are not well founded in research, they are not peer reviewed, they suffer numerous reliability problems (notably test-retest). Lencioni goes on a few sentences later to say why he likes them, “their basis in research (they are not founded upon astrology or new age science)” - I wonder what makes old age science better than new age science? I can tell you these tools are exactly as reliable as astrology, and if you read the horoscopes for today, you'll have as good an idea about your team's performance as you will if you spend thousands to some consultant to waste your team's time taking a personality quiz to then chat about how “omg it's so insightful).

Yuck. This is going back to the little library.

4 stars - found Lencioni's writing to be full of simple but compelling literary techniques, such as clearly telegraphed foreshadowing. Very much new to the genre of self-help books written through fictional stories, and really enjoyed it! Found it much more digestible and memorable in this story format, and useful summary at the end. Interesting and not immediately apparent takeaways such as meetings being the perfect time for constructive arguments, and the importance of not taking such vital arguments ‘offline' or postponing them.

The writing of this book is wrought, so not a great read just for enjoyment, but good for practice of executive function.

This little unassuming book is well organized, compelling, and actionable. The leadership fable offers characters and intrigue, making the key points easy to pull out of the abstraction. Management and leadership books can be so dull, even when the information is useful.

Thankfully, Lencioni saves the boring information - that we are going to need - until after spoon feeding us the key points with a short story.