Episode 19: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Building Trust, Accountability, and Results

Fred has run Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions assessment with more than a hundred companies. In all that time, he has never seen a team come back all green. This episode explains why.

What does the pyramid measure?

Five layers, built from the bottom up: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Teams take an anonymous assessment and get a red, yellow, or green read on each layer. Fred has learned not to predict the score. Cultures that look healthy from the outside can score badly when people answer in private, and the reverse happens too.

He also runs it at different levels of a company, because the home office and the field can have completely different cultures. That misalignment is often where the real problem lives.

Why is trust about vulnerability?

The trust Lencioni means isn't predictability. As Kristina puts it, knowing someone will always be a jerk is consistent, but it isn't trust. Vulnerability-based trust means lifting your arm and showing the soft spot under the armor.

When a leader does that, saying in effect "I've been where you are," it removes the sense that you're the only one struggling. Fred compares growth to a trapeze artist letting go of one bar before catching the next. That moment in midair is where trust either holds or doesn't.

For new team members he uses four questions: What do I want the team to know about me? What does the team want to know about me? What does the team want me to know about the team? What do I want to know about the team? Thirty minutes of that, he says, reveals more than five years of working side by side.

What's a zinger culture?

When trust is missing, humor turns into a weapon. Fred calls it a zinger culture, and he admits he's a recovering zingerholic from the streets of Chicago. His fixes are a zinger jar, priced high enough to sting, and a safe word that anyone can call out. Teams almost always pick "pineapple," the symbol of hospitality, and when someone says it, the room stops.

Kristina's point here is that we treat physical danger at work seriously while ignoring emotional danger, which can do longer-lasting damage. Fred adds that the people standing next to the target feel it too.

Why is artificial harmony dangerous?

Fear of conflict looks like everyone nodding in the meeting and complaining in the hallway. Fred's tell is people talking about someone who isn't in the room. His rule: if you haven't talked to them, don't talk to me about it. When two people can't work it out, he sits in and has them mirror each other, one short point at a time. It slows the conversation way down and raises clarity just as much. He once spent 45 minutes getting two partners through three sentences, and the first sentence turned out to be a compliment.

Kristina's example is sobering. At a wood shop where no one wanted to confront a veteran worker about wearing gloves at the table saw, the polite avoidance ended with a life-changing injury.

Where does commitment come from?

Commitment is the hinge of the pyramid, the point where relationships turn into action. Kristina describes a merger where neither company was dominant, so no decision felt safe and every decision that did get made was second-guessed. Fred's remedy is to close every meeting by asking what was agreed, then assign owners, resources, and timelines.

Why don't people know what they're accountable for?

Ask someone what they're accountable for and they'll list what they do. Responsibility is the activities. Accountability is the result. Fred wants KPIs visible like a sports page, since no athlete plays hard without a scoreboard. In a mature team, peers hold each other accountable with a simple question: can I help? He also separates excellence from perfectionism. Perfectionists can't accept mistakes. People striving for excellence own them, and sometimes own a problem they didn't create.

How does your team celebrate?

When Fred asks companies this, he often gets blank stares. Individual wins don't count if the team loses. Small celebrations are fuel, especially when times are ugly. Kristina closes by pointing out that the same pyramid works inside a family, a partnership, or one person with a lot of competing parts.

Listen to the full episode of The Executive and the Mystic on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.