Patrick Lencioni is the author of the well-known book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, which, for those of you who have not read the book, are

1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results

Every Christmas, my family forgets what happened last time and whips out the board games, appoints the teams and starts playing…or at least tries to!  This year, I observed the five dysfunctions of a team in action:

1. We had appointed one person to keep score, and the opposing team leader was arguing that there was NO WAY we could allow someone on one team to keep score for both teams without some form of independent regulation;
2. This started someone else saying “ah come on, let’s not argue, it’s fine, I’m sure they’ll do it fairly”;
3. A couple of people weren’t committed to playing and kept abandoning their teams to go get a drink or check their Christmas messages on their ‘phones;
4. The timekeeper forgot to keep time and so one team got a huge advantage over the other, sparking another argument;
5. Nobody kept score, and in the end the game had to be abandoned as we didn’t know who was winning or when we had agreed the game would be over!

It wasn’t the most successful game ever, but nor had it very serious consequences.  If it had been an important project on which the two teams needed to collaborate, however, we would have failed miserably!

Think about how your team behaves when working together – do these kinds of issues arise?  Can you see, looking back, how some projects have been hindered, or even failed, by similar problems?  How could you avoid them going forward?

Building relationships, communicating, being committed to a common purpose and being clear about what is being measured are all steps in our 8-step model for effective team building, and serve to avoid the five dysfunctions of teams – work on these and avoid family fights over Christmas!  Oh, and achieve fantastic results with your work teams too, of course!

Jeff Roberts expands on the five dysfunctions of a team in his blog – click here if you’d like to read more.