|
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (Audio CD)
by Patrick M. Lencioni
| Category:
Leadership, Organizational effectiveness, Management, Teamwork |
| Market price: ¥ 330.00
MSL price:
¥ 298.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
|
|
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An excellent management manual outlining the problems and conflicts that often prevent teams from working together to achieve their stated goals. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 13 items |
|
|
Jeffrey Ellis (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
We see ourselves, at arm's length, in "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team". Safely in someone else's story, we get a glimpse of our own team; sometimes all too close for comfort.
Once again, Lencioni uses the modern fable to make his points. In a very effective way, he diagnoses symptoms of teams in trouble:
1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results
These are flaws of malfunctioning teams and are brought to life in a "leadership fable" which tells the tale using Kathryn Petersen, new CEO of DecisionTech.
One of the things I found interesting is that if Lencioni is correct, the inverse of his hypothesis should also be true. Well-functioning, healthy teams should be built upon the opposite traits: Trust, Candor, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Perhaps building those traits will be the subject of one of his next insightful books.
|
|
|
Twist (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
Very well done show-by-example story of how teams tend toward dysfunction. The fable style of the book makes it highly readable, and very quick.
The portions at the back of the book (Overview of the Model, Team Assessment questionnaire, Understanding and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions) provide excellent background, theoretical understanding, and specific tasking to address the issues. These pages won't turn as quickly as the fable, but it is where the work gets done.
The book clearly addresses issues of behavior - something I have found so many managers unwilling and unqualified to do. Group dynamics, behavior, are what cause a group to stop working (producing). The whole "be-nice" syndrome (which inhibits people from expressing opinion) moves toward a be-fair approach, far more capable of discourse and movement of ideas to a better future.
If you are in a dysfunctional team, and they are willing to admit it - get the book for everyone.
If you are in a dysfunctional team (not willing to admit it), get the book for management.
If you're managing ANY team, get the book, and get it for your ENTIRE management staff; then do the work. You'll create an environment where people can contribute.
I am personally an exceptional contributor, but I have left positions because management was simply unwilling to address behavior (the real limiting issue at hand), choosing instead to focus on a task list when such blatant dysfunctions as a eerie quiet meeting environment, misinformation among members were present. It is a complete and utter shame to see that, particularly when projects wallow in their own filth for years never actually producing what they are capable of - something of extraordinary greatness.
Don't let this happen to your organization. Be a LEADER, address what is inhibiting contribution in your efforts. |
|
|
Graham Lawes (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
I recommend this book highly. It'll get you thinking about what's wrong with the way your current team works, or teams you've been involved with in the past. It will also give you some ideas for what can be done about it. The beauty of the book is in the simplicity of the model. As Lencioni says, "As difficult as it is to build a cohesive team, it is not complicated. In fact keeping it simple is critical."
I've spent a lot of time observing what goes wrong in teams in high-technical companies, and most of the problems I've seen in organizations can be tied directly to dysfunction in the top management team. I believe that the answer to making work more meaningful is to build small teams that work. I've also surveyed many of the books that have been written on management, leadership, motivation and team-building and what I've found is that, despite advances in management theory and sincere efforts on the parts of many organizations to improve their effectiveness, there's still a large disconnect between the theory and the practice. This is one of the best and most practical books that I've found and may help to bridge that gap.
I don't normally like the fable approach. I find it hard enough to extract workable lessons from a book and apply them, and I tend to lose patience when I'm expected to give credence to stories that ask me to relate to mice whose cheese has moved or workers in fish markets. There's relevance in these stories, but it's not a learning style I like. Nonetheless, I liked this fable well enough. The characters, although stereotypical, do come to life. And the story of the stages a group of people needs to go through to transform itself into a highly performing team is relevant and memorable.
There's another advantage to the book's format. If you want a full summary, you can simply skip to the end of the book where Lencioni provides his well-tried model for helping top management teams through the process. In the last chapter, Lencioni describes the five dysfunctions, which are:
1. Absence of trust - "Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group.
2. Fear of conflict - "Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas
3. Lack of commitment - "Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions."
4. Avoidance of accountability - "Without committing to clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team
5. Inattention to results - "Team members put their individual needs - such as ego, career, or recognition - above the collective goals of the team."
He then gives some practical advice for fixing the problems (or building a team from scratch). There's nothing new or surprising about this advice, but it's simple and actionable. For example, to build trust he recommends two simple exercises, each of which can be done in under an hour: 1) have each member tell the team a small list of things about themselves, such as: number of siblings, hometown, unique challenges of childhood, favorite hobbies, first job, and worst job, and 2) Starting with the leader, have each member identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team, as well as one area that they could improve or eliminate for the good of the team
Lencioni's advice, by itself, is not enough to turn a dysfunctional team into a highly performing one. I'd recommend reading some other books on management, like Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive, Buckingham and Coffman's First Break All The Rules, or tapes on team-building and motivation, like Mark Sanborn's Team Building: How to Motivate and Manage People. These will give you ideas for additional interventions that might help improve your own management performance and that of your team.
This is an excellent book. It's focused on one idea - how to build a top management team - and its message is simple enough to be remembered and acted upon. The success of an organization and the welfare of its members is highly correlated with the effectiveness of its management team, so this book could do a lot of good for a lot of people.
|
|
|
|
1 2 Total 2 pages 13 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
