5 Dysfunctions (Lencioni)
Lencioni's model stacks the five things that break teams - each resting on the one below - so the fix has to start at the bottom, with trust.
Five layers stack up, trust at the base and results at the peak, each holding up the next.
Reach for this when…
- A team is busy and polite but not actually delivering together.
- Meetings are agreeable in the room and undermined afterwards.
- You suspect the presenting problem sits on top of a deeper one.
How to run it
- Diagnose from the bottom. Without trust, people will not risk real conflict.
- Build vulnerability-based trust first with a personal-histories exercise - each person shares background, a real struggle, and one strength, starting with the most senior person in the room.
- Once trust holds, provoke healthy conflict: put the two or three decisions the team has been avoiding on the table and insist on unfiltered debate rather than false agreement.
- Turn debate into clear commitment - end every discussion by stating the decision and who owns it, even without full consensus.
- With those in place, hold each other accountable to commitments in the room, then shift attention from individual ego to collective results.
A worked example
Situation. Grace Turner ran the seven-person exec team at Meridian Freight Group, a logistics firm in Melbourne, Australia, and every decision made in the boardroom came undone within a week once people were back at their desks.
Applied. Starting at the base of the pyramid, she opened the next offsite with a personal-histories exercise and went first herself - sharing a real setback, not a highlight reel - and for the first time people risked disagreeing with each other out loud.
Result. The debates got sharper and shorter, decisions actually held after the meeting, and the polite nodding followed by quiet sabotage stopped showing up in the weeks after.
The catch
The pyramid is clean; teams are not. Trust and conflict develop together rather than in a strict order, and pushing 'productive conflict' before trust is real does damage. It names the pattern well, but the sequence is a guide, not a law.
Skipping to accountability while trust is still missing just teaches people to hide better.
Origin: Patrick Lencioni