A Leadership Fable
Patrick Lencioni
ISBN 0-7879-6075-6
Read: 2008 April 13th and 20th
Reviewed: 2008 May 15
This delightful little book is a very quick read. You really canÕt put it down. It is the realistic story of a management team and the main reasons, in our culture at least, why they arenÕt effective. It is interesting to know that executives everywhere agree: If they could get everybody on their team on the same page and pulling together, they could beat anybody else in their business regardless of raw talent. What a powerful statement! Superstars are not all theyÕre cracked up to be.
Different people (one of my managers at work, my psychologist, etc.) had been recommending this book for some time. I was in an especially ready state to absorb its message and advice. The team I was on at work for the last five years is not a team. When I took the little quiz at the end of the book, my that team failed miserably. There, it is just a group of pretty good people working under an abusive and insecure superstar. On this reading I was already in the late stages of deciding to change jobs away from that team anyway.
The leadership team IÕm on at church, on the other hand, the Trustees at Pasadena Covenant, after a year and a half of working together on really tough issues, really is a team. WeÕve learned to act and lead without the necessity of total agreement. WeÕve learned to be respectful and bring out rather than suppressing our differences. WeÕve learned to listen to each other, pray together, and do difficult things in the best way we can. I would fact any crises with these people. They are the best.
The form of the book is to tell the story of a new CEO who comes in to save a well endowed startup from self-destruction. She knows which battles to pick and how to fight them. She makes mistakes. She loses some people (who need to be lost) and she has to fire one, but in the end they pull it out. The reader is on the edge of their seat the whole time. You canÕt wait to see what happens in the next meeting or confrontation.
Some big take-away messages are: Conflict is good, within the context of trust and commitment where it can play out non-destructively. It brings out needed diversity. ÒEnter the danger.Ó Consensus, that is, everybody agreeing, is the enemy. Effective teams disagree and commit in order to move. People will usually go along with a vote that is not the way they wanted it if the have been fully heard and understood by their colleagues who they trust.
The five dysfunctions, in the order that they must be addressed, are:
The last one says, in effect, ÒIf you donÕt know what your goals are, how can you achieve them? This is another message IÕve heard many times in jump-starting myself to manage my own career effectively.
If these dysfunctions donÕt make sense just looking at them, they sure do in the context of the narrative, where they are brought out one at a time to the executive team by their new CEO.
Another big takeaway message is that none of this is easy. You can get people to intellectually assent to the fact that they donÕt trust each other, they donÕt want conflict, they want to avoid each other in the halls, and so forth, but when you get back to the office from the offsite retreat where all this was carefully presented and worked out, nothing is different. The old patterns are hard, hard, hard to overcome and change. But, by pushing in the right direction consistently and persistently, you can at least move in the right direction.
Now I understand what a CEO actually does. And, having learned from lots of bad experience (not just the work team IÕm on now which really isnÕt remotely similar to a team, but others on which and in which IÕve made mistakes in the past) IÕm ready to lead an effective team myself now.
So, letÕs get going!