Sport psychology : Lencioni 2007

Question 1

5 dysfunctions within a team.

Answer 1

1. Dysfunction one: An absence of trust among team members.
   – (resulting problem: invulnerability)
2. Dysfunction two: Fear of conflict.
   – (resulting problem: artificial harmony)
3. Dysfunction three: Lack of commitment.
   – (resulting problem: ambiguity)
4. Dysfunction four: An avoidance of accountability.
   – (resulting problem: low standards)
5. Dysfunction five: Inattention to results.
   – (resulting problem: status and ego)

Question 2

How members of truly cohesive teams behave:

Answer 2

1. They trust one another.
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action.
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering
   against those plans.
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

Question 3

Overcoming dysfunction 1

Answer 3

• Personal histories exercise
• Team effectiveness exercise – team members identify the single
most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the
team, as well as one area that they must either improve upon or
eliminate for the good of the team
• Personality and behavioral preference tools (e.g., MBTI)
• 360-degree feedback – (the author recommends that this be
divorced from compensation and formal performance evaluation)
• Experiential team exercises – ropes courses, and other experiential
team exercises (note: the author observes that these seem to have
lost some of their luster in recent years)
• The role of the leader: demonstrate vulnerability first; genuine,
not staged.

Question 4

Overcoming dysfunction 2

Answer 4

2. Suggestions for overcoming dysfunction 2
   • Acknowledge that conflict is productive.
   • Mining – extract disagreements, call out sensitive issues…
   • Real-time permission – openly state, in the heat of the moment, that this conflict is productive;
   “it is ok, even good, for us to have this conflict…”
   • The role of the leader: practice restraint; allow conflict, and resolution, to occur naturally.
   (Do not let the {natural} desire to protect members from harm to prematurely interrupt disagreements).

Question 5

Overcoming dysfunction 3

Answer 5

3. Suggestions for overcoming dysfunction 3
   • Recognize the dangers inherent within the desire for consensus and certainty.
   • Cascading messaging – leave meetings clearly aligned with one another
   • Deadlines – make clear deadlines for when decisions will be made, and honor those deadlines with
   discipline and rigidity.
   • Contingency and worst-case scenario analysis
   • Low risk exposure therapy – demonstrate decisiveness in relatively low-risk situations
   • The role of the leader: the leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that
   ultimately turns out to be wrong. And the leader must be constantly pushing the group for closure around
   issues, as well as adherence to schedules that the team has set. What the leader cannot do is place too
   high a premium on certainty or consensus.

Question 6

Suggestions for overcoming dysfunction 4

Answer 6

4. Suggestions for overcoming dysfunction 4
   • Accountability refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or
   behaviors that might hurt the team.
   • Publication of goals and standards – the enemy of accountability is ambiguity
   • Simple and regular progress reviews
   • Team rewards
   • The role of the leader: to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability
   mechanism. (Sometimes strong leaders naturally create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving
   themselves as the only source of discipline).

Question 7

Suggestions for overcoming dysfunction 5

Answer 7

• Team status – plenty of teams fall prey to the lure of status.
• Individual status – the familiar tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career
prospects at the expense of the team.
• Recognize that many teams are simply not results focused – they do not live and breathe in order to
achieve meaningful objectives, but rather merely to exist or survive.
• Public declaration of results – teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to
work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results.
• Results based rewards – letting someone take home a bonus merely for “trying hard” sends a
message that achieving the outcome may not be terribly important after all.
• The role of the leader: perhaps more than any of the other dysfunctions, the leader must set
the tone for a focus on results. If team members sense that the leader values anything other than results,
they will take it as permission to do the same for themselves.