S3E8 – 5 Dysfunctions of a Team

Show Notes

 Andy and Mon-Chaio explore Patrick Lencioni’s concept of the five dysfunctions of a team, discussing how absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results interrelate to impact team performance. They reflect on their own experiences and the importance of productive conflict, peer accountability, and commitment to collective success. Listeners will learn how examining organizational structure and culture can address these dysfunctions and improve team dynamics. Andy and Mon-Chaio also stumble upon the topic for the next episode on holding individuals accountable in areas outside one’s expertise.

References:

• 5 Dysfunctions of a Team PDF resource – https://files.tablegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/11224029/FiveDysfunctions.pdf
• 5 Dysfunctions of a Team – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team
• Team Effectiveness: A Validation Study of Lencioni’s Five Functions of a Team – https://lib.manaraa.com/books/A%20validation%20study%20of%20Lencioni’s%20five%20functions%20of%20a%20team.pdf

Transcript

Andy: And we’re back for another TTL podcast episode, Mon-Chaio. We’re gonna dive in, and get to the root of this issue, aren’t we?

Mon-Chaio: We are, but there’s only five roots,

Andy: There’s only five roots. Five routes. Yeah. The number five is important in this. We’re gonna be talking about the five core dysfunctions of a team, Unlike last time, rather than going through a big example we’ll take this, a piece at a time, talk through it, say where it’s coming from, whether or not it really exists, maybe a few examples and see where it goes.

Should we just dive straight in? There’s no need for a big introduction, I think.

Mon-Chaio: We’re talking about the five dysfunctions of a team, which is a concept first published by Lencioni.

Andy: Patrick Lencioni. In the book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Mon-Chaio: And the book was I believe a, leadership parable. Yes.

Andy: Yes, it was one of the big There must have been a time period when these were really popular. Where you write a story, and in the story has all of the lessons that you need to learn.

Mon-Chaio: you’re right. We did one of these, which was the, uh, which one was it? Um,

Andy: it, did we talk about The Goal? Yeah, that would have been The Goal. The Theory of Constraints was another parable book.

Mon-Chaio: I guess, they’re a little more consumable perhaps. Both of these I felt like were kind of easy reads in some ways. If a little bit condescending at times,

Andy: I think The Five Dysfunctions is easier to read than, the goal, but also it’s much more direct in what you’re supposed to learn than the goal is, I

Mon-Chaio: right? Yeah, instead of going around and around. Um, absolutely. So, there are well, five dysfunctions of a team, the dysfunctions that he lists are. Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

Andy: And they compound, or they kind of, grow on each other. So he has one that’s foundational, trust. If you had trust, then you could have what he calls productive conflict, or just conflict. And if you could have productive conflict, you can have commitment,

and if you have commitment, you can have accountability. And if you can have accountability, you can actually focus on

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: A highly effective team has all five of those things, and a dysfunctional team will be lacking one or more of them in some way.

Mon-Chaio: Right. And Lencioni was not a researcher, I don’t believe. Do you know his background?

Andy: I actually don’t. But I did look up to see if anyone has researched what he posited.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: And I found one PhD article. One PhD paper. Which, he, the, the Ph. D. student went through and confirmed that all of these five functions or dysfunctions show up in other leadership and management literature. There is some evidence to support that they exist.

Lencioni in the book gives, a short survey. I have the survey from the Ph. D. dissertation, which we’ll link in the show notes. He did a, a, a kind of small survey, validation test on it. So a few different methods for checking, is it consistent?

Is it reliable? Does it seem connected to other concepts? And I think he correlated it with another survey for a few of the concepts. And basically he found they’re all things that show up elsewhere in the literature. So it seems okay. And the survey seems. Connected to what it’s trying to measure so that was the outcome from that PhD paper

Mon-Chaio: Which is really good because, As we were saying, Lencioni is not a researcher. He put his thoughts in sort of this leadership parable. He posits that there’s this triangle of dysfunctions that build on top of each other, which, I don’t believe that triangle has ever been researched at all.

Andy: I don’t think he went into that kind of like interaction between them at

Mon-Chaio: Right. And he, in the book, has some tactics for addressing various portions of these dysfunctions, which also have not been researched or not research backed. This isn’t something that we would normally take and say, look, this is a prime breeding ground of tactics and learnings. And yet, like all good books, and I think the five dysfunctions of a team has been quoted many times, it was written quite a while ago, I believe.

Andy: Back in the 90s, I think

Mon-Chaio: And it is something that I’ve heard quoted, even by people who don’t study leadership. So it’s pretty well known, and I think part of that is because it makes intuitive sense. Like, I think the triangle hasn’t been studied, but You can imagine that in order to have productive conflict, you have to have trust. And you can imagine that if you can’t have productive conflict, then it’s difficult to get to commitment, and so

on and so forth.

Andy: which fits exactly once again that gets the very first level of the PhD research into it it has what’s called face validity. If you take someone who knows something about the area and you show them this they’re like yeah, that seems sensible. There’s nothing immediately wrong that I see in it.

So it has what they call face validity.

Mon-Chaio: I like that. I haven’t heard that term before. Do you know if that’s a widely used research term?

Andy: Yeah, that is one of the forms of validity. There’s multiple different kind of layers of validity, and face validity is kind of like the lowest level of validity. And, not necessarily the one you want to focus on the most. Because some things that have no face validity can be completely

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Absolutely. I think we thought that beyond face validity, it was interesting to talk about because it’s in the cultural milieu in some ways people talk about it. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that these are the only five dysfunctions of a team. And as long as you satisfy all of these, you have a high performing team. But again, that face validity. We might look at it and say, if you’re missing any one of these, you probably do have a dysfunction and your team probably isn’t performing as well as it could be.

Andy: Yeah. Even if these aren’t complete, I would say, they’re easy to notice. There could be other things that are harder to pin down, like, what exactly is going on, but, absence of conflict, fairly easy to notice. Absence of commitment, you kind of get that feeling if you’re in a team that’s not committing.

You’re like, wait a second, we’re not actually ever committing to anything.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: I think it’s easy for people in there and for people watching to notice these things happening.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. Should we start at the bottom and kind of

give our thoughts and work our way up and see where we end up?

Andy: Yeah, I think that’s through traditional way as well to go through go through the five dysfunctions you start at the bottom of the triangle

Mon-Chaio: In the bottom of the triangle is trust. The other part of it is absence of trust. Lencioni says that trust is about vulnerability. He even posits that if you have a team without trust, at least in his book, the tactic is to create workshops or situations where you can talk about being vulnerable with your team.

Lencioni thinks it’s the bottom of the triangle. As somebody who thinks trust is very foundational, I tend to agree. Although I don’t agree about this concept of vulnerability. I think it’s fine, but for listeners that have heard our episode on trust in season one, we talked about, there’s varying levels of trust.

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Uh, and there’s, um, of course, I’m not going to be able to remember the term because it is such a terrible term. I hate it.

Andy: Yeah,

Mon-Chaio: Calculus based trust. I believe it was.

Andy: that’s what it was. Yes. Yeah, there was calculus based trust and,

Mon-Chaio: Value.

Andy: Oh, something else.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah. You see, uh, we don’t have

Andy: So poorly named, we can’t remember it, even though we spent, I don’t know how many hours thinking about it.

Mon-Chaio: In either case, regardless of what they were named, there’s trust that is transactional.

This idea of you trust people because you can transact with them because they’ve shown you that they’re trustworthy to get something done that they said they would do or that they wouldn’t break a rule.

They said they would not break those types of things And then there’s trust based more on knowing people being vulnerable with them understanding their wants and wishes And that is a higher order of trust I think in our trust episode, what we said is, look, transactional trust is the minimum that you need. The most high performing organization should likely strive for the higher level of trust.

I do agree that trust can be the bottom of this pyramid, but I think he is missing that perhaps you can just get away with this calculus trust, base trust, or this transactional base trust, instead of having to be completely vulnerable

Andy: Yeah, to kind of bootstrap it, to prime the pump and get things going, you can kind of start with that. Yeah, I do recall thinking I don’t think immediately going to we start sharing life stories is necessary?

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Andy: It seems like a step kind of early. Now you might do it because you just want people to start talking. And maybe that’s what you’re trying to get out of it is actually, let’s just start talking on something that we won’t have a disagreement about so that we can get that first level of just enough trust to talk to each other.

Mon-Chaio: Right. And I think, using vulnerability for different means, like you were saying, just to get people to open up, might be useful. And I think it absolutely is useful to establish a culture of being vulnerable. But I don’t know about your experience, Andy. I have rarely been successful going into a team and saying, hey, I’m going to be vulnerable.

And then all of a sudden people are like, Oh.

Andy: Oh, let me tell you about myself. Hahahaha.

Mon-Chaio: I do think that, like, it’s a, it’s more of a cultural thing. It’s not something that you can just kind of jump in and model and

immediately you’re going to see.

Andy: I think that’s true. I think it does take a little bit longer. I guess the question is for these five dysfunctions is that transactional trust enough to get you going to the next level?

Mon-Chaio: And I think.

Andy: I think it

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I, think it is as well. And I think there’s research that backs this. Amy Edmondson who did the teaming work, discovered this I can’t remember what type of trust they call it. But they discovered that you can build this transactional level of trust really quickly.

That allows you, especially if you’re reteaming all the time, to really be productive in short cycles Oh, well, I have a new group of people I have to work with, but we’re only going to last three weeks or a month. That this transactional level of trust can prime it enough, that they can go and achieve results.

Andy: The next level of the pyramid after trust is fear of conflict, and then the functional side of it is to have conflict. And Mon-Chaio, isn’t conflict bad? Don’t we just want to get along and agree on things?

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, we do. I was talking to somebody about this just today, two hours ago, I think, we do, but I think it’s really difficult to get to where we need to go. If people aren’t willing to have some conflict, which paper was it? I believe it was the Peter Principle paper, that we were talking about. Which said there’s a difference between destructive consent and constructive dissent. Do you remember that?

Andy: I do remember that. Was that Peter Principle? That might’ve

Mon-Chaio: I think it might have been maybe it wasn’t. Well, i’m not going to be able to remember anymore This is the problem once you’re like 80

Andy: we’ve got so many of these

Mon-Chaio: I know right

Andy: we’re like, we know that they exist. We know that they’re out there, but we can’t keep it all straight.

Mon-Chaio: But I like that

Andy: yeah.

Mon-Chaio: We just have to work a little harder and But, but I like that term, right? I think too often organizations are in destructive consent. An example being product told us to do this. We’re going to do it.

This is what the spec says. We’re going to do it. Customer said they want this blue.

We’re going to make it blue. The constructive descent is trying to find the areas between the words, and between the ideas to actually achieve the best result. To me. That’s conflict. I don’t know how you feel about that.

Andy: To get to that point where we have gotten rid of the conflict. We first have to have the conflict. If you have a different understanding of what it is that we’re doing than I do, it doesn’t help us if I just stay silent and we go along with whatever you’re saying.

Now, it does help us if I say, I don’t think that that’s right. Here are my reasons. And we discuss them.

So we’ve had that conflict in order to get to a place of consent. And we’re not looking for conflict for the sake of conflict. We’re looking for conflict to uncover, information that wouldn’t have been available to us.

Mon-Chaio: agree. What about organizations that have no conflict because they have perfect understanding with each other? Everybody knows the information and understands it the same way.

Andy: I would seriously doubt that ever exists.

It doesn’t mean that we can’t immediately agree on some things. Some things it comes up and it’s just like, yeah, none of us have any other information. We immediately agree on it. There’s no need for conflict here. But if that’s the way it always is. Be concerned even if we all immediately agree I think that’s where it can be useful to say we all immediately agree on this a little too easily Let’s pick out one of us to be the devil’s advocate and the real meaning of the word someone else advocate for some other side and push us on it because that also is the real test of do we understand what it is that we’re all agreeing to

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I liked that part of it. I think, back to popular culture, three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I saw World War Z, that movie for the first time. Have you seen that one with Brad Pitt?

Andy: I’ve seen it, and I’ve read the book, and it’s another one of these ones where I liked the book

Mon-Chaio: Hmm. As is often the case.

Andy: Yeah. Mm

Mon-Chaio: There was a line in the movie where he is in the Israel compound and he asks, I was doing many things while watching this movie, so not paying a ton of attention. So he asked this, Israeli character, how did you know to build a compound? Such that you were the last safe city and you can keep all the zombies out. And that character said something to the effect of if nine people agree, the 10th person must disagree and investigate. While I think that’s a little rigid, I do like the idea if people are agreeing all the time, designate someone to be the devil’s advocate, to uncover more information. And you’re right to laugh at this idea that in an organization, everyone has perfect information and interprets it the same way. What is the likelihood that a productive, effective company Of more than two people are going to be able to get by with no conflict I think they’re probably just avoiding it and not really thinking about everything the same way

Andy: it can look like you have agreement and no conflict, but it can happen because people Just don’t have the energy to bring things up

I’ve seen this in various groups where you have the little whispers out of the meeting or behind, closed doors where people are just like, this is such a stupid idea. Why are we doing this? And then when you get into the actual decision making place, everyone’s like, yep, let’s do that.

And that, that gets to why Lencioni says that this is like this pyramid. What that’s really coming from is people don’t have the trust that if they raise this. Others who they know actually agree with them will support them, that they’ll have the debate and that the debate will matter. And so sometimes when, when people have no conflict, it’s not that they’re trying to preserve artificial harmony.

It could be they just don’t have the trust that their conflict would be helpful. That gets into an aspect of this model, which is that Each one of these things can be caused not only from something in its own realm, but by things in the other, areas as well.

Mon-Chaio: And it may still be to your point around trust that the conflict won’t be helpful. But I’ve definitely seen teams where the lack of conflict is due to being worn down.

I don’t know that I would say trust is the main factor, but sometimes teams have so much conflict that’s

Andy: that they’re worn out by

Mon-Chaio: That’s, unresolved, or unproductive conflict.

And I think you can have unproductive conflict even with high trust, just because of bureaucracy or other things around the team.

But definitely it’s like, I already argued for five hours. I think I’m done for the day.

Andy: Yeah. I’m arguing every single day. We’re always arguing about this. And that might be a thing, as you said, it could be about the environment they’re in. If the thing that you’re constantly in conflict about is something that’s outside of your control, outside of your team’s control, that’s not productive.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm

Andy: it doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it just takes your energy.

Mon-Chaio: And I think maybe we see this also, if I think about it with teams that are the boundaries of the teams are incorrect or unideal, not ideal, where you’re

Andy: talking about, things that you have no authority, accountability, or autonomy over, and yet you’re involved all the time in talking about these ideas.

It’s not gonna change.

Andy: And I think that, we can use that as a good point to step to the next one as well, which is commitment or lack of commitment. One way of looking at this lack of commitment would be if your attention is on things that are not in your control, you might not end up doing the things that are in your control, that you need to be focusing

Mon-Chaio: hmm. Mm

Andy: you end up with these things that you’re supposed to be doing as a team, and no one really buys into.

Mon-Chaio: This is the layer that I’m a little bit cautious about being influenced by the layer below it. I tend to think that it’s difficult to get to commitment without conflict simply because I think commitment requires some sort of local truth about what is and what isn’t.

And it’s difficult to get to that truth without conflict. Conflict is about exploring ideas and, without ideas you can’t get to that truth, in my opinion. But I don’t think the primary cause of lack of commitment is due to fear of conflict.

Andy: Okay.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah.

Andy: Where does it come from, in your mind?

Mon-Chaio: I think I would draw on the research that we did around setting challenging goals. Because I think part of what we talked about when we said you need to set challenging goals is the commitment to those goals.

Should a leader come in and deliver challenging goals and how do you commit to those? And if I remember the research correctly, a lot of it was, look, you build an organization with a culture of inquiry and trust. And that is the most effective way of creating challenging goals where people buy in. Lack of commitment often comes from structuring your organization wrong culturally or structurally. We talked about you being in a lot of meetings where you don’t have anything to say or you can’t actually affect the change. Shouting into the wind, right?

You could also be in an organization where you don’t have triple A, right? That doesn’t come from conflict, but it’s like, Hey, you are accountable with this thing, but you don’t have any autonomy. More than anything else, those two things, the cultural part and the structural part in my mind lead to lack of commitment more than this fear of conflict. When I look at those situations, I often see teams with a lot of conflict. They yell about it.

Andy: Yeah, I think the key is, that it’s not productive conflict. They’ll have lots of conflict. They’ll yell about it. They’ll scream. They’ll be like, this is stupid. This is insane. Why are we doing this? But it’s not productive conflict.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah,

Andy: Now, if they could turn that into conflict where they can actually get the people who are giving them the, thing to commit to, to change what it is, then, I think it would be productive.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I. That’s

Andy: is interesting. We’re kind of getting to, what is it even possible for you to truly commit to?

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, in some ways it’s. It’s a little pedantic, right?

And I’m not saying it’s bad pedantic. It’s just, I think from trust to conflict, it was really easy. It’s like, hey, lack of trust makes it difficult for us to have conflict. But now all of a sudden we’re saying, Oh, it’s not just conflict. It’s a subsection of conflict called productive conflict. And we haven’t even defined what productive conflict means. I’m worried that it’s a little bit of a tautology because it’s like oh productive conflict just means you can get to better results

Andy: And if they’re not better results, then it wasn’t

Mon-Chaio: That’s right and if it didn’t lead to commitment then it must not have been productive conflict But I think the whole point is trust can enable both productive and unproductive conflict and lack of

trust I think can uh can hinder all conflict even unproductive conflict

Andy: I do want to bring up one thing, which is that I’m looking in particular at the Table Group, which is Lencioni’s consulting company, a PDF that they have about these. And one of the things they have in addressing the dysfunctions, they ask does the team come to decisions quickly and avoid getting bogged down by consensus?

The conflict is not to get to consensus, it’s to get to enough of an understanding to find something to commit to. And maybe that’s the thing, helping the team find a way to commit to the thing that they’re being asked to commit to. or find a way of changing what that thing is to something that they can commit to.

Mon-Chaio: I

Andy: it’s not to have consensus about the whole

Mon-Chaio: I think we all agree with that. But you can come to decisions that you aren’t bought into. And that can affect commitment.

Andy: Yeah, that’s the disagree and commit

Mon-Chaio: and I think disagree and commit often leads to, you only do the work that’s right in front of you because, well, you actually disagree.

To me, that’s not commitment. And so then I worry that you can have, this conflict productive, I guess you would call it that leads to a decision where people disagree and commit. Sometimes that is all you’re looking for. And honestly, if we’re just looking for results, we’re not talking about the golden best result that this organization can give. In some ways, the five dysfunctions of a team are you’re not getting to results at all.

Andy: Yeah, I think we should say that a lot of these dysfunctions lead to teams that are so diffuse and so unfocused on anything, almost nothing happens,

Mon-Chaio: So in that case, I think you’re right that sometimes just being able to put a name on a JIRA ticket so that we can get to the next part, that accountability part. Is enough and for people to agree. Yup. My name belongs there, to some level of agreement.

Andy: which takes us on to the next one,

Mon-Chaio: Accountability.

Andy: accountability. So we got that minimal level of commitment, but it was actually commitment that the person said, yep, I’m doing that. I understand what it is. I’m doing it now. What you need is accountability.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: Accountability is avoiding interpersonal discomfort prevents the team members, from holding one another accountable for their behaviors and performance.

And I see this so often in, stand ups. Have you, Mon-Chaio, have you ever been in stand ups with teams where basically they’re going through their board and they’re calling out, like, Okay, Mon-Chaio, tell us about this ticket. And Mon-Chaio, your response is, it’s in progress. Okay, let’s move on.

That’s actually avoidance of accountability,

Mon-Chaio: yeah, I think the big part that speaks to me here, uh, to reread what you were reading prevents team members from holding one another accountable.

It doesn’t say prevent managers from holding team members accountable. I like that you leaned into what you need for personal accountability, the sharing of information, the ability to be vulnerable.

I think a lot of what I see in your stand up example, and I do see this, I would say I see this probably more than I see the other part of good standups. Maybe it’s an 80 20 split. Maybe it’s even a 90 10. I think most standups are this way. Accountability to your manager, not accountability to your team members. And the team members themselves don’t hold each other accountable for whatever reason. I think a lot of it is siloing. A lot of it is cultural or whatnot, but I often tell new leaders when they ask, well, how do I scale? One of the things I tell them is you need peer accountability. Not just manager accountability.

So that’s a culture thing. How are you going to build your team and your processes so that your peers are accountable to each other? Or

Andy: I think that’s really key. You’re right. Good to call that out. Because, I, I called this out in, like, stand ups. But you watch the exact same thing happened in, like, leadership team meetings. Where maybe you’re doing that go, you’re doing that go around where everyone’s talking about what’s happening in their area and no one questions anyone else about what’s going on.

Someone says, oh yeah, we’re, we’re working on this thing and we’re doing this and our system, our system had some downtime and, uh, all that. And no one else, like, speaks up and says, tell me about that downtime. What did you learn? How did it happen? I, I, I want to understand. No one wants to hold the other person. to account for what’s going on in their area. And when that doesn’t happen, it then starts falling on, like, the CTO is the only one who starts asking those questions. And then if the CTO is not there, they’re on holiday, or, or, or they have some important, like, meetings to go to to raise funds for the company to keep going.

The entire team never holds each other to account for what’s going on and so they kind of drift apart when the CTO isn’t there. Which is the worst fear of anyone in a leadership position is that if I’m not here it all falls apart.

Mon-Chaio: worst fear.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: yeah. But for people that are accountable, then. Then we get, Lencioni would say the top is results. It leads to results. And the dysfunction here is inattention to results. Where,

Andy: Which is the pursuit of individual goals or personal status. Which, actually, referring back to last episode, is that pathological. Uh, type of organization.

Mon-Chaio: a little muddy for me because I’m not sure that this leads this leads from accountability. Maybe it does because your peers are holding you accountable for team results versus your personal results, that you want to achieve. But from an individual standpoint, I think Yeah, you may have accountability But you may steer that accountability towards your own personal goals your career growth that you want to achieve the status that you want to achieve That sort of a thing.

So I’m not sure that that like follows directly from accountability.

Andy: I’m not, it’s not so much that if you have accountability, you’ll get, uh, focus on collective success. It’s more that if you don’t have accountability for those collective goals, you won’t be able to focus on collective success.

Mon-Chaio: I see. And so then if you’re

not, then the only, then the, uh, then the vacuum leaves only focusing on individual success and personal goals.

Andy: Yeah. Because, well, there is no way to have collective success if you don’t have accountability for what we’re up to. So, so you might as well just focus on your own individual goal.

Mon-Chaio: What’s interesting about this is most organizations tend to focus on individual goals.

Andy: Oh, yeah, this and this is why so much of the research says stop doing that.

Mon-Chaio: And yet, I would say a lot of these organizations that that really do focus on individual goals would say that the bottom four parts of this dysfunction pyramid they’ve tackled quite well. But I think as you were saying, just because you have accountability doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to achieve collective success.

Andy: Because, because it’s, it’s that you need all of those things and now you can start setting yourself for those collective success, the results of, of the organization, the results of the group.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: Doesn’t mean you will.

Mon-Chaio: hmm. Mm

Andy: Just like if you have commitment, conflict, and trust, doesn’t mean you will hold others accountable.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: But you have the option to do it now.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Right. I like that.

Andy: And I think that, I think that’s the way of thinking about this. Usually, when you talk about the five dysfunctions, and this is why it’s called the five dysfunctions, you talk about it in terms of the dysfunction, not in terms of the function.

You talk about it in terms of absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability. Because, I think in that setup, in the, in that kind of negative space, there’s one kind of, reinforces the next one occurring.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: But, just like we know from logic, I cannot flip, uh, what is it? I cannot flip a universal to find an existential assertion?

One way or the other. I don’t have it on top of my head. We can’t just flip these around and say that well, because in the negative case each one was a consequence of the prior, in the positive case, it doesn’t mean that you’re forced that each one then is once again a consequence of the other. It’s that Each one is now no longer being blocked by the prior.

Mon-Chaio: Exactly. That makes sense. Mm

Andy: you, if once you have trust, you can have conflict, but you don’t necessarily get productive conflict. Once you have productive conflict, you can get commitment, but you won’t necessarily get commitment. Once you can have commitment, you can have accountability, but you won’t necessarily get it. And once you can have accountability, you will get, you can get results, but not necessarily.

Each one of those, you have to do something more to get. Whereas the dysfunctions, very nicely, just feed each other. If you don’t have trust, you won’t have conflict, you won’t get commitment, and you’ll, won’t get accountability, and you won’t get great results.

Mon-Chaio: I like it. I think that’s a very clear way to present these five dysfunctions. So at the C suite level, I’ll have to think more about this. This is just off the cuff. It feels like, it feels like peer accountability must be less about the specific KPIs and business results. And more on, as I mentioned earlier, this idea of we’re all trying to solve a specific problem or a theme that we’re focusing on now, because like, if I look at the sales organization and I see that they’re 15 percent off their new contracts closed to dollars.

In

Andy: Mm hmm. Mm

Mon-Chaio: that doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t know how to hold them to account for that when they say, Oh, we’re off because of seasonal values. And here’s my chart on seasonal values. And also because federal funding fell short here. So people aren’t applying for grants. Like I, I don’t know whether that’s true. I’m not like deep in there. I’m not with the lobbyist. And so I kind of just have to take it at face value, right? There’s some areas that I can absolutely probe, but for the most part, it feels difficult to hold them to account for that. And you know, there’s a lot of jargon, right? Like my, my, um, uh, my financial partner, my CFO, is building models that they’re calling seven plus five models, which I believe means you take the previous seven to project the next five and they’re talking about the ways in which the models weren’t working and so like how this is a better model for projecting dollars and I can’t hold him to account because like, I don’t really know whether it’s right or wrong or, I mean, better model or worse model.

Andy: Well, you should be holding them to account for the things that are That are the organizational goals at that executive suite level. So you’ll have, like, I can’t imagine that a particular model is an organizational goal. I, I would expect that a, the organizational goal is more along the lines of either investment or revenue streams or product strategy.

Uh, being, doing those things. In which case, a CFO would be

using the model to inform the conversation about how those things are going.

Mon-Chaio: Correct. And so then if I’m the consumer, if I’m a direct consumer of the model, let’s say I’m the CEO and I require the model to do fundraising or to project or to inform the board of what’s going on, I as a CEO can hold the CFO to account for deficiencies in the model.

Andy: hmm.

Mon-Chaio: but and if I’m technology and I’m sort of two orders removed from it.

I just care about whether the funding happened or not. It’s difficult for me to understand where in that causal chain that fell apart, right? Like, it could either be the CEO’s fault for not presenting that well, or it could be the CFO’s fault for not feeding the right information in. But to me, I I can’t, I don’t understand that enough to hold either of them to account unless I, again, dive in and have them both explain it to me in such a way that I can ask questions.

Andy: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s, that’s a really good thing. And I’m trying to, I’m trying to figure out, like, is there a way that we could dive into that? Like, how do you, maybe we’re getting into the next stage of this inquiry into companies. How they can, they can encounter problems and how they can identify them and treat them and turn around.

Which is, these things are happening. You’ve now identified that something’s going on. So like maybe, Mon-Chaio, you’re, you’re saying like, Ah, well, I have the trust and I can see that there’s commitment, but I have no idea how to ask the questions to be able to hold people to account in things that I am not, myself, intimately familiar with.

Maybe that’s where we go next, is how can you hold someone to account on something that you do not have such deep familiarity with?

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. I’d love to talk about it. I obviously don’t have an answer so

would love to

Andy: is a great reason to go and research it and figure out, can we come up with something?

Well, that’s not where I expected to end this episode, but I think that is a really good point, that we can leave it. We hit the edge of our knowledge, which we are quite willing to accept and quite willing to admit to others I hope everyone enjoyed listening to us blather on about these five dysfunctions.

Uh, somewhat disagree as well, because, apparently some of the feedback is we don’t disagree enough, so for your listening pleasure, we have disagreed a bit more. And if anyone wants help on this, where you’re interested in having people who do know a fair amount about these techniques, but are also willing to admit when we don’t know what we’re doing, then please get in touch.

Please tell us your thoughts. Ask your questions at the hosts at, no, not the hosts, at hosts at the ttlpodcast. com. That is hosts with an s at the ttlpodcast. com and until next time where it seems we might be talking about how to inquire into things that you don’t know very much about. Mon-Chaio, be kind and stay curious.