The Five Dysfunctions, Read as a Diagnostic

The training closed with Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions — a model I’d encountered a half-dozen times across my eighteen engineering years, in books I’d read and books my better managers had recommended, without ever using it well. The training didn’t change the model. It changed how I read it. From a tidy framework about why teams fail into a diagnostic I can run, in real time, on the team I lead.

That’s why I want to close this series with it. Every essay so far has been about a specific lens — engagement and capability, communication styles, fierce conversations, trust, safety, coaching, feedback formats. The Five Dysfunctions are where those lenses connect. Each dysfunction maps to something I’ve already written about. Read together, they explain why care is the route through, not around, the work of making a team effective.

The pyramid, briefly

The model is read bottom-up. Each layer depends on the one below it. A team without trust can’t have healthy conflict. A team without healthy conflict can’t reach genuine commitment. A team without commitment can’t hold real accountability. A team without accountability can’t sustain attention to results.

That dependency is the thing I most often forget when something on a team is struggling. The temptation is to address the visible symptom — a missed result, a slipping commitment — when the actual fix is at a layer below. The pyramid is a diagnostic for where to look, not a checklist of things to fix in parallel.

How I read each layer in practice

Absence of trust. This is where everything starts, and the layer I’ve been most deliberate about from day one of this role. The practices I wrote about in essay 9 — integrity in small commitments, competence with honest gaps, compassion in the everyday, reliability in promises kept — are all foundation work. The team I lead has trust because I’ve spent two years building it on purpose, and because they’ve extended it back to me as I’ve earned it. That foundation is what makes everything above it possible.

The mistake to avoid here is treating trust as a hire-and-onboard concern that’s “done” once a team has gelled. Trust decays. Especially under pressure, especially across reorganisations, especially when a leader has been distracted. The work is continuous, and the pyramid rests on it.

Fear of conflict. When trust is present and conflict still doesn’t happen, the team has learned — somewhere — that disagreement is unsafe. The practices I wrote about in essays 6 and 10 — fierce conversations as care, safety as permission to bring the mess — are what keep this layer alive. My team disagrees with me, in public, with frequency. That’s the test that the layer is healthy. The work to keep it that way is the small moves I make every time someone brings a hard thing.

Lack of commitment. Even with trust and healthy conflict, commitment can fail. The signature is decisions that get made and then quietly relitigated, or commitments that are nodded to in the room and then ignored in the work. The cause, almost always, is that the commitment wasn’t real — people agreed to stop the conversation, not to do the thing.

The responsive move here is to insist on dissent before the close. The line I use: who is still uncomfortable with this, and what would have to be true for you to commit? Sometimes the answer is “nothing, I just needed to say it”; sometimes it surfaces a real constraint that changes the decision. Either way, the commitment that follows is the kind that holds. GROW’s Way forward is the same idea at the individual scale.

Avoidance of accountability. Once commitments are real, accountability becomes possible. The dysfunction shows up when people don’t hold each other to those commitments — when the agreement quietly slips and no one says anything. My instinct in my first year was to step in and be the accountability myself. That works in the short term and corrodes the team in the long term, because the team never learns to hold each other.

The practice I’m settling into is to make the team’s agreements mutual and explicit — and to model holding myself accountable in public when it’s my own commitment that’s slipped. The team’s willingness to hold each other comes from watching me do that, repeatedly, with my own commitments.

Inattention to results. This is the dysfunction that looks like a results problem and almost never is. A team that’s been failing at trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability is going to look like it’s inattentive to results. The fix isn’t to push harder on results. It’s to look at the layer below and see which one is actually broken.

The one exception — and it’s real — is the team where individual incentives are pulling people away from the shared outcome. When that’s the real dysfunction, the fix is structural. But that’s a smaller share of “results” problems than people assume. Most of them are foundation problems wearing a results costume.

What I’ll do with the pyramid

I’ll run it on my team a few times a year, informally. If I had to point to the highest layer where we’re functioning well, where would I point? The answer tells me where my next work is. The temptation is to focus on the top of the pyramid because that’s where the visible outcomes live. The right move is to focus one layer below where the team is currently functional — because that’s where the next gap is.

I’ll run it on myself when I’m struggling with a specific person. Is the issue that I don’t trust their judgement? That I’m avoiding a hard conversation with them? That a commitment between us was never real? That I’m carrying their accountability for them? The honest answer almost always names the layer I need to act on, and almost always it’s not the layer I was about to act on.

The team-effectiveness lens, restated

I want to close the series with the same point I started it with, now that we have the language to be precise about it.

Every dysfunction in this pyramid is, in operational terms, a tax on team throughput. Absence of trust shows up as slower decisions and underground conflict. Fear of conflict shows up as bad decisions and surprises later. Lack of commitment shows up as work that re-litigates itself. Avoidance of accountability shows up as drift. Inattention to results shows up as missed outcomes.

The responsive practices in this series — empathy as diagnosis, transparency as collaboration, fierce conversations as care, coaching as growth, trust as infrastructure, safety as permission — are not soft alternatives to running an effective team. They are how you run an effective team. The pyramid is the explicit map of why.

A note to the team I lead

I want to close with something direct, because this whole series owes them a public acknowledgement.

The way I’ve been leading this team for the last two years has been more learning than doing, on my side. I’ve been trying things, sometimes badly. I’ve been bringing the engineer’s love of process and rigour into a role where the most important skill is reading the person in front of me. I’ve been a teller learning to listen, a planner learning to flex, a routines-person learning that other people’s rhythms aren’t mine to override.

The team I lead has trusted me to be in their work, in their week, in their thinking. That trust is what’s let me practise the moves I’ve been writing about across these fourteen essays. None of the frameworks in the training would have helped if I hadn’t been close enough to the team to know who needed what. The closeness was the precondition. The frameworks added language for it.

Thank you to my team. I’m a better manager because of you, and the part of this series that matters most is the part where I name that.

What I’m taking forward

I came into this training with the same job I’m leaving with: lead a team that does excellent work and grows the people doing it. What I have now that I didn’t have a week ago is a clearer sense of how those two are the same job, not competing jobs. Caring about the people is the work of making the team effective. The shortcuts that pretend otherwise — the manager who’s “results-focused, not people-focused” — are not shortcuts. They’re debt that the team eventually pays.

The best leaders I worked under across my engineering years were people I could feel the care from in the smallest moments — the way they remembered something I’d said about my family three months earlier, the way they corrected themselves in public when they’d been wrong, the way they took the hard conversation as a gift to me instead of as a burden to themselves. They were also the leaders whose teams shipped the best work I’ve seen. Those two facts are not coincidence. They are the same fact, observed from two angles.

That’s what I want this series to land on. Care isn’t soft. Effectiveness isn’t cold. The leaders I most respect have shown me that they are the same conversation, held well, for a long time.

I’m twenty-two months into being one of those leaders. The training gave me sharper tools. The work, as always, is in the next conversation.