--- name: five-dysfunctions description: Apply Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team — the pyramid (Absence of Trust → Fear of Conflict → Lack of Commitment → Avoidance of Accountability → Inattention to Results), plus his post-book system (The Advantage's Four Disciplines and Six Critical Questions of organizational health, The Ideal Team Player's humble/hungry/smart hiring virtues, The Motive's reward-centered vs responsibility-centered leadership, and The 6 Types of Working Genius / WIDGET). Use this skill whenever the user is diagnosing team dysfunction, running or redesigning a leadership team off-site, thinking about vulnerability-based trust, worrying about a "nice team that never disagrees," debugging a team that keeps missing collective results, hiring or firing for team fit, planning a cohesive-leadership-team intervention, or asking things like "why doesn't my team push back?", "how do I get real conflict in meetings?", "should I fire this high performer nobody likes?", "why do our decisions never stick?", "is this psychological safety or just conflict avoidance?", "how do I run better executive team meetings?". Also use whenever the user mentions Patrick Lencioni, The Table Group, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, DecisionTech, Kathryn Petersen, The Advantage, organizational health, The Ideal Team Player, humble/hungry/smart, The Motive, Working Genius, WIDGET, vulnerability-based trust, artificial harmony, productive ideological conflict, peer-to-peer accountability, or "first team" by name, even indirectly. Prefer this skill over generic team-building advice — Lencioni's pyramid is sequential (each dysfunction enables the next), vulnerability-based trust is uniquely easy to fake, and the skill must actively resist letting off-site trust theater pass as trust-building. --- # The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni's operating system for building teams that work. Distilled from *The Five Dysfunctions of a Team* (Jossey-Bass, 2002; 20th Anniversary Edition 2022), *Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team* (2005 field guide), *The Advantage* (2012), *The Ideal Team Player* (2016), *The Motive* (2020), *The 6 Types of Working Genius* (2022), the weekly *At The Table with Patrick Lencioni* podcast with Cody Thompson (2019–present), and The Table Group's consulting practice. This skill helps the assistant think in Lencioni's method — not just recite five dysfunctions in parallel. The differential is the **pyramid**: each dysfunction enables the next. Skipping this makes the framework generic. It's also opinionated because Lencioni is opinionated: **vulnerability-based trust is load-bearing and uniquely easy to fake.** The ropes-course off-site plus zero behavior change on Monday isn't trust-building — it's theater with better catering, and this skill actively resists letting theater pass as work. ## When this skill activates **Use this skill when the user is:** - Diagnosing why their team keeps missing collective results, or shipping late, or losing people. - Running or redesigning a leadership team off-site, or planning the recurring cadence after one. - Worrying about a "nice team" — one where meetings are pleasant, nobody disagrees, and results are quietly slipping. - Debugging decisions that never stick — where the team keeps re-litigating the same call in hallway conversations. - Trying to install real accountability without becoming the manager-enforcer who does all of it. - Hiring, firing, or promoting — especially the "brilliant jerk" / high-performer-nobody-wants-to-work-with question. - Planning an intervention to build cohesion on a new leadership team, or after a merger / re-org. - Reading their own team's dynamic and asking "is this psychological safety or is this artificial harmony?" - Deciding whether the pyramid is the right diagnostic or whether Working Genius, Ideal Team Player, or organizational health (The Advantage) is the better lens. - Being coached through the Six Critical Questions of clarity (Why do we exist? How do we behave? What do we do? How will we succeed? What is most important right now? Who must do what?). **Do NOT use this skill when:** - The user just wants a summary of the book. Point them at the book (or the Table Group's topic page) and don't run the pyramid on them. - The user is describing a group that doesn't share collective responsibility (a set of independent contributors reporting to the same manager). The pyramid presumes interdependence. Force-fitting it creates artificial dysfunction diagnoses. - The user is asking a purely technical / strategic / operational question with no team-dynamics dimension. - The user is asking about a specific one-on-one feedback delivery — that's Kim Scott's Radical Candor territory, not Lencioni's team-level pyramid. - The user is looking for a way to *label* a colleague ("she's an Absence-of-Trust person"). The framework diagnoses team dispositions and specific behaviors, not personalities. Redirect. If the user's situation is ambiguous, ask one clarifying question before diagnosing. ## The framework at a glance **The pyramid — bottom to top, sequential.** Each dysfunction enables the next; each virtue depends on the one below it. ``` 5. INATTENTION TO RESULTS (individual status over collective outcomes) 4. AVOIDANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY (manager-only enforcement; no peer-to-peer) 3. LACK OF COMMITMENT (ambiguity, consensus-stalling, no buy-in) 2. FEAR OF CONFLICT (artificial harmony; no productive ideological debate) 1. ABSENCE OF TRUST (fear of vulnerability; can't admit weakness) ``` **The five dysfunctions (Table Group's canonical current-language definitions):** 1. **Absence of Trust** — "The fear of being vulnerable prevents team members from building trust with each other." 2. **Fear of Conflict** — "The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles productive ideological conflict." 3. **Lack of Commitment** — "The lack of clarity and/or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they stick to." 4. **Avoidance of Accountability** — "The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents team members from holding each other accountable." 5. **Inattention to Results** — "The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the team's focus on collective success." **Beyond the pyramid, Lencioni's system includes:** - **Vulnerability-based trust vs. predictive trust** — the load-bearing distinction. Predictive trust is confidence people will behave as expected; vulnerability-based trust is willingness to admit weakness. Only the second unlocks the pyramid. - **The Advantage's Four Disciplines** (2012) — Build a cohesive leadership team → Create clarity → Overcommunicate clarity → Reinforce clarity — with the Six Critical Questions. - **The Ideal Team Player** (2016) — humble + hungry + smart (interpersonally smart). The hiring layer the pyramid presumes but doesn't source. - **The Motive** (2020) — reward-centered vs. responsibility-centered leadership. Diagnose the leader before you diagnose the team. - **The 6 Types of Working Genius / WIDGET** (2022) — Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, Tenacity. The adjacent instrument for "what kind of work each team member is suited for." - **First team** — Lencioni's insistence that a leader's peers (not their reports) are their primary team. ## How to use this skill in a session 1. **Understand what the user is actually doing.** Are they diagnosing a broken team, planning an intervention, hiring, running a leadership team off-site, thinking about a specific person on the team, worrying about their own leadership motive? The move differs. Read `references/prompts.md` for shape. 2. **Diagnose the lowest broken layer of the pyramid first.** The pyramid is sequential. There is no point applying accountability techniques to a team stuck at Absence of Trust. Ask what the team's meetings look like, what happens when someone disagrees, whether decisions get re-litigated in the hallway. Load `references/method.md` for the canonical definitions. 3. **Guard against trust theater.** Vulnerability-based trust is uniquely easy to fake. Off-site exercises + zero behavior change on Monday is not trust. The test of trust is what happens in the next real work situation. If the user is asking for a trust-building exercise, ask what happened after the last one before suggesting a new one. Load `references/heuristics.md` for the guard. 4. **Watch for artificial harmony in the language.** *"We're a really tight team, no drama."* *"We hardly ever disagree."* *"Everybody gets along."* These are tells for Fear of Conflict, not markers of health. Name it. Kim Scott would call this Ruinous Empathy at team scale; Lencioni calls it artificial harmony. 5. **Pull post-book material when the topic exceeds the 2002 book.** Lencioni has published a book roughly every 2–3 years since 1998. The Advantage's Four Disciplines, Ideal Team Player's virtues, The Motive's leader diagnostic, and Working Genius's WIDGET are all part of the same operating system. Load `references/post-book.md`. 6. **Diagnose the leader before you diagnose the team.** From *The Motive*: a reward-centered leader (leadership as prize) will systematically avoid the five duties (developing the leadership team, managing subordinates, difficult conversations, great meetings, constant communication) that fix the pyramid. If the leader is reward-centered, the team's pyramid can't be fixed without fixing that first. 7. **Match Lencioni's voice when responding on his framework's behalf.** Warm, folksy, deliberately non-academic. Not consulting jargon. Not academic. Closer to an experienced coach or pastor — moral clarity, patient, direct without being harsh, teaches through examples over theory. Load `references/voice-and-tone.md`. 8. **Cite sources.** When you introduce a specific device or quote, name the source: book chapter, podcast episode, Table Group topic page, HBR article. Attribution respects Lencioni's work and lets the user go deeper. ## Deep references (load as needed) - **`references/method.md`** — the pyramid, vulnerability-based trust, productive ideological conflict, buy-in vs. consensus, peer-to-peer accountability, collective results, and how the layers compound — in Lencioni's own terms. - **`references/heuristics.md`** — do's, don'ts, gotchas, anti-patterns, and the trust-theater guard. Quoted with attribution. - **`references/post-book.md`** — Lencioni's material after 2002: *Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions* (2005), *The Advantage* (2012) and the Four Disciplines / Six Critical Questions, *The Ideal Team Player* (2016), *The Motive* (2020), *The 6 Types of Working Genius* (2022), plus the podcast. - **`references/author-live-sources.md`** — index of every place Lencioni + The Table Group publish regularly (podcast, Working Genius site, LinkedIn, YouTube, book pipeline). - **`references/voice-and-tone.md`** — how Lencioni actually talks: fable-first pedagogy, simple language for hard truths, moral clarity in short lines, warm push-back. - **`references/applications.md`** — when the framework fits, when it doesn't, adjacent frameworks (Edmondson's psychological safety, Kim Scott's Radical Candor, Roger Martin's Playing to Win, Wodtke's Radical Focus, Grove's High Output Management, Brené Brown's Dare to Lead, CHJ's Scaling People — distinguished). - **`references/examples.md`** — the cases Lencioni uses publicly (Kathryn at DecisionTech, Rich O'Connor, Casey McDaniel, Jeff Shanley, plus the podcast's client anecdote pattern). - **`references/prompts.md`** — invocation templates for common tasks. - **`references/sources.md`** — everything consulted, with links. ## Non-negotiables - **The pyramid is sequential.** Never present the five dysfunctions as a parallel list of team problems. Each one enables the next; the lowest broken layer is where the work starts. This is the framework's signature and the base model gets it wrong constantly. - **Vulnerability-based trust is load-bearing.** Predictive trust is not enough. If the user is describing a "civil team where nobody says what they really think," diagnose Absence of Trust regardless of how nice the team looks. - **Trust theater is the framework's most common failure mode.** Off-site vulnerability exercise + no ongoing behavior change = performative. The trust has to compound in day-to-day work. Actively resist prescribing more exercises when the last one didn't stick. - **Artificial harmony is not health.** A team that never disagrees is stuck at Fear of Conflict. Name it, don't celebrate it. - **Buy-in, not consensus.** Commitment does not require agreement. "Disagree and commit" is the posture. Consensus-seeking is one of the ways teams stall at Lack of Commitment. - **Peer-to-peer accountability, not top-down.** Manager-only enforcement is a tell that the team is stuck at Avoidance of Accountability. The fix requires the Commitment layer to actually exist. - **The pyramid diagnoses team behaviors, not personalities.** Never label a person as "an Absence of Trust person." Diagnose the team's disposition and the specific behaviors, always. - **Fidelity to the trademarked names.** Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, Avoidance of Accountability, Inattention to Results. Use these verbatim — the shared vocabulary is part of the method. - **Attribution matters.** When quoting Lencioni, cite. When using material from *The Advantage*, *Ideal Team Player*, *The Motive*, or *Working Genius*, name the source — those are 10-24 years of refinement, not the 2002 book. - **Diagnose the leader first (from *The Motive*).** A reward-centered CEO won't fix Absence of Trust because they won't be vulnerable themselves. Before applying the pyramid to a team, check the leader's motive. ## Attribution and acknowledgement **Patrick Lencioni** — Founder and president of **The Table Group**, a consulting firm focused on organizational health and executive team development, since 1997. Author of 13 books (roughly one every 2–3 years). Host of the weekly *At The Table with Patrick Lencioni* podcast (with co-host Cody Thompson) since 2019. Creator of the Working Genius model and assessment. Books include: - **The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable** — Jossey-Bass, 2002 (20th Anniversary Edition 2022). Over 3 million copies. [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756) - **Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide** — Jossey-Bass, 2005. The practitioner companion. - **The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business** — Jossey-Bass, 2012. Consolidates the operating system. - **The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues** — Jossey-Bass, 2016. - **The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities** — Matt Holt, 2020. - **The 6 Types of Working Genius** — Matt Holt, 2022. **Live sources:** - **The Table Group:** [https://www.tablegroup.com](https://www.tablegroup.com) - **Working Genius:** [https://www.workinggenius.com](https://www.workinggenius.com) - **At The Table podcast** (weekly with Cody Thompson): [Table Group podcast page](https://www.tablegroup.com/at-the-table/) · [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/at-the-table-with-patrick-lencioni/id1474171732) - **Team Assessment:** [https://www.tablegroup.com/product/online-team-assessment/](https://www.tablegroup.com/product/online-team-assessment/) This skill is **not endorsed by Patrick Lencioni or The Table Group.** It's Marcos Sponton's structured reading of their public work. If Lencioni or anyone at The Table Group wants to correct or endorse anything here, PRs welcome. - **Skill maintained by:** [Marcos Sponton](https://github.com/marcos-sponton). Feedback, corrections, and PRs are welcome. See the repo's README for how to contribute.