The Five Dysfunctions of Teams and How Coaching Addresses Them

Why Great Teams Are Rare But Possible

In today's complex business environment, the need for effective teamwork has never been greater. Yet truly high-performing teams remain the exception rather than the rule in most organizations. As a team coach working with leadership teams across various sectors in the UK, I've observed firsthand the challenges that prevent teams from reaching their full potential.

Patrick Lencioni's influential model, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," provides a powerful framework for understanding these challenges. More importantly, it offers a pathway for addressing them through targeted team coaching interventions.

This article explores how professional team coaching can help leadership teams overcome each of the five dysfunctions, illustrated with real-world examples from our coaching practice (with details modified to protect confidentiality).

Understanding the Five Dysfunctions Model

Lencioni's model identifies five interconnected challenges that prevent teams from achieving cohesion and results:

1. Absence of Trust: The fear of being vulnerable prevents team members from building the foundation of trust.
2. Fear of Conflict: The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles productive ideological conflict.
3. Lack of Commitment: Without honest debate, team members rarely buy in to decisions.
4. Avoidance of Accountability: Without commitment to a clear plan, team members hesitate to call peers on counterproductive behaviors.
5. Inattention to Results: When team members put individual needs above collective goals, the team fails to achieve its potential.

These dysfunctions build upon one another in a hierarchy, with each unresolved dysfunction making the next level more difficult to achieve. The model's power lies in its simplicity and accuracy in diagnosing team challenges.

"Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."

— Patrick Lencioni

How Team Coaching Addresses Each Dysfunction

Dysfunction 1: Absence of Trust

The Challenge: At the foundation of team dysfunction lies the absence of vulnerability-based trust. In teams lacking this foundation, members are unwilling to admit mistakes, acknowledge weaknesses, or ask for help. Energy is wasted on defensive behaviors and impression management rather than focused on the collective work.

Signs of Trust Issues:

• Concealing weaknesses and mistakes from one another
• Hesitating to ask for help or provide constructive feedback
• Jumping to conclusions about others' intentions
• Failing to recognize and tap into one another's skills
• Holding grudges or bringing up past issues repeatedly
• Dreading meetings and finding reasons to avoid team interactions

Coaching Approach: Building trust requires creating safe spaces for authentic interaction and gradually increasing vulnerability. Effective team coaching interventions include:

• Personal History Exercise: Facilitating structured sharing about background, formative experiences, and career journey
• Strengths and Challenges Disclosure: Guiding team members to share their self-perceived strengths and areas for development
• Behavioral Profiling: Using tools like MBTI, DiSC, or Insights to create a shared language about different working styles
• Trust Behaviors Identification: Defining specific behaviors that build and break trust in this particular team

Case Example: We worked with a newly formed executive team at a financial services firm where members came from different organizations with competing cultures. Initial interactions were characterized by politeness masking skepticism and judgment. Through a series of facilitated trust-building sessions, including a "professional journey mapping" exercise where each leader shared significant career turning points and lessons learned, the team began developing genuine appreciation for each other's experiences and perspectives. By the third month of coaching, members were voluntarily sharing business challenges and asking for input rather than presenting polished solutions.

Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict

The Challenge: Teams that lack trust typically also fear conflict, resulting in artificial harmony that prevents robust debate around important issues. Without the ability to engage in unfiltered, passionate debate of ideas, the best solutions remain undiscovered, and team members harbor private reservations about decisions.

Signs of Conflict Avoidance:

• Boring, tension-free meetings
• Personal attacks or veiled comments during or after meetings
• Creating "back channels" for real discussions outside of formal meetings
• Ignoring controversial topics critical to team success
• Failing to tap into all team members' perspectives and opinions

Coaching Approach: Effective team coaching helps teams distinguish sureween productive, ideological conflict and destructive fighting. Key interventions include:

• Conflict Norms Development: Establishing agreed protocols for healthy debate
• Real-Time Coaching: Providing in-the-moment guidance during team discussions to model productive conflict
• Mining for Conflict: Techniques to draw out unspoken disagreements constructively
• Conflict Style Assessment: Helping team members understand their personal approach to conflict
• Productive Debate Practice: Structured exercises on non-threatening topics to build conflict muscles

Case Example: A technology leadership team we coached prided itself on its collaborative culture, but this had devolved into conflict avoidance. Critical decisions about product prioritization were made with minimal debate, only to be passively resisted during implementation. We introduced a structured debate format called "Proposal Dialogue" where each significant decision required explicitly articulated concerns before moving forward. Initially uncomfortable, the team soon embraced this approach, with the CTO commenting, "I'd rather have ten minutes of intense debate than ten weeks of half-hearted implementation."

Dysfunction 3: Lack of Commitment

The Challenge: Without having engaged in honest debate, team members rarely achieve genuine buy-in to decisions, even when they feign agreement during meetings. This lack of commitment creates an environment where ambiguity about direction and priorities prevails.

Signs of Commitment Issues:

• Ambiguity among team members about direction and priorities
• Window of opportunity closes due to excessive analysis and delay
• Breeding ground for second-guessing among team members
• Revisiting discussions and decisions again and again
• Encouraging fear of failure that inhibits risk-taking and innovation

Coaching Approach: Team coaching addresses commitment challenges by creating clarity and psychological closure around decisions, even without perfect information. Key interventions include:

• Decision Review Process: Establishing how and when decisions will be made
• Cascading Communication: Creating alignment on messaging about decisions to the wider organization
• Commitment Clarification: Explicitly testing for commitment at the end of discussions
• Decision Logs: Maintaining clear records of decisions and agreed actions
• Worst-Case Scenario Planning: Addressing fears that may prevent commitment

Case Example: A healthcare executive team struggled with implementation follow-through despite seemingly agreed strategies. Through coaching, we discovered that different interpretations of what "agreement" meant were causing the breakdown. Some viewed silence as consent, while others felt that genuine concerns were being overlooked. We implemented a simple commitment scale (1-5) for all key decisions, with anything below a 4 requiring further discussion. This made commitment explicit and identified concerns early. The team also adopted a "disagree and commit" norm, allowing members to express reservations while still fully supporting the team's decision once made.

Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability

The Challenge: Without clear commitment to a plan of action, team members are often reluctant to hold one another accountable for behaviors and actions that might be counterproductive to the team. The absence of peer-to-peer accountability puts an undue burden on the team leader as the sole source of discipline.

Signs of Accountability Issues:

• Resentment among team members who have different standards of performance
• Mediocrity and missed deadlines becoming normalized
• Team leader bearing sole responsibility for identifying and addressing performance issues
• Overburden of the team leader as the bottleneck for all corrective feedback
• Failure to hit targets without consequence or discussion

Coaching Approach: Effective team coaching helps establish peer-to-peer accountability systems and build the team's capability to have direct conversations. Key interventions include:

• Team Accountability Systems: Creating structures for regular peer review of commitments
• Feedback Skills Development: Building capability to give and receive constructive feedback
• Clear Standards Articulation: Defining behavioral and performance expectations
• Leadership Courage Cultivation: Developing willingness to address difficult issues promptly
• Accountability Discussion Facilitation: Providing a safe space for addressing sensitive performance issues

Case Example: A professional services leadership team consistently failed to implement cross-selling initiatives despite agreement on their importance. Through team coaching, we instituted quarterly "accountability sessions" where each leader presented progress on their commitments to peers, who were encouraged to ask challenging questions. Initially uncomfortable, these sessions quickly became valued for their clarity and fairness. We also helped the team develop skills in giving "in-the-moment" feedback rather than waiting for formal reviews. Within six months, cross-selling revenues increased by 23%, with team members citing peer accountability as a key driver.

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to Results

The Challenge: The ultimate dysfunction occurs when team members put their individual needs (ego, career development, recognition) or departmental loyalties above the collective goals of the team. When teams are not focused on clear, collective outcomes, they lose achievement-oriented employees and fail to reach their potential.

Signs of Results Inattention:

• Stagnation and failure to grow as a team or organization
• Status and ego driving individual behavior rather than collective success
• Departmental or personal objectives taking precedence over team goals
• Difficulty attracting and retaining achievement-oriented employees
• Vulnerability to competitors who are more results-focused

Coaching Approach: Team coaching addresses results orientation by creating clarity around collective priorities and reinforcing a focus on team outcomes. Key interventions include:

• Team Scorecards: Developing clear, measurable outcomes that define team success
• Public Goal Setting: Making team goals visible and regularly reviewed
• Rewards Alignment: Ensuring incentive systems reinforce team rather than individual achievement
• Team-First Mindset Development: Building understanding of how team success enables individual success
• Regular Results Review: Facilitating honest assessment of team performance against goals

Case Example: An executive team at a manufacturing company struggled with persistent silos, with each function optimizing for departmental rather than company-wide success. Through coaching, we helped the team develop a unified "Team Scorecard" with just five metrics that required cross-functional collaboration. Individual performance evaluations were revised to weigh these team metrics as 40% of each leader's assessment. The coaching also included facilitated discussions on team-first behaviors and their impact. Within two quarters, cross-functional collaboration improved significantly, with one leader noting, "For the first time, I'm as concerned about Supply Chain hitting their targets as I am about my own Sales numbers."

The Team Coaching Process: A Structured Approach

Addressing team dysfunctions through coaching is not a one-time event but a structured process that typically unfolds over 6-12 months. While customized to each team's specific needs, an effective team coaching journey often includes these core components:

1. Assessment and Diagnosis

The process begins with a comprehensive assessment of team dynamics and performance, typically including:

• Team effectiveness surveys measuring the five dysfunctions
• Individual interviews with team members and key stakeholders
• Observation of the team in action during regular meetings
• Review of team performance data and outcomes

This phase establishes a baseline and identifies the specific dysfunctions most significantly impacting the team.

2. Feedback and Goal Setting

Assessment insights are shared with the team in a facilitated session that:

• Presents findings in a constructive, non-judgmental manner
• Creates shared awareness of team strengths and challenges
• Facilitates agreement on priority areas for development
• Establishes clear goals and success measures for the coaching process

This phase ensures team alignment and commitment to the development journey.

3. Targeted Development Sessions

Based on identified priorities, a series of facilitated team sessions address specific dysfunctions through:

• Structured exercises and discussions to build capability
• Real-time coaching during authentic team interactions
• Skill development in areas such as conflict management, feedback, and accountability
• Creation of team agreements and protocols for working together

These sessions typically occur monthly or bi-monthly, with work continuing sureween sessions.

4. Ongoing Implementation Support

Sureween development sessions, the coaching process continues through:

• Individual coaching for team leaders and members
• Check-in calls to review progress and address emerging challenges
• Observation and feedback during regular team meetings
• Tools and resources for continued skill development

This ongoing support ensures new behaviors become embedded rather than reverting to old patterns.

5. Progress Review and Refinement

At regular intervals (typically quarterly), the process includes:

• Reassessment of team functioning against the baseline
• Celebration of progress and recognition of improvements
• Identification of remaining or emerging challenges
• Refinement of the coaching approach based on evolving needs

This continuous improvement approach ensures the coaching remains relevant and impactful.

The Business Case for Team Coaching

Investing in team coaching to address the five dysfunctions delivers measurable business impact. Research and our client experience demonstrate that high-performing teams that overcome these dysfunctions achieve:

• Faster Decision-Making: Teams that engage in healthy conflict and commit to decisions move 2-3x faster on strategic initiatives
• Improved Resource Allocation: Clarity about priorities leads to 20-30% sureter resource utilization
• Higher Employee Engagement: Teams with trust and accountability typically score 25% higher on engagement measures
• Reduced Turnover: Cohesive leadership teams experience 40% lower voluntary turnover of high performers
• Sureter Execution: Teams focused on collective results report 15-30% higher implementation success rates

Perhaps most importantly, functional leadership teams create a culture that cascades throughout the organization, multiplying the impact beyond just the team itself.

Beyond Lencioni: Additional Dimensions of Team Effectiveness

While the Five Dysfunctions model provides an excellent foundation for understanding team dynamics, comprehensive team coaching often addresses additional dimensions including:

Strategic Clarity

Even cohesive teams falter without compelling direction. Team coaching often includes work on:

• Purpose and vision clarity
• Strategic priorities and trade-offs
• Alignment sureween team goals and organizational strategy

Stakeholder Management

Effective teams manage relationships beyond team boundaries through:

• Stakeholder mapping and engagement planning
• Cross-functional collaboration strategies
• Unified external communication approaches

Team Processes and Decision Rights

Operational clarity enhances team functioning through:

• Clear decision-making processes and authorities
• Effective meeting structures and practices
• Information sharing and communication protocols

Collective Leadership Capability

High-performing teams continuously develop:

• Complementary leadership strengths
• Adaptability to changing business conditions
• Continuous learning and innovation practices

Conclusion: The Journey to Team Excellence

Creating a truly cohesive, high-performing team is challenging work that requires commitment, courage, and often external support. The five dysfunctions identified by Lencioni provide a powerful framework for understanding the fundamental issues that prevent teams from achieving their potential.

Professional team coaching offers a structured approach to addressing these dysfunctions, helping leadership teams develop the trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and results orientation necessary for exceptional performance.

In today's complex, fast-changing business environment, the competitive advantage of effective teamwork becomes even more pronounced. Organizations that invest in developing truly cohesive leadership teams position themselves not just for current success but for sustainable performance through whatever challenges lie ahead.

The journey from dysfunction to cohesion is not always comfortable, but teams that commit to this path consistently report that it is among the most rewarding and impactful development work they undertake. The results—in business performance, organizational culture, and personal satisfaction—make it well worth the investment.