A team is defined as a group of people assembled to work together on a common project. As a leader, it’s not always easy to create a team out of its members’ individualities and to make them look the same way.
In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni describes five problems a team must face to evolve. Those dysfunctions are presented by the author under the form of a pyramid, fueling each other.
Julie Chatharoo Vigne, Scrum Master at Wemanity uses this tool on the field in order to let barriers fall in a collaborative framework within an enterprise.
1. Absence of Trust, a Clear Obstacle to Communication
At the base of the pyramid lies the most important dysfunction of a team: Absence of trust.
As a human, the natural reaction to protect oneself in a hostile environment is to close oneself in and avoid making oneself vulnerable. The expression of this might be not sharing one’s feelings and personal concerns, hiding mistakes or even working alone rather than benefit from collaborative skills.
This mutual lack of trust can hinder the team’s communication and prevent a good collaboration. It’s therefore important to be attentive to people who appear reserved, hide their mistakes, or do everything to give you a good impression. Those signs could show a lack of trust within the team.
Julie Chatharoo Vigne, Scrum Master at Wemanity, suggests a few tips to improve communication and trust among team members:
Set a transparency culture
- Set a transparency culture by encouraging team members to be open and honest about their thoughts, feelings, and concerns.
- Be careful over your communication towards team members by using, for example, an agile manager’s method: Nonviolent communication (NVC) for transparency to do more good than harm.
- Embark all individuals during any decision-making that would affect the team and share with your collaborators on a regular basis.
Listen carefully to your collaborators’ concerns, and more generally to those of all stakeholders within your team’s environment.
Benefits of active listening
Active listening is a communication technique which focuses on the emotional content of a discussion rather than its intellectual content. It consists in perceive-ing both the verbal and non-verbal. Encourage each member of your team to use active listening: Open questions, rephrasing, and attention to non-verbal.
This technique improves relationships between members of the team because it shows everybody pays attention to what one another says. Questions and rephrasing will indeed make sure the other person got the message correctly and therefore avoid any quiproquo.
Active listening enhances trust by showing everybody’s ideas and opinions are appreciated and respected. The goal is to help solve problems, avoid repetitions and quiproquos, and contribute to solving conflict situations within the team.
Feedbacks contribute to an atmosphere full of trust
Getting trust within a team also comes through feedbacks. Giving a feedback contributes to stronger trust and cohesion of the team.
When a team member thanks a colleague for their help, for example during the last sprint, they strengthen the links between team members.
In the same way, when sponsors or users tell the team about their satisfaction over the quality of the job or the good understanding of their needs, this strengthens trust between the team and their environment as well.
When a feedback needs to be constructive, for a negative feedback to someone, it’s recommended to do it face to face, be genuine, illustrate the feedback with facts and, last but not least, listen to the other with indulgence. What matters isn’t giving your opinion, but giving the other person useful and additional information.
2. Fear of Conflict
A lack of trust within a team leads to a fear of conflict. Patrick Lencioni uses the term ‘’conflict’’ in a productive sense, materializing in debates to discuss diverging ideas and viewpoints.
If team members are afraid of expressing themselves, tensions will grow bigger and lead to hidden ideas, stress, and frustration which will hinder the team’s performance.
For example, a new developer can disagree with a technical solution from his colleagues and open a discussion to lead to the emergence of new solutions. In the same way, a team member can talk about a communication problem with several team members during a retrospective.
If there is a disagreement among team members, an exchange may be organised in order for everyone to explain their arguments. The debate is productive when everyone can express themselves and can lead to a resolution of the conflict.
Julie Chatharoo Vigne, Scrum Master at Wemanity, proposes concrete actions which allow to let team members speak freely and therefore create a true cohesion within the team.
When there is a lack of communication, a solution the team could find might be to schedule weekly moments to share information and keep every team member posted.
A team chart as the foundations for a well-functioning team
A team chart defines values, objectives, and roles of every team member, as well as the rules within the team for functioning, communication and conflict resolution.
This chart can be shared with executives and your team’s sponsors. This will allow for every stakeholder to:
- Understand how the team works and how to communicate with them appropriately.
- Improve the team’s performance and enhance dynamics and cohesion.
When Julie Chatharoo Vigne joins a new team whose members don’t know each other really well and have trouble working and communicating together, she designs a team chart.
Thanks to this chart, the team can be aligned towards their mission, identify stakeholders, define factors for success and know the roles of everyone.
A regular retrospective to improve oneself
A regular retrospective allows for an examination of the organisation and communication within the team. The advantages of a retrospective include:
- Encouraging everyone to focus on their problems and avoid jumping at each other’s throats.
- Helping with the identification and hierarchization of actions which will allow for preventing and solving problems, and therefore improving life and organisation of the team.
Simple retrospective formats – such as DAKI, Starfish, or Speedboat – exist and can be used to collect information and help the team set up actions for improvement.
The retrospective might be particularly useful as a moment for sharing and socializing during calendar events and birthdays. For example, sharing an epiphany cake, pancakes, or chocolates contribute to strengthening the links and the team’s cohesion.
3. Lack of Commitment
The third problem that Lencioni identifies is a lack of commitment, which directly results from an absence of trust and the fear of confronting colleagues. Indeed, if a team can’t create trust, it can’t look forward to a common objective. It’s important for everyone to understand how their work contributes to the common project’s success.
We’ll get into details of two points below: Respecting deadlines and setting up a positive work culture.
- Unrealistic deadlines prevent commitment
Unrealistic deadlines are one of the causes of a lack of commitment. It can indeed create too much pressure, discourage, and frustrate the team when they can’t respect deadlines. It could also have an impact on the quality as the team might be tempted to make compromises to respect them.
Quite the contrary, setting realistic and achievable deadlines stimulates the team’s commitment and performance. Considering everyone’s skills, availabilities, and obligations will be primordial. At the same time, it’s necessary to communicate expectations and objectives to the team, so that reasonable objectives can be set. Everyone will feel respected and considered, and a virtuous cycle will be triggered as soon as objectives are achieved, as everyone will commit more and more as they’ll see objectives can be achieved without impacting the team’s efficiency and morale.
- Encouraging a positive work culture
The creation of a positive work culture – value the team, have open discussions, personal and professional growth – will help strengthen the commitment of team members.A positive work culture might consist in the development of you collaborators’ skills or showing appreciation for achieved work and devotion of team members. The point here is to rethink leadership and recognize efforts with rewards for your team members. In addition to that, encouraging innovation and creativity with free time during the week is another way to strengthen commitment.
4. Avoidance of Team Accountability
Another usual phenomenon resulting from other dysfunctions, according to Patrick Lencioni, is an avoidance of team accountability.
For example, if team members don’t commit to achieve objectives, they avoid their accountability in the achievement or failure of those objectives. Everyone must be aware of their place and accountable of their progress and obstacles they face.
Everyone is accountable for the team’s progress
Every member is accountable for the achievement of the team’s objectives. It’s everyone’s job to know their progress has a positive or negative impact on the achievement or failure of the team as a whole. The team’s progress can be controlled by monitoring achievements on a regular basis.
The daily stand-up meeting is a daily update organised by and for the team. During this 15-minute meeting, every collaborator shares their progress, potential blocking points, and problems they might have faced. This meeting allows to identify and solve problems quickly, but also to communicate important information and learn of a major difficulty which might hinder the achievement of objectives. The daily meeting can be associated to a task board such as the scrumboard, scrumban, or kanban, which will allow for a better follow-up of tasks.
Encouraging collaborative work
Another way is to encourage collaborative ways of working such as pair-programming. This method makes the duo accountable for all work done, as it boosts appropriation of the improvement actions identified during retrospectives while still making sure those actions are flourishing.
Make space for brainstorming or problem-solving workshops in your calendars, for example. You can also create one communication network or more, like Slack or Teams which are dedicated to tasks and projects and make the communication easy for the teams, moreover if teams are working remotely.
5. Inattention to Results
The last dysfunction, located at the top of the pyramid, is an inattention to results. It’s a lack of focus on results and objectives within a team, which can hinder the team’s efficiency and productivity. An inattention to results can manifest as a lack of accountability and commitment in the achievement of the team’s objectives, leading team members to focus on their individual objectives.
Creating a culture of accountability
It’s important to create a culture of accountability and commitment to results within the team and monitor progress on a regular basis. For example, such can be achieved with regular communication on the current progress on the roadmap, the number of achieved functions as opposed to the numbers expected by the Product Owner, or a follow-up on task hierarchization.
Setting priorities and deadlines for tasks can indeed make sure the team works on the elements with the most impact on results.
Clear, measurable, shared objectives
Without a sight on objectives within the team, members might feel unaccountable or demotivated, which could lead to a decrease in productivity and morale.
Communication on objectives is important for everyone to know what is expected from them. A regular monitoring of specific indicators or progress towards objectives during a dedicated meeting can help the team remain focused on those objectives.
*Source : Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In summary :
According to author Patrick Lencioni in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, those are:
-An absence of trust
-The fear of conflict
-A lack of commitment
-The avoidance of team accountability
-An inattention to team results and objectives
Which advices and ways of working can a team set up to avoid or solve those dysfunctions?
First of all, you can make a diagnosis of the situation, which will allow you to detect dysfunctions within your team. At Wemanity, we set up a transparency culture, promote active listening, and value feedbacks from the start of a team. You can create a positive framework with, for example, the creation of a team chart for a better team work, regular retrospectives, and a follow-up on actions for improvement.
Last but not least, don’t just give orders, but learn to become both a leader and a team member who understands, listens, helps and works with your collaborators. Including them in the decision-making process – like setting realistic deadlines and sharing clear objectives – gives you the eventual possibility to solve problems and forge a stronger and more committed team.
