University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A review of

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

A Leadership Fable

Patrick Lencioni • Jossey-Bass • 2002

More Effective Teams

by David Meyer

Bestseller and business consultant Patrick Lencioni uses a fable to explain how to engage teams, increase their commitment and make sure they meet their goals.

Patrick Lencioni offers a fable about an executive striving to run a company and create a smoothly functioning executive team. Lencioni’s fable is interesting to a point, and you can read through it easily, getting to know the characters and participating in their business decisions. However, if you want to glean Lencioni’s worthy, no-nonsense advice about achieving better teamwork quickly, skim to the final chapters, in which the author offers a detailed model for diagnosing the five dysfunctions of a team and provides exercises and techniques to ameliorate those dysfunctions.

His advice is complete and concrete, as in his other bestsellers. Lencioni, president of The Table Group, a San Francisco consultancy, is the author of 10 business books, including Getting Naked and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars – with three million copies sold.

Comment on this review