The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Written by Patrick Lencioni
Narrated by Charles Stransky
4/5
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Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
After her first two weeks observing the problems at DecisionTech, Kathryn Petersen, its new CEO, had more than a few moments when she wondered if she should have taken the job. But Kathryn knew there was little chance she would have turned it down. After all, retirement had made her antsy, and nothing excited her more than a challenge. What she could not have known when she accepted the job, however, was just how dysfunctional her team was, and how team members could challenge her in ways that no one ever had before.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two bestselling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.
Patrick Lencioni
Patrick M. Lencioni is founder and president of The TableGroup, a management consulting firm specializing in organizational health and executive team development. As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 and mid-size companies to start-ups and nonprofits. Lencioni is the author of nine business books with over three million copies sold worldwide. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and four boys.
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Reviews for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
715 ratings41 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I thought the fictional company was a genius move, a way of incorporating business theory and applying it to a situation that we can easily understand, and be invested in. I've known nearly every type of personality that Lencioni constructs and I couldn't believe how interested in the story I was. It forced me to look back at all the successful teams I've been apart of, and all the terrible teams I've been a part of and it's remarkable how true the book's lessons are and how they apply to all types of organizations in real life. Terrific!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is my favourite book on leadership.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Awesome book! Great narrator! Not only did I enjoy it, I learned from it too!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent book on team management and the importance of healthy conflict and awareness of management team goals over individual goals
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great story with practical exercises, easy and interesting to read book. Highly recommend for leaders!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I'm sure there's more to management than this book offers, but if nothing else it's a fantastic introduction and an easy read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good book. I'll probably go back and read some of the last chapters in the book because I couldn't take notes because I was listening on the go, but overall I learned a lot.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this book because of the story telling mode that makes you move away from the boring theory but in the same time highlights all the key points.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Amazing fable and book for teamwork, team management, and leadership
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5the narrative made 5 dysfunctions clear, simple to understand
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent book I would recommend this book for any team building venture.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5da pautas muy precisas sacadas de una experiencia, lo hace ameno e interesante, al final da los puntos claves del tema principal, incluyendo ejercicios.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Using ‘fable’ to relay the ideas of this book was brilliant! Engaging, thoughtful, & incredibly useful!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5fantastically read and the content is so substantive and applicable to the business world. Worth the time if you want insight into overcoming feelings amd emotion in business. Audio quality was 5/10 , content 9/10.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enjoyed the book, worth the read. Audio quality not great and got annoying at times.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent overview of why teams fail to coalesce into operational units. Good for politics too - was particularly enlightening about the local Collingwood Council's dysfunctions.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One of those modern business books that teaches through a story. Most of those book's stories are so contrived to make it easy to lose the lesson in the mess of the story. This book actually has a more reasonable story that makes helps make the lessons clearer.
I found the dysfunctions interesting and helpful and the quiz at the end could be valuable. If you try it, don't mention the name of the book or your team might rebel at being thought of as dysfunctional in any way.
Well worth the read. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rated: ALencioni is a master. Love his parable style. Get's to real world relevance. Great insight into what causes dysfunctional behavior within a group trying to be a team. Absence of trust leads to destructive conflict is foundational. Helpful ideas to change team behaviors. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a "fable" in which a company gets a new top administrator who realizes that some of the failings of the business come from top brass not working together as a team. I appreciate how instead of being a book of just do this, do that, etc., the author chose to make this a story that showed how to have good leadership skills. My one complaint is that is clearly designed much more for corporations than nonprofits, although lessons for the latter could still be gleaned.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great book and writing style and can be considered as an eye opener for common yet serious issues among team members. As an audio book, I did not quite like the quality of the sound that has been presented in this book unfortunately and for such work I would have expected rather clearer sound quality.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Let's be blunt: business books are all trash because capitalism is trash.
However, sometimes you just gotta read some interpersonal guides that shed light on the minds of the people who don't understand that the whole thing is toxic.
This book was slightly better written than average for the genre. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5French translation of Five Team Dysfonctions.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A look at the five dysfunctions that can derail teamwork. We were given this book at my work place to read as a team building exercise and I was very surprised at what a quick, easy and pleasant read it turned out to be, I read it in less than two days.The first part is written like a story and deals with a promising company that is not living up to its potential and a new CEO’s efforts to find out what is holding the company back and how to fix it. The second section, a very short section, breaks down the five basic dysfunctions that can prevent teamwork and gave examples and exercises to help work on them. We’ve only had one meeting so far where we discussed and started to use it’s techniques but it’s already shown some promising benefits and I am looking forward to seeing if we can continue to build on that. I would recommend this book for anyone looking to work on teamwork for their business but really, these techniques could easily be applied in the personal sector as well.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is my second assigned reading for a year-long management seminar. Less intellectually offensive than the first (a Ken Blanchard classic), it still suffers from trying to be the smartest book in the room. The subject is yet another one that is intuitively obvious to me, but that's because I've been building teams for 30 years.
In case it's not clear, I'm not a fan of these "fable" formats, but this was easy to read. The too-pat setups were there, but done well enough as to mostly overlook how obvious they are. Lenconi is selling a product, so can't see the problems with his "this is the way it is" presentation, but as with most of these self-help business books, there are nuggets to mine and toss in the mental toolbox. I liked it better than most I've read (obvious in retrospect because my critical notations were fewer than similar books.) - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Leadership Fable is really very good. I read it on a single plane travel, but it created a lasting impact on me nevertheless. It really very simply and gently provides you with insights in teamwork applicable in your work and personal life.
The structure of a fable (95% of the book) and the theory and exercises behind the model (5% of the book) seemed a bit strange to me at first, but it does work really well.
I truly believe that not finance, not strategy, not technology, but teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I read this for a book club at work, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lencioni describes how teams fail and what they must do to succeed. Rather than a cut-and-dry non-fiction version, Lencioni writes in the 3rd person narrative, fictionalizing the people and organization in order to drive his points home. The fictionalization made the book easy to read and follow.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I am never sure when I read a leadership book that is more story than to-dos. Lencioni did a good job of weaving the scenario to describe the 5 dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. Visualizing personally and professionally and relating to the characters in the story was helpful.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I was required to read this for work. It was a quick read, and some of it I think will be helpful. I have to question framing it as a "fable": by presenting it as basically fiction, the author has a lot of leeway in setting up situations the way he wants them to play out. I don't know that any organization has a director as saintly as the one in this book. It wasn't my cup of tea, but it certainly could have been worse.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Half of a review: The fable kept my attention but I ran out of library time before finishing the rest. Maybe some other time... the premise seemed reasonable.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53.5 stars.
This is a remarkably well written book (with regards to structure, not necessarily language). Many management/business books are written so dry, with anecdotal examples or pages of statistics and studies... this book starts with a fictional account of someone creating a team and working on the 5 eponymous dysfunctions. The story is painfully simplistic, but there is no way to include every facet of a problem (or more than a handful of problems).
After the instructive "fable,", the book then lists out each dysfunction, what happens or what a team looks like when a team is functional or dysfunctional with regards to that specific trait, what a team member can do to help, and how the team leader can help.
It's nice that the book discusses, in detail, each of the five problem areas and how people in different functions can work on it.
Some of the book is common sense, but then again, common sense isn't as common as it should be, and people could all use a primer on things they may not be seeing.
Unfortunately, I think the book is not suited to every type of team. The team best suited to this type of system/suggestions in the book would have to be middle-management and above (therefore better for an upper management that is managing people with a little more drive and maybe more intellectual). I say this because it feels like it needs the team members to be more intellectually inclined than a middle-manager's (possibly) entry level minions, and it also assumes that the manager has a pretty substantial amount of power (with regards to promotion/demotion/firing) that you don't necessarily see a lot of.
With all of that in mind, I can see why it is that the HR trainer I have taken classes with recommends this book, and this book is not a total waste of time (which is a better standing than I can give most management books I've read).