Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I picked up Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team because I'm stepping into a new role next year as my school's PD coordinator, and I wanted to start building a small library of leadership reading before I'm responsible for actually managing anything. I didn't expect a book about a fictional Silicon Valley startup to make me think so hard about staff meetings, department culture, and why some school initiatives quietly die a year after they're rolled out.

The Fable: A New CEO, a Broken Executive Team, and a Lot of Avoided Conversations

Most of the book isn't a business manual at all — it's a story. Lencioni introduces us to DecisionTech, a promising tech startup with money, talent, and a board full of believers, and yet the company is quietly underperforming. The board brings in Kathryn Petersen, a no-nonsense executive with an unglamorous resume, to take over as CEO and figure out what's wrong.

What she finds isn't a strategy problem. It's a team problem. The executives are smart, experienced, and individually impressive, but in meetings they're polite, guarded, and conflict-averse. Disagreements happen in hallway conversations afterward, never in the room. Decisions get nodded through and then quietly ignored. Nobody calls out the colleague who's clearly checked out. And every one of them is, in some way, more focused on protecting their own turf than on whether the company actually succeeds.

Kathryn spends the next several months doing something deceptively simple: she makes the team get honest with each other. She forces awkward personal disclosures in meetings. She lets arguments happen instead of smoothing them over. She makes people commit out loud to decisions instead of letting them quietly opt out. It's uncomfortable to read at points, in the way that watching real conflict is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the point.

By the end of the fable, Lencioni distills what went wrong into five dysfunctions that stack on top of each other, each one causing the next:

1. Absence of Trust — team members won't be vulnerable or admit weakness with each other

2. Fear of Conflict — disagreements get avoided instead of worked through

3. Lack of Commitment — without real debate, people don't actually buy in to decisions

4. Avoidance of Accountability — nobody calls out peers whose behavior is hurting the team

5. Inattention to Results — people quietly prioritize ego, status, or their own department over the team's collective goal

The second half of the book steps out of the story and explains the model directly, with concrete tools for diagnosing and addressing each layer. It's clearly written for corporate executive teams. But almost as soon as I started the model section, I started substituting "staff meeting" for "boardroom" in my head.

How This Maps Onto a School

Schools are full of teams that aren't usually described as teams: department offices, grade-level teaching teams, PLCs, leadership cabinets, the whole faculty as a body that has to move together on a new initiative. None of these look like a startup's executive suite. But the dynamics Lencioni describes are uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has sat through a staff meeting where everyone nodded along to a new policy that half the room privately thought was a bad idea.

A few other writers have already drawn this connection. Peter DeWitt has written about how teaching teams fall into these same five patterns, particularly the way fear of conflict shows up when teachers don't believe their input on a new district initiative will actually be taken seriously, so they default to going along with it instead of voicing real objections. Educator Steven Weber has gone further and adapted the model specifically for Professional Learning Teams, swapping in dysfunctions like "curriculum clutter" and "lack of a scoreboard" to capture how PLCs specifically lose their way. I won't rehash their versions here, but if you work in PLCs, both are worth reading alongside Lencioni's original.

What I want to focus on instead is what this looked like for me, reading it specifically as someone about to be responsible for adult learning and collaboration across an entire building.

Absence of Trust: The Foundation of Every Staff Culture

Lencioni's definition of trust isn't "I trust you to do your job." It's vulnerability-based trust — the confidence that a colleague's intentions are good, so you don't have to manage how you come across around them. In a school, that's the difference between a department where a teacher will admit "I don't know how to teach this standard well" and one where everyone performs competence because admitting struggle feels risky.

I think about a hypothetical version of this that probably feels familiar to a lot of teachers: a department meeting where everyone's pacing guide says they're "on track," but in reality, half the team is two weeks behind because a unit didn't land the way it was planned. Nobody says so out loud, because admitting it feels like admitting failure in front of colleagues. So the team keeps planning the next unit as if the gap doesn't exist, and the students who needed re-teaching never get it. Compare that to a department where one teacher says, "My kids bombed the quiz on this, I think I rushed it," and instead of awkward silence, two colleagues immediately offer what worked for them. That second version only happens if people trust that admitting struggle won't be held against them.

Fear of Conflict: Why Faculty Meetings Are So Often Boring (and Useless)

Lencioni argues that teams who avoid conflict don't actually avoid tension — they just push it underground, where it shows up as politics, gossip, and passive resistance instead of productive disagreement. Anyone who has watched a staff meeting where a controversial new policy got a few seconds of silence and a unanimous show of hands knows this pattern. The real disagreement happens later, in the parking lot or the group chat, where it can't actually change anything.

Imagine a staff meeting where admin announces a new schoolwide late-work policy. There are real concerns in the room: some teachers think it's too lenient, others think it'll be impossible to enforce consistently across departments. But when admin asks "any questions or concerns?", the room stays quiet, a few people nod, and the meeting moves on. Three weeks later, half the staff is enforcing the policy their own way because they never actually voiced their doubts, and the inconsistency becomes its own problem. The disagreement that should have happened in that thirty seconds of silence instead plays out all semester, in a much messier and less productive form.

Lack of Commitment: Why Initiatives Quietly Die

This was the dysfunction that hit hardest, because it explains a phenomenon every teacher has lived through: the new initiative that gets rolled out with enthusiasm in August and is functionally abandoned by February. Lencioni's point is that commitment isn't the same as agreement — it requires people to have actually aired their real opinions first. Teams that skip the debate get compliance in the room and quiet non-implementation everywhere else.

Picture a new instructional framework rolled out at an August in-service: a coded lesson-planning template every teacher is supposed to use, pitched as the thing that will finally bring consistency across departments. It's introduced enthusiastically, nobody objects out loud, and everyone fills out the template for the first observation cycle. By quarter 1, maybe a third of the staff is still using it, not because they were talked out of it, but because they never actually got to voice the skepticism they walked in with — concerns about prep time, about whether it fit their subject, about whether it actually helped kids. Without that debate, "agreement" in the room was never real buy-in, just compliance with an expiration date.

Avoidance of Accountability: The "Land of Nice"

This is the dysfunction most specific to school culture, because schools run on a particular kind of professional politeness. Calling out a colleague — even gently — for missed deadlines, inconsistent grading standards, or checked-out behavior in a PLC can feel like a violation of an unwritten norm that teachers don't criticize other teachers. Lencioni's argument is that this "niceness" isn't kindness; it's actually a failure of care, because it lets mediocrity slide and quietly punishes the people who are working hardest.

Consider a grade-level team that's agreed to grade a common assessment using the same rubric, so results are comparable across classrooms. One teacher consistently grades noticeably easier, and everyone on the team notices when the data comes back skewed. But nobody says anything directly to that colleague — it gets mentioned vaguely in a meeting ("we should make sure we're calibrated"), or it gets routed entirely to the department head to handle quietly, because a peer-to-peer conversation feels too confrontational. The two or three teachers who are grading rigorously end up looking worse by comparison, and the discrepancy never actually gets resolved, just managed around.

Inattention to Results: What Are We Actually Optimizing For?

The final dysfunction is about whether a team's energy is actually pointed at a shared outcome, or whether it's been quietly redirected toward individual goals: a teacher's own classroom reputation, a department's turf, a coordinator's program looking good in isolation rather than students actually learning more. In a school, "results" should mean something like student learning and growth, but it's strikingly easy for a staff to drift toward optimizing for something else — looking busy, avoiding complaints, protecting autonomy — without anyone deciding to do that on purpose.

Think of a PD committee that spends a full semester building out a polished new tutoring program, complete with a slick sign-up system and a launch event. It looks great on paper and gets positive attention from the front office. But six months in, almost no one checks whether the students using it are actually improving academically, because the energy was always pointed at building and promoting the program rather than measuring whether it worked. The program becomes something the committee points to with pride, even as the actual outcome it was meant to produce — better student performance — quietly goes unmeasured.

What I'm Taking Into the PD Coordinator Role

The most useful reframe in this book, for me, wasn't any single dysfunction — it was the idea that they stack. You can't fix accountability by writing a better rubric if the real problem is that the team never had a real debate to commit to in the first place. You can't get genuine commitment from a staff that doesn't trust each other enough to disagree openly. The work has to start at the bottom of the pyramid, with trust, or every layer built on top of it stays fragile.

Reading this book at this particular moment — right before stepping into a role where I'll be the one designing PD, not just sitting through it — felt less like picking up a leadership manual and more like getting a diagnostic checklist for my own building. I don't know yet which of these five dysfunctions is most alive in our staff culture, but I have a much better sense of where to look, trying to build a positive, trusting culture from the ground up rather than reaching for whatever initiative looks good on paper first.