Staring at the Scoreboard with Five Dysfunctions of a Team

We love a challenge and last week a team event for senior leaders required some ‘warrior moments’ from one of our Team Coaches, to ensure a high support/high challenge session moved the team forwards.

A key moment came when interpreting the results of the team’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) assessment questionnaire.

The team had rated themselves as ‘low’ against all the five areas:

Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results

Lengthy discussion followed to understand why these low scores had occurred. Clearly, it is important to understand the ‘why’, but we also believe there’s a point where the discussion ceases to be productive and that “you don’t win a match by simply staring at the scoreboard”. Hence our ‘warrior’ stepped in to move the team on from discussing the scores to the ‘so what’ – focusing on what the team were actually going to do about the results to take themselves forwards.

The warrior clearly had a great impact, as our Team Coach has been invited to support this team throughout 2018!