Your school leadership team meets every week. The agenda gets covered. Nobody argues. And yet, nothing in your school is actually improving.   If that sounds familiar, you are probably dealing with a dysfunctional leadership team, and the cost to your school, your staff, and your students is far higher than most principals realise.   Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which has now sold more than three million copies worldwide, identified the foundational pat

Humility is the first and most indispensable virtue of Patrick Lencioni's ideal team player model. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni argues that great team members share three virtues: they are humble, hungry, and smart. Of these three, humility is the most important and the hardest to develop because it runs counter to the self-promotion that modern workplaces often reward.   Lencioni defines humility not as a lack of confidence but as a lack of excessive ego. Humble team p

Inattention to results is the fifth and final dysfunction in Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model. It occurs when team members prioritise their individual goals, departmental interests, career advancement, or ego ahead of the collective results of the team. When this happens, the team exists in name only. It is a collection of individuals pursuing separate agendas rather than a unified group working toward shared outcomes.   Lencioni places results at the top

Peer accountability is the fourth behaviour in Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model, and it is the behaviour that most leadership teams find most uncomfortable. Lencioni defines peer accountability as the willingness of team members to call out performance or behaviours that might hurt the team, even when doing so is personally uncomfortable. It is team members holding each other to high standards, not waiting for the leader to do it.   The avoidance of accoun

Team commitment is the third behaviour in Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model, and it is the one most often misunderstood. Lencioni defines commitment not as consensus, not as certainty, and not as unanimous agreement. Commitment is clarity and buy-in. It is the moment when a team walks out of a room fully aligned on a decision, even when some members initially disagreed, because every person had the chance to weigh in and be heard.   The lack of commitment i

Productive conflict is the second behaviour in Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model, and it is the one most teams avoid. Lencioni argues that the fear of conflict is not a sign of team health. It is a sign of dysfunction. Teams that avoid honest, passionate, ideological debate are not peaceful. They are artificial, and that artificial harmony comes at a devastating cost to the quality of their decisions.   The distinction Lencioni draws is between productive i