35 Vital Lessons from Five Dysfunctions Summary (2026)

Patrick Lencioni published The Five Dysfunctions of a Team in 2002, and over two decades later it remains one of the most widely read leadership books in the world. The book has sold more than three million copies, been translated into over 30 languages, and shaped how organisations from Fortune 500 companies to school leadership teams think about teamwork. If you have ever sat in a meeting wondering why your team cannot seem to make decisions, follow through, or have honest conversations, this five dysfunctions of a team summary will show you exactly where the breakdown is happening.

The genius of Lencioni's model is its simplicity. He presents five interconnected dysfunctions in a pyramid, where each level builds on the one below it. Without trust at the foundation, everything above it crumbles. Teams that skip ahead to accountability without first addressing conflict and commitment are building on sand. The model is not a theory disconnected from reality. It is a diagnostic tool that reveals, often uncomfortably, why your team is stuck.

What makes this book different from most leadership theory is the format. Lencioni tells the story of Kathryn Petersen, a newly appointed CEO tasked with turning around a dysfunctional executive team at a Silicon Valley startup called DecisionTech. Through Kathryn's journey, readers watch a team move from distrust and artificial harmony to genuine vulnerability and collective results. The fable makes the concepts stick in a way that a textbook never could.

Below are 35 vital lessons drawn from the book, organised into seven categories that cover the full scope of Lencioni's framework. Whether you are a CEO, school principal, team leader, or simply someone who wants to understand why your team meetings feel like a waste of time, these lessons will give you a practical roadmap for building a healthier team. If you would like help implementing these principles with your team, you can reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.

1. Trust Is the Foundation of Everything

Lencioni places trust at the base of his pyramid for a reason. Without it, none of the other four behaviours can function. In the context of the five dysfunctions of a team, trust does not mean the predictive kind where you assume a colleague will do what they say. It means vulnerability-based trust, where team members feel safe enough to admit mistakes, share weaknesses, and ask for help without fear of being punished or judged.

This is a harder kind of trust to build because it requires people to drop the professional armour they have spent years constructing. In the fable, Kathryn Petersen starts her first offsite retreat by asking her executive team to share personal histories, simple details about their childhood, first job, and family. It takes only 45 minutes, yet it shifts the dynamic in the room. People begin to see each other as human beings rather than competitors.

Teams that lack trust conceal weaknesses and mistakes from one another, hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback, jump to conclusions about the intentions and aptitudes of others, dread meetings, and find reasons to avoid spending time together. If any of those descriptions sound familiar, trust is where your work begins.

2. Vulnerability Requires the Leader to Go First

One of the clearest lessons in the book is that trust building starts at the top. Kathryn demonstrates this by sharing her own background and admitting her own limitations before asking anyone else to do the same. If the leader is not willing to be vulnerable, no one else will be either. Artificial vulnerability, where a leader shares a carefully curated weakness that is actually a disguised strength, will backfire and erode trust further.

For leaders who struggle with vulnerability, start small. Share a genuine mistake you made recently and what you learned from it. Admit when you do not know the answer to a question in a meeting. Ask a direct report for feedback on your leadership style and respond with gratitude rather than defensiveness. These small acts accumulate into a culture where honesty is safe.

3. The Personal Histories Exercise Is Deceptively Powerful

One of the most practical tools in the five dysfunctions of a team summary is the personal histories exercise. It involves asking team members to answer five non-intrusive personal questions about their hometown, number of siblings, childhood hobbies, biggest challenge growing up, and first job. The exercise takes about 30 to 45 minutes and reliably produces a shift in how team members see each other.

The exercise works because it bypasses the professional persona people wear at work. Learning that your head of engineering grew up on a farm or that your CFO was the youngest of seven children changes how you interpret their behaviour in meetings. It does not solve trust overnight, but it begins the process of humanising colleagues who might otherwise remain strangers despite sitting next to you every day.

4. Behavioural Profiling Accelerates Understanding

Lencioni recommends using behavioural profiling tools alongside personal histories to deepen trust. In the story, Kathryn uses a personality assessment to help her team understand each other's natural tendencies. Tools like the Working Genius assessment, DISC, Myers-Briggs, and StrengthsFinder all serve this purpose by giving teams a shared language for discussing differences without making them personal.

The value is not in the labels themselves but in the conversations they provoke. When a team member understands that a colleague's directness is a behavioural tendency rather than aggression, it removes a layer of friction that would otherwise block trust. The best facilitators use these tools as conversation starters, not as boxes to put people in.

5. Trust Is Not a One-Time Achievement

A common mistake teams make is treating trust building as a single event. They go on an offsite, do a personal histories exercise, and check the box. But trust erodes constantly. New team members join. Stressful projects create tension. People revert to protective behaviours under pressure. Kathryn recognises this in the book when she notes that even healthy teams can fall backwards into old habits.

Effective teams treat trust as an ongoing practice rather than a destination. They build trust-reinforcing rituals into their regular meetings, revisit behavioural assessments when the team composition changes, and address trust violations quickly rather than letting them fester. If you want to explore how tools like the Working Genius framework can support ongoing trust building, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

6. Healthy Conflict Is Not the Same as Personal Attacks

The second dysfunction is fear of conflict, and it is the one most commonly misunderstood. Lencioni is not advocating for arguments, shouting matches, or personal attacks. He is talking about productive ideological conflict, where team members passionately debate ideas and concepts without making it personal. The distinction matters because many leaders use their discomfort with any conflict as an excuse to avoid the healthy kind.

In dysfunctional teams, meetings are boring because controversial topics are avoided. People hold back their real opinions to preserve artificial harmony. Behind the scenes, however, frustration builds. Backchannel politics replace open debate. The irony is that teams who avoid conflict in the name of efficiency actually waste enormous amounts of time revisiting the same unresolved issues over and over.

7. Artificial Harmony Is More Dangerous than Conflict

One of the strongest lessons in the five dysfunctions of a team is that artificial harmony, where everyone appears to agree but privately disagrees, is more destructive than open disagreement. When people suppress their real opinions to avoid discomfort, the team loses access to the full range of perspectives needed to make good decisions. Worse, the suppressed disagreements do not disappear. They go underground and emerge as passive-aggressive behaviour, gossip, and sabotage.

Kathryn makes this explicit in the story by telling her team that the lack of debate in their meetings is not a sign of alignment. It is a sign of dysfunction. She pushes them to argue about the real issues, even when it feels uncomfortable. The first few attempts are messy and tense, but eventually the team learns to debate ideas without damaging relationships.

8. Mining for Conflict Is a Leadership Skill

Lencioni introduces the concept of mining for conflict, where a leader or designated team member actively unearths buried disagreements and puts them on the table for discussion. This is especially important early in a team's journey toward healthy conflict, because people who have spent years avoiding debate will not suddenly start volunteering their dissenting opinions.

The miner's role is to ask the difficult questions everyone is thinking but nobody is saying. "Are we really aligned on this decision, or are we just avoiding the argument?" "Carlos, you have been quiet. What concerns do you have that we have not addressed?" Mining takes courage, but it prevents the far more expensive cost of decisions that fall apart during execution because nobody voiced their objections when it mattered.

9. Real-Time Permission Keeps Conflict Productive

When teams first begin engaging in healthy conflict, it can feel uncomfortable and people may want to shut it down prematurely. Lencioni recommends that the leader give real-time permission during heated moments by acknowledging that what is happening is productive and necessary. This simple act of naming the discomfort and validating it reduces anxiety and builds confidence.

In practice, this might sound like: "I know this conversation feels tense, but this is exactly the kind of debate we need to have before we commit to a direction. Keep going." Over time, teams internalise this norm and no longer need the leader to give explicit permission. Conflict becomes a natural and expected part of how the team operates.

10. The Leader Must Show Restraint During Conflict

A counterintuitive lesson from the book is that leaders should resist the urge to protect their team members from difficult conversations. When the leader steps in too quickly to smooth things over, it sends the message that conflict is dangerous and should be avoided. Kathryn demonstrates restraint in the story by allowing her executives to work through disagreements on their own, even when the tension in the room is palpable.

This does not mean the leader abandons all responsibility. They should intervene if conflict crosses the line into personal attacks. But short of that, allowing the team to sit in discomfort and work through it together builds the conflict muscles they need to function at a high level. Teams that are protected from all discomfort never develop the resilience to handle real challenges.

11. Commitment Does Not Require Consensus

The third dysfunction is lack of commitment, and Lencioni is clear that commitment does not mean everyone agrees. It means everyone has had the opportunity to voice their opinion, their input has been genuinely considered, and they buy in to the final decision even if they would have chosen differently. This is a critical distinction that many teams miss.

The phrase Lencioni uses is "disagree and commit." A team member might argue passionately against a particular strategy, but once the decision is made, they support it fully and publicly. They do not undermine it behind closed doors. This only works when people trust that their voice was heard during the debate, which is why conflict must come before commitment in the pyramid.

12. Ambiguity Is the Enemy of Commitment

Dysfunctional teams often leave meetings without a clear decision, or with a decision so vague that each person interprets it differently. This ambiguity creates confusion that cascades down through the organisation. When the executive team is not aligned, their direct reports receive inconsistent direction and clash with colleagues from other departments who received different instructions.

Lencioni recommends that at the end of every meeting, the team reviews the key decisions made and agrees on exactly what was decided and who will communicate what to whom. This sounds basic, but it is remarkable how many leadership teams skip this step and then wonder why execution falls apart.

13. A Bad Decision Is Better than No Decision

One of the more provocative lessons in the five dysfunctions of a team summary is that making a wrong decision boldly and correcting course later is almost always better than making no decision at all. Teams that demand certainty before committing create paralysis. They study, analyse, and discuss endlessly without acting, while competitors who move faster capture the advantage.

Lencioni points out that the most effective teams are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information because they know they can always revisit and adjust. The cost of indecision, including confusion, wasted time, missed opportunities, and demoralised employees, almost always exceeds the cost of a wrong decision that is quickly corrected.

14. Cascading Communication Prevents Misalignment

After making a decision, healthy teams practice cascading communication. This means each team member communicates the same message to their direct reports within 24 hours of the meeting. Lencioni describes this as one of the simplest yet most impactful practices a leadership team can adopt.

The exercise of writing out a cascading message forces the team to confront any remaining ambiguity. If two executives cannot agree on how to describe the decision to their teams, they clearly have not achieved real commitment. It also builds trust with the broader organisation because employees receive consistent, timely information rather than contradictory messages from different departments.

15. Deadlines Force Commitment

Simple as it sounds, setting clear deadlines for decisions reduces the tendency to defer and delay. When a team agrees to decide on a particular course of action by a specific date, it creates healthy pressure that moves people from deliberation to action. Without deadlines, discussions can continue indefinitely and commitment remains theoretical.

Kathryn uses this technique throughout the story, setting concrete timelines for strategic decisions and holding her team to them. The deadlines do not prevent thorough debate. They prevent the debate from becoming a way to avoid the discomfort of actually deciding.

16. Peer Accountability Is More Powerful than Boss Accountability

The fourth dysfunction is avoidance of accountability, and Lencioni makes an important distinction. The most effective accountability mechanism in a healthy team is not the leader holding everyone accountable from above. It is team members holding each other accountable directly. Peer pressure is a profoundly powerful motivator because nobody wants to let down a colleague they respect and trust.

This only works, however, when the earlier dysfunctions have been addressed. People will not hold peers accountable if they do not trust them, have not debated the decision openly, and have not genuinely committed to the agreed course of action. This is why the pyramid structure matters. Skip a level and accountability breaks down.

17. Accountability Requires Clear Standards

You cannot hold someone accountable to a standard that was never clearly articulated. Lencioni recommends that teams make goals, roles, and behavioural expectations completely public and explicit. Everyone should know exactly what the team needs to achieve, who is responsible for what, and how team members are expected to behave.

This transparency eliminates the "I did not know that was my responsibility" defence and makes it far easier for peers to hold each other accountable. When standards are public, calling out a missed commitment feels less like a personal attack and more like a necessary part of working together effectively. Teams that operate with ambiguous expectations inevitably produce ambiguous results.

18. Regular Progress Reviews Keep Standards High

Lencioni suggests that team members should regularly communicate with one another about how they feel peers are performing against stated objectives. This can be done verbally or in written form, but the key is that it happens consistently and is expected by everyone. When accountability is left to chance, it rarely happens because most people find it uncomfortable to give difficult feedback.

Structured feedback processes remove the awkwardness by making accountability a system rather than a personal confrontation. Some teams do this through quarterly peer reviews. Others build it into weekly tactical meetings where each person reports on their commitments from the previous week. The format matters less than the consistency.

19. The Leader Steps In When the Team Does Not

While peer accountability is the ideal, the leader serves as the ultimate backstop. When team members fail to hold each other accountable, the leader must step in firmly and directly. Lencioni warns that if the leader avoids this role because it feels uncomfortable, the entire culture of accountability collapses.

In the story, Kathryn demonstrates this when she confronts team members who are not meeting their commitments. She does so respectfully but without softening the message. Her willingness to hold people accountable, including making the difficult decision to let team members go who cannot embrace the culture, sets the standard for the rest of the team.

20. Team Rewards Reinforce Collective Accountability

Lencioni recommends shifting rewards from individual performance to team achievement wherever possible. When the team shares a common reward, members become invested in each other's performance because individual failure directly affects the group outcome. This creates a natural incentive for peer accountability.

The principle extends beyond compensation. Recognition, celebration, and career advancement should all be tied to team results as much as individual contribution. When team members see that the organisation values collective achievement, they are far more likely to hold each other to high standards rather than looking the other way when a colleague falls short.

21. Results Must Be Collective, Not Individual

The fifth and final dysfunction is inattention to results, and it sits at the top of the pyramid because it represents the ultimate purpose of teamwork. Lencioni defines results not as financial profit alone but as the specific, measurable outcomes the team has collectively committed to achieving. When team members prioritise their own goals, their department's success, or their personal career advancement over the team's results, the team fails.

This dysfunction manifests in two ways. Team status occurs when members are satisfied simply being part of a prestigious group, regardless of whether the group actually achieves anything. Individual status occurs when members focus on advancing their own career at the expense of the team's objectives. Both are corrosive and both require intentional effort to overcome.

22. Define Results That Are Simple and Measurable

Vague goals produce vague results. Lencioni insists that teams define their collective results in terms that are simple enough to understand quickly and specific enough to be actionable. In the story, Kathryn pushes her team to identify an overarching goal. After vigorous debate, they settle on acquiring 18 new customers by the end of the year, a target that is clear, measurable, and impossible to ignore.

This kind of clarity prevents team members from hiding behind ambiguity. When the goal is specific, everyone knows whether the team is winning or losing. It becomes much harder to focus on individual priorities when the collective scoreboard is visible to all.

23. Make Results Public and Visible

Lencioni recommends that teams make their results public, both within the team and to the broader organisation. A visible scoreboard creates healthy pressure and keeps the team focused on what matters most. It also prevents the tendency for individuals to quietly pursue their own agenda while the team's results drift.

Some teams display their key metrics on a shared dashboard. Others review progress at the beginning of every weekly meeting. The method is less important than the practice of keeping results in front of the team constantly. When results are visible, avoidance becomes impossible and accountability becomes natural.

24. The First Team Concept Changes Everything

One of the most transformative concepts in the book is the idea of the "first team." Lencioni argues that for a leadership team to function, each member must consider the leadership team as their primary team, not the department they lead. Most executives instinctively put their department first. They fight for their department's budget, protect their people, and view the leadership team as a necessary distraction from their real work.

Kathryn confronts this directly by asking her team: "Which team do you consider your primary team? This one, or the department you lead?" The honest answer for most was their department. Until that changes, the leadership team will never achieve collective results because each member is optimising for their own slice rather than the whole.

25. Status and Ego Are the Biggest Threats to Results

Lencioni identifies ego and status as the primary enemies of a results-focused team. When team members care more about their personal reputation, title, or career trajectory than about whether the team achieves its goals, the team's performance suffers. This is especially common in executive teams where high-achieving individuals are accustomed to personal recognition.

The antidote is a culture that celebrates team wins over individual accomplishments and addresses self-serving behaviour directly. Leaders who tolerate team members who prioritise personal status send a clear message that individual interests trump collective results. Kathryn addresses this by making it explicit that at DecisionTech, team results come first, period.

26. Kathryn Petersen Models What Good Leadership Looks Like

Throughout the fable, Kathryn embodies the leadership behaviours Lencioni advocates. She is vulnerable without being weak. She pushes her team into conflict without being aggressive. She demands commitment without being dictatorial. She holds people accountable without being punitive. She focuses on results without losing sight of relationships.

Her approach is especially powerful because she does not shy away from making difficult decisions. When team members cannot or will not embrace the new culture, she allows them to leave. This is not cruelty. It is clarity about what the team needs and the courage to act on it. Leaders who tolerate dysfunction because they want to avoid discomfort ultimately harm everyone on the team.

27. Sometimes the Right Decision Is to Let People Go

One of the harder lessons in the book is that not everyone will thrive in a healthy team culture. Mikey and JR both leave DecisionTech, Mikey because she cannot embrace vulnerability and JR because he views the whole process with cynicism. Kathryn does not celebrate their departure, but she recognises that their continued presence would have undermined everything the team was building.

This lesson applies to every organisation. Some individuals, regardless of their talent or technical skill, are fundamentally unable or unwilling to work in a culture of trust, open conflict, commitment, accountability, and shared results. Retaining them out of fear or loyalty is a disservice to every other team member who is doing the hard work of building a healthy team. If you are navigating this challenge, Step Up or Step Out provides a practical framework for these conversations.

28. The Pyramid Must Be Worked from the Bottom Up

A fundamental lesson that many teams miss is that the five dysfunctions must be addressed sequentially, from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. You cannot impose accountability on a team that has not first built trust, engaged in healthy conflict, and committed to clear decisions. Attempting to skip levels is the most common reason team-building initiatives fail.

Kathryn demonstrates this patience throughout the story. She spends the first offsite focused entirely on trust. She does not introduce accountability until the team has practiced conflict and commitment. Each dysfunction is built on the foundation of the ones below it. Leaders who try to jump straight to results without laying this groundwork will be perpetually frustrated.

29. Meetings Are the Arena Where Dysfunctions Are Overcome

Lencioni makes a strong case that meetings are the central arena where team health is built or destroyed. Great teams have meetings filled with passionate debate and leave energised. Dysfunctional teams have meetings that are boring, unproductive, and dreaded by everyone in the room.

If your team meetings consistently lack energy, honest debate, and clear decisions, that is a direct symptom of the five dysfunctions at work. The solution is not better agendas or shorter meetings. It is addressing the underlying trust, conflict, and commitment issues that make your meetings lifeless. For more on transforming your meetings, Lencioni's companion book Death by Meeting explores this topic in depth.

30. Offsite Retreats Are Essential, Not Optional

In the story, Kathryn's executives initially resist her schedule of two-day offsite retreats, viewing them as time away from "real work." But these retreats become the crucible where the team's transformation takes place. The combination of extended time together, removal from daily distractions, and facilitated exercises creates conditions for breakthroughs that cannot happen in a regular meeting room.

Lencioni recommends quarterly offsite retreats of one to two days for leadership teams, in addition to regular weekly and monthly meetings. If you are planning an executive team retreat and want to incorporate the five dysfunctions framework, reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how a facilitated session could serve your team.

31. The Five Dysfunctions Model Works for Any Team

While the fable is set in a Silicon Valley tech startup, the five dysfunctions of a team model applies universally. It has been used successfully by schools and school leadership teams, sports teams, nonprofit boards, government agencies, church staffs, and small businesses. The principles of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results are not industry-specific. They are human dynamics that affect every group of people working toward a shared goal.

The book's lessons have been particularly influential in professional sports. Several NFL coaches have credited the framework with transforming their team cultures. Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat has called it his playbook for developing staff and locker room culture.

32. The Team Assessment Reveals Where You Are

Lencioni includes a diagnostic questionnaire in the back of the book that allows teams to assess their level of dysfunction across all five areas. The assessment is simple, consisting of 15 statements that team members rate on a scale, but the results can be eye-opening. Teams frequently discover that they overestimate their health in some areas and underestimate it in others.

Running this assessment anonymously and then discussing the results as a team is one of the fastest ways to surface hidden issues. It gives the team a shared starting point and a common language for talking about dynamics that are usually left unspoken. The Table Group also offers a more comprehensive online team assessment for teams that want deeper diagnostic data.

33. Regression Is Normal and Should Be Expected

Healthy teams are not permanently healthy. Under stress, with new team members, or during periods of rapid change, teams naturally regress toward dysfunction. Kathryn acknowledges this at the end of the story when she notes that even though the team has made significant progress, she knows they can fall backwards into old habits.

This is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of being human. The difference between a healthy team and a dysfunctional one is not that the healthy team never experiences dysfunction. It is that the healthy team recognises regression quickly and has the tools and willingness to address it. Regular check-ins using the five dysfunctions framework prevent small regressions from becoming entrenched patterns.

34. Working Genius and Five Dysfunctions Are Complementary

Patrick Lencioni created both the Five Dysfunctions model and the Six Types of Working Genius framework, and the two work powerfully together. The Five Dysfunctions addresses how a team relates to each other: trust, debate, commitment, accountability, and results. Working Genius addresses how the team gets work done: which types of contributions each member naturally provides and which drain them.

Teams that layer Working Genius on top of the Five Dysfunctions create both relational health and operational effectiveness. They understand each other emotionally and they understand each other functionally. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, I have seen teams make breakthrough progress when they combine both frameworks. If you want to explore how this combination could serve your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

35. Teamwork Is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Lencioni opens and closes the book with the same core message: if you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time. This is not hyperbole. It is the practical reality that most organisations leave untapped. Strategy, technology, and capital are important, but they are all available to your competitors. The one thing that is nearly impossible to replicate is a genuinely cohesive team.

The five dysfunctions of a team summary you have just read gives you the roadmap. Building a healthy team is not complicated, but it is difficult because it requires leaders to do things that feel uncomfortable: be vulnerable, encourage conflict, demand commitment, enforce accountability, and subordinate ego to collective results. The teams that embrace this difficulty gain an advantage that compounds over time.

What to Do Next

If this five dysfunctions of a team summary has highlighted gaps in your team's health, here are three concrete steps you can take this week.

Run the team assessment. Get a copy of the book and have each team member complete the 15-question diagnostic. Discuss the results openly at your next team meeting. Do not skip the discussion, because the conversation matters more than the scores.

Start with trust. Schedule a personal histories exercise at your next offsite or extended team meeting. Give it 45 minutes and resist the temptation to rush it. Follow up with a behavioural profiling exercise using a tool like Working Genius, DISC, or StrengthsFinder to deepen the team's understanding of each other's natural tendencies.

Get a facilitator. The five dysfunctions framework is powerful but difficult to implement without an outside perspective. A skilled facilitator can see dynamics the team is too close to notice and can guide difficult conversations that internal leaders find hard to facilitate while also participating. To discuss how a facilitated session could help your team, reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the five dysfunctions of a team in order?

The five dysfunctions of a team are, from the base of the pyramid to the top: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Each dysfunction builds on the one below it, meaning trust must be established first before the team can address higher-level issues.

What is the main point of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team?

The main point is that teamwork fails not because of strategy or talent but because of five interconnected behavioural dysfunctions. When teams build vulnerability-based trust, engage in productive conflict, commit to clear decisions, hold each other accountable, and focus on collective results, they become nearly unstoppable.

Is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team based on research?

The book is a leadership fable based on Lencioni's experience coaching hundreds of CEOs and Fortune 500 teams. It is not based on academic research in the traditional sense. However, its principles align with established research on psychological safety, team effectiveness, and organisational behaviour, which is partly why it has remained influential for over two decades.

How long does it take to fix a dysfunctional team?

There is no fixed timeline. Some teams make significant progress in a single facilitated offsite retreat. Others require months of sustained effort. The speed of improvement depends on the severity of existing dysfunction, the leader's commitment to the process, and the team's willingness to be vulnerable and hold each other accountable.

Can the five dysfunctions model work for remote teams?

Yes, though remote and hybrid teams face additional challenges around trust and conflict because they have fewer natural opportunities for informal connection. Remote teams benefit from more frequent check-ins, intentional trust-building exercises conducted virtually, and periodic in-person gatherings to strengthen relationships.

What is the difference between the five dysfunctions and Working Genius?

The five dysfunctions model addresses how a team relates to each other through trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Working Genius addresses how a team gets work done by identifying which of six types of work contribution each member naturally provides. Both were created by Patrick Lencioni and work powerfully together.

Who should read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team?

Anyone who leads or participates in a team. The book is especially valuable for CEOs, school principals, executive team members, department heads, nonprofit leaders, sports coaches, and anyone frustrated by meetings that lack honest debate, decisions that do not stick, or colleagues who avoid accountability.

What is the team assessment in the book?

The team assessment is a 15-question diagnostic tool included at the end of the book. Team members rate statements related to each of the five dysfunctions on a scale. Scores are compiled to reveal the team's relative health across all five areas. It is designed to surface hidden issues and provide a starting point for improvement.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, bestselling author, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator. His book, Step Up or Step Out, has sold over 10,000 copies globally and equips leaders with practical strategies for difficult conversations and conflict resolution.

Jonno hosts The Leadership Conversations Podcast, reaching listeners in over 150 countries across 230+ episodes. He works with CEOs, school principals, and executive teams across Australia, the USA, UK, Singapore, Canada, and India, delivering keynotes, workshops, executive team offsites, and facilitated strategic planning sessions using Patrick Lencioni's frameworks.

As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, Jonno helps teams combine relational health with operational effectiveness. His services include Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, StrengthsFinder sessions, executive coaching, and strategic planning facilitation. To discuss how Jonno can help your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

50 Best Five Dysfunctions of a Team Consultants

Finding the right five dysfunctions of a team consultant can transform how your organisation approaches team development. Patrick Lencioni's groundbreaking model has become the definitive framework for diagnosing and fixing team dysfunction, addressing the fundamental issues of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results that plague teams worldwide.

Whether you are leading a startup team struggling to gel, an established corporate division facing communication breakdowns, or an executive team that cannot seem to make decisions stick, the consultants on this list specialise in applying Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team framework to create lasting change.

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