25 Patrick Lencioni Consultants in Australia and NZ

You have read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and your leadership team still does not function like the book says it should.

You did the offsite. You ran the trust exercise. Everyone nodded. Three months later the same two people still will not work together, the same topics still get avoided, and the same decisions still do not stick. You are starting to suspect the problem is not the framework. The problem is you need someone who can actually facilitate it in the room with your specific team.

Patrick Lencioni’s models work. The Five Dysfunctions, The Advantage, Working Genius, The Ideal Team Player. These frameworks have changed thousands of teams. But a framework on paper is not the same thing as a framework applied to the dysfunction sitting around your boardroom table every Tuesday morning.

The question is not whether to use Lencioni’s work. The question is which consultant to bring in to make it stick.

WHAT MAKES A LENCIONI CONSULTANT WORTH HIRING

A certified Lencioni consultant is not automatically a good Lencioni consultant. Certification proves someone has been trained. It does not prove they can read a room, name the thing nobody is saying, or hold a senior executive accountable when the conversation gets uncomfortable. The gap between certified and effective is where most teams waste their money.

1. Jonno White

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out, with more than 10,000 copies sold. He works with schools and organisations around the world, and his work centres on the gap between what a leadership team says it values and what actually happens in the room when decisions need to be made.

The distinction that matters: Jonno does not run generic Lencioni sessions. He tailors the frameworks to the specific dysfunction the team is carrying, which means the debrief after a Working Genius session is not about the model. It is about why three of your senior people all scored high on Wonder and nobody scored high on Tenacity, and what that pattern is costing you in execution.

Most consultants teach the framework. Jonno uses the framework to surface the unspoken tension, then works with the team to resolve it. The session itself is useful. The 90 days after the session is where the value compounds.

What leaders say about working with Jonno: Teams describe the experience as uncomfortably accurate. He names patterns people have been feeling but have not articulated. The discomfort comes from the precision, not from manufactured conflict.

Best fit for: Senior leaders who have read Lencioni’s books, tried to apply the ideas internally, and realised they need someone in the room who can hold the team accountable to what they already know is true. Book Jonno at jonno@consultclarity.org.

2. The Table Group

The Table Group is Patrick Lencioni’s own consulting firm, based in the United States but serving clients globally including Australia and New Zealand. If you want the source, this is it. Their consultants are trained directly by Lencioni’s team and work exclusively with his models.

The benefit of hiring The Table Group is you get practitioners who have spent years inside Lencioni’s frameworks. They know the edge cases. They know the common failure points. They know how to adjust the session when a team is more dysfunctional than the initial diagnostic suggested.

The trade-off: You are paying for global expertise, which means international rates and travel logistics. For some organisations, especially larger corporates or national nonprofits, that investment makes sense. For smaller teams or schools, the cost can exceed the budget.

When The Table Group is the right call: You are running a multi-site organisation, you need a consultant who has worked with hundreds of leadership teams, and you want someone who can benchmark your team’s dysfunction against patterns they have seen across industries and continents.

3. Local Lencioni-trained facilitators through official directories

The Table Group maintains a directory of certified consultants and facilitators trained in Lencioni’s frameworks. These practitioners have completed the certification process and are authorised to deliver Working Genius, Five Dysfunctions, and Ideal Team Player assessments and workshops.

• Certification means they know the models and have been trained in facilitation techniques.

• Geographic proximity means lower travel costs and easier scheduling for multi-session engagements.

• Many certified facilitators specialise in specific sectors, which means you can find someone who understands the particular dynamics of schools, nonprofits, or family businesses.

The limitation: Certification does not equal experience under pressure. A facilitator who is excellent at running a Working Genius debrief with a cooperative team may struggle when two senior executives are in open conflict and the CEO is privately questioning whether one of them should still be in the role.

How to assess a certified facilitator: Ask how many leadership teams they have worked with in the last 24 months. Ask what happens when a session surfaces a conflict the leader was not expecting. Ask whether they do follow-up work or whether the engagement ends after the workshop. The answers will separate the practitioners from the trainers.

4. Organisational development consultants who use Lencioni frameworks as part of a broader practice

Some of the best Lencioni work happens through consultants who are not exclusively Lencioni-focused but use his frameworks as one tool in a wider organisational development practice. These practitioners bring Lencioni’s models into team diagnostics, leadership coaching, culture change programmes, and strategic planning processes.

Strengths of this approach: You get a consultant who can move between frameworks depending on what the team actually needs. If the Five Dysfunctions diagnostic reveals the real issue is role clarity, they can shift into a structural conversation. If a Working Genius session exposes a trust deficit, they can bring in tools from other methodologies to address it.

Risk of this approach: The consultant may know Lencioni’s work well enough to teach it but not deeply enough to apply it under pressure. A shallow understanding of the Five Dysfunctions produces surface-level insights. A deep understanding produces the conversation that changes the next six months.

What to ask: How long have you been using Lencioni’s frameworks? Which of his models do you use most often, and why? Can you describe a time when a Lencioni session surfaced something the leadership team was not expecting, and what you did next?

The answers will tell you whether this person uses the frameworks as a diagnostic or as a talking point.

CERTIFICATION VS CAPABILITY

Certification proves training. Capability proves pattern recognition. The distinction matters because the hardest moments in a Lencioni session are the ones the certification programme cannot prepare you for.

5. What certification actually measures

Lencioni certification programmes train facilitators in the mechanics of the frameworks. How to administer the assessments. How to interpret the results. How to run the standard debrief. How to explain the model to a team that has never heard of it.

What certification does well:

• It ensures baseline competence in delivering the content.

• It gives facilitators access to official materials, assessments, and resources.

• It signals to clients that the consultant has invested in learning the work properly rather than skimming a book and calling themselves a Lencioni expert.

Certification is necessary. It is not sufficient. A certified facilitator who has only ever run sessions with cooperative, high-trust teams will struggle the first time they facilitate a session where the CFO and COO have not spoken directly to each other in four months.

6. What certification does not measure

The ability to read a room. The instinct for when to press into the silence and when to let it breathe. The confidence to name the dynamic everyone can feel but nobody is articulating. The skill to hold a senior leader accountable without making them defensive. These capabilities develop through repetition in high-stakes environments, not through a training module.

Here is the pattern: A certified facilitator who has run 12 Working Genius sessions will be competent at explaining the six types and debriefing the results. A certified facilitator who has run 120 sessions will notice the moment when someone’s self-assessment does not match the behaviour the rest of the team is describing, and will know how to surface that gap without creating a defensive spiral.

The first facilitator can teach the framework. The second facilitator can use the framework to unlock the thing that has been blocking the team for two years.

How to tell the difference in a sales conversation: Ask the consultant to describe the last time a Lencioni session went differently than they expected. If they talk about a logistical issue or a timing problem, they are thinking about delivery. If they talk about an insight that shifted the whole engagement, they are thinking about transformation. See the vulnerability-based trust post for more on what this looks like inside a real team context.

7. Years in practice vs sessions facilitated

A consultant who has been certified for five years but only runs two or three Lencioni sessions a year has less applied expertise than a consultant who has been certified for 18 months but facilitates a session every week. Volume matters. Recency matters. The patterns you learn in session 40 do not show up in session 4.

What to ask: How many leadership teams have you worked with using Lencioni’s frameworks in the last 12 months? The number should be specific and recent. If the answer is vague or defaults to total career numbers, the consultant is either not doing much Lencioni work or is not confident in their current activity level.

Red flag: A consultant who lists certification credentials but cannot name a recent client engagement in specific terms. You do not need names. You need detail. The leader who says “I worked with a school leadership team last quarter, they scored low on trust and accountability, and the breakthrough came when we named the pattern where decisions made in the meeting were being reversed in side conversations afterwards” is telling you they know the work.

8. Sector-specific experience

Lencioni’s frameworks apply across sectors, but the way dysfunction shows up varies. A dysfunctional corporate executive team and a dysfunctional school leadership team both fail on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. The language they use, the power dynamics at play, and the cultural norms that reinforce the dysfunction are different.

Why sector experience matters:

• A consultant who understands schools knows that a principal cannot fire a deputy the way a CEO can fire a direct report, which changes the accountability conversation.

• A consultant who understands nonprofits knows that mission urgency often gets used as an excuse to avoid conflict, which means the intervention has to address the belief that “we do not have time for this” before it addresses the actual dysfunction.

• A consultant who understands family businesses knows that trust issues in the leadership team are often trust issues in the family, and the intervention needs to account for relationships that predate the org chart by 30 years.

What this does not mean: You do not need a consultant who only works in your sector. You need a consultant who has worked in your sector enough times to recognise the patterns and know how to adjust the intervention.

What to ask: Have you worked with organisations like ours before? What is different about facilitating a Lencioni session with a team like this compared to other sectors you work with? The answer will tell you whether they have done the pattern recognition work or whether you are going to be their learning case.

FRAMEWORKS AND WHICH CONSULTANT USES WHICH ONES BEST

Not every Lencioni consultant works with every Lencioni framework. Some specialise in Working Genius. Some focus on The Five Dysfunctions. Some use The Ideal Team Player as a hiring and onboarding tool. Knowing which framework you need and which consultant is strongest in that framework saves time and money.

9. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team summary covers Lencioni’s foundational team health model. It diagnoses whether a leadership team is failing on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, or results, and it gives leaders a map for where to intervene. The model is simple enough to teach in an hour and deep enough to guide a two-year culture change programme.

The best Five Dysfunctions consultants: These practitioners do not treat the pyramid as a checklist. They use it as a diagnostic to surface the specific dysfunction that is blocking the team, then design the intervention around that. If the team is failing on commitment because they are failing on conflict, the consultant does not run a trust exercise. They teach the team how to have productive conflict, then commitment follows.

What mediocre Five Dysfunctions facilitation looks like: The consultant walks the team through the pyramid, explains each dysfunction, runs a generic exercise for each layer, and leaves the team with a poster and a vague sense that they should trust each other more. Nothing changes because the intervention was not specific to the team’s actual dysfunction.

What great Five Dysfunctions facilitation looks like: The consultant uses the diagnostic to name the one or two dysfunctions that are actually costing the team, then spends the session addressing those. The team leaves with a specific commitment to change a specific behaviour in the next 30 days, and the consultant follows up to hold them accountable.

Who does this well in Australia and New Zealand: Look for consultants who talk about follow-through and behaviour change, not just the model. The consultant who says “we run a half-day Five Dysfunctions workshop” is selling a session. The consultant who says “we use the Five Dysfunctions diagnostic to design a 90-day intervention” is selling a transformation.

10. Working Genius

Working Genius is Lencioni’s productivity and team composition model. It identifies six types of work (Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanising, Enablement, Tenacity) and helps individuals understand which types energise them, which types drain them, and which types they are competent at but indifferent to. See the Working Genius implementation guide for a full breakdown of how to roll it out across a team.

Why Working Genius is different from other assessments: Most personality or strengths tools tell you who you are. Working Genius tells you which work you should be doing and which work is costing you energy even when you are good at it. The insight is not “you are a visionary.” The insight is “you are energised by Wonder and Invention, which means asking you to lead Tenacity work will burn you out even if you are capable of doing it.”

The best Working Genius facilitators use the model to redesign how work gets distributed across a team. They help leaders see that the reason a project keeps stalling is not because people are lazy. It is because the team is stacked with Wonder and Invention types and nobody is naturally wired for Tenacity, so the ideas get generated and nothing gets finished.

Red flag in a Working Genius session: The facilitator debriefs the results but does not connect them to the actual work the team is trying to do. A session that ends with everyone knowing their Genius types but no plan to redistribute work is a session that produced awareness without application.

Who does this well: Jonno White uses Working Genius to diagnose why execution is breaking down, then helps teams reassign work so the right people are doing the right tasks. The session is useful. The reorganisation that follows is where the productivity gains show up.

11. The Ideal Team Player

The Ideal Team Player framework identifies three virtues that make someone effective on a team: Humble, Hungry, and Smart (in the emotional intelligence sense, not the IQ sense). The model is used primarily in hiring, onboarding, and performance management. See the Ideal Team Player interview questions post for how to embed this in your hiring process.

Where this framework is most useful: You are hiring senior roles and you need a shared language for what “cultural fit” actually means. You have someone on the team who is technically excellent but creating friction, and you need to name why. You are building a leadership team from scratch and you want to select for people who will work well together, not just people who are individually talented.

The best Ideal Team Player facilitators: They help teams move from subjective (“I just do not think they are a fit”) to specific (“they score high on Hungry and Smart but low on Humble, which is why they keep steamrolling people in meetings”). The framework does not replace judgment. It sharpens it. For a deeper look at one of the three virtues, see the humble team player guide.

What weak facilitation looks like: The consultant teaches the three virtues, the team nods, and nothing changes in the next hiring process. Strong facilitation integrates Humble, Hungry, and Smart into interview questions, reference checks, onboarding plans, and performance reviews.

Who to hire for this: Look for consultants who work in talent and culture, not just team development. The Ideal Team Player is a hiring and retention tool as much as it is a team health tool, and the best practitioners understand how to embed it into HR systems.

ASSESSING A CONSULTANT BEFORE YOU BOOK

The sales conversation with a Lencioni consultant tells you almost everything you need to know. A great consultant will ask more questions than they answer. A mediocre consultant will pitch their process before they understand your problem.

12. What a great discovery conversation sounds like

A strong Lencioni consultant does not lead with their credentials. They lead with questions about your team. What is happening in the room that made you start looking for help? What have you already tried? What is the cost of not solving this?

The questions a great consultant asks:

• How long has your current leadership team been working together?

• If you could fix one thing about how this team operates, what would it be?

• When was the last time your leadership team had a genuine disagreement in front of you?

• What decisions have you made as a team in the last six months that you are confident will actually stick?

• What happens in your organisation when someone on the leadership team is underperforming?

These questions are diagnostic. They are designed to surface whether the problem is trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results, or something else entirely. A consultant who asks these questions is thinking about whether they are the right fit for you, not just whether you are willing to pay them.

Red flag: The consultant jumps straight to proposing a session format without understanding the dysfunction you are carrying. If they are pitching a half-day Five Dysfunctions workshop before they know whether your team is failing on trust or accountability, they are selling a product, not solving a problem.

13. How they talk about follow-up

The best Lencioni work happens after the session, not during it. A great consultant will talk about the 30, 60, and 90 days after the workshop before they talk about the agenda for the day itself.

What to listen for:

• Do they offer follow-up coaching or check-ins as part of the engagement?

• Do they help you design accountability structures so the insights from the session turn into behaviour change?

• Do they offer to train internal facilitators so your team can keep using the frameworks without hiring them every time?

A consultant who only sells the workshop is leaving value on the table. A consultant who designs for what happens after the workshop is thinking about transformation, not transactions.

14. How they handle pricing

Lencioni consultants vary widely in how they price their work. Some charge day rates. Some charge per participant. Some offer fixed-price packages. Some customize every engagement. None of these models is inherently better, but the way a consultant talks about pricing tells you how they think about the work.

Good pricing conversations sound like this: The consultant explains what you are paying for (preparation, the session itself, assessments, debrief materials, follow-up), gives you options based on the scope of the engagement, and is transparent about what is included and what costs extra.

Bad pricing conversations sound like this: The consultant gives you a number without explaining what it covers, avoids naming the price until you have committed to moving forward, or implies that a higher price automatically means better outcomes.

What to ask: What does your fee include? Are there additional costs for assessments, travel, or materials? Do you offer payment plans or phased engagements for organisations with budget constraints? A consultant who is comfortable talking about money is usually comfortable being held accountable for results.

15. References and case studies

Any consultant worth hiring will offer references or case examples from past clients. The quality of those references matters more than the quantity.

Strong references include:

• Specific outcomes, not vague praise. “The session was great” tells you nothing. “We identified that our leadership team had no one naturally wired for Tenacity, reassigned project ownership, and saw three stalled initiatives complete in the next 90 days” tells you everything.

• Honest reflections on what was hard. A reference that only describes the wins is usually a reference that has been coached. A reference that says “the session surfaced some uncomfortable truths, Jonno held us accountable, and it took us eight weeks to work through the changes” is a reference you can trust.

• Follow-up detail. Did the consultant stay involved after the session? Did the insights stick? Would the client hire them again?

What to ask the reference directly: What was different about your team 90 days after the session compared to the week before? If you were hiring this consultant again, what would you ask them to do differently? Would you recommend them to another organisation in our sector?

16. Red flags in the sales process

Some warning signs show up before you ever book the consultant. Pay attention to these.

Red flag 1: The consultant claims to have created or co-developed a Lencioni framework. Patrick Lencioni created the models. Certified facilitators deliver them. If a consultant is implying they had a hand in developing Working Genius or the Five Dysfunctions, they are either confused or dishonest.

Red flag 2: The consultant cannot name the last time they facilitated a session. If they are certified but not actively practicing, you are hiring someone whose skills are theoretical, not applied.

Red flag 3: The consultant oversells the outcome. Phrases like “transform your team in one day” or “guaranteed results” are signs of someone who does not understand how behaviour change works. Real transformation takes weeks and months, not hours.

Red flag 4: The consultant is defensive when you ask hard questions. If asking about their experience, their pricing, or their follow-up process makes them uncomfortable, imagine how they will handle a tense moment in the session itself.

SECTOR-SPECIFIC CONSIDERATIONS

Lencioni’s frameworks apply universally, but the way you choose a consultant should account for the specific context you are operating in. Schools, nonprofits, corporates, and associations all have different constraints and different failure modes.

17. Choosing a Lencioni consultant for schools

School leadership teams operate under constraints that corporate teams do not. You cannot fire a deputy principal the way a CEO can fire a COO. Staff are often union-protected. The board is volunteer-led. Parents have opinions about everything. Budget cycles are rigid. The leadership team is trying to execute on a strategic plan while also managing the crisis that walked into the office at 8.07 this morning.

What schools need in a Lencioni consultant:

• Someone who understands that accountability in a school context requires different levers than accountability in a corporate context.

• Someone who can facilitate conflict in a way that does not create HR issues the next week.

• Someone who has worked with enough school leadership teams to recognise the patterns (the deputy who undermines the principal in subtle ways, the business manager who hoards information, the head of curriculum who is brilliant but impossible to work with).

Questions to ask a consultant before hiring them for a school: How many school leadership teams have you worked with? What is different about facilitating a Five Dysfunctions session with a school compared to a corporate team? How do you handle situations where someone on the leadership team is underperforming but cannot easily be removed?

Best fit: Consultants who work regularly with schools and understand the governance, employment, and cultural dynamics that make school leadership different from other sectors.

18. Choosing a Lencioni consultant for nonprofits

Nonprofit leadership teams are mission-driven, under-resourced, and often carrying trauma from years of doing too much with too little. The dysfunction in a nonprofit leadership team is frequently masked by mission urgency. “We do not have time to work on team health, we have people to serve” becomes the reason the team never works on team health, which is why burnout, turnover, and underperformance compound.

What nonprofits need in a Lencioni consultant:

• Someone who will not let mission urgency become an excuse to avoid the hard conversations.

• Someone who understands that nonprofit teams are often carrying unresolved grief, frustration, or exhaustion that predates the current leadership.

• Someone who can work within budget constraints and offer phased engagements rather than requiring a large upfront investment.

Pattern to watch for: Nonprofit leaders often frame team dysfunction as a resource problem (“if we just had more staff, this would be easier”) when the real issue is a leadership team that does not trust each other enough to have honest conversations about priorities. A good consultant will name that dynamic early.

Questions to ask: Have you worked with nonprofit leadership teams before? How do you handle the tension between mission urgency and the slower work of behaviour change? Can you offer a phased engagement that fits within our budget cycle?

19. Choosing a Lencioni consultant for corporates

Corporate leadership teams have resources, structure, and clear accountability mechanisms. The dysfunction is usually not about budget. It is about politics, silos, competing agendas, and the gap between what gets said in the boardroom and what actually happens three layers down.

What corporates need in a Lencioni consultant:

• Someone who can work with senior executives who are used to being the smartest person in the room and are not naturally inclined to vulnerability.

• Someone who understands organisational complexity and can connect team health at the executive level to execution problems three levels down.

• Someone who can integrate Lencioni’s work with other organisational development initiatives the company is already running (strategy execution, culture change, digital transformation).

What to ask: Have you worked with executive teams at our scale? How do you connect team health at the top to execution issues across the organisation? How do you handle situations where the CEO is part of the problem?

Best fit: Consultants who have worked with large, complex organisations and know how to navigate power dynamics, competing priorities, and the political realities of corporate life.

20. Choosing a Lencioni consultant for family businesses

Family businesses add a layer of complexity that other sectors do not carry. The leadership team is also a family. Trust issues at work are trust issues at Christmas dinner. Accountability conversations have to account for relationships that have existed for 40 years. Succession planning is not just a business question. It is a family question.

What family businesses need in a Lencioni consultant:

• Someone who will not pretend the family dynamics do not exist.

• Someone who can hold space for the fact that the COO is also the founder’s daughter and the CFO is also the person who used to babysit the CEO.

• Someone who understands that the solution to a family business leadership team problem is rarely “fire the underperformer” because firing the underperformer might mean firing your brother.

What to ask: Have you worked with family businesses before? How do you handle situations where business accountability and family loyalty are in tension? Do you work with family business advisors or governance consultants as part of your practice?

Best fit: Consultants who specialise in family business or have substantial experience navigating the overlap between family systems and business systems.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE SESSION

The session itself is the smallest part of the work. The transformation happens in the 90 days after, and most consultants do not design for that. The best ones do.

21. Follow-up structures that make the work stick

A Lencioni session produces insight. Insight does not automatically produce behaviour change. Behaviour change requires accountability structures, and most leadership teams do not build those on their own.

What great follow-up looks like:

• The consultant schedules a 30-day check-in to see whether the commitments made in the session are actually being kept.

• The consultant helps the leadership team embed the frameworks into their regular meeting cadence (starting every leadership team meeting with a Working Genius check-in, using the Five Dysfunctions language to diagnose why a conversation is stuck).

• The consultant trains an internal facilitator so the team can keep using the tools without needing to hire the consultant every time.

What weak follow-up looks like: The consultant delivers the session, sends a summary deck, and disappears. The team is left to figure out implementation on their own, which means most of the insights evaporate within six weeks.

What to ask before you book: What happens after the session? Do you offer follow-up coaching or check-ins? Will you help us design accountability structures so the work sticks? The answers will tell you whether the consultant is thinking about transformation or just delivering content. For a practical framework for what comes next, see the thematic goal guide for how Lencioni’s meeting rhythms create ongoing accountability.

22. Internal facilitation vs ongoing consultant support

Some organisations want to build internal capability. They want to learn the frameworks, train their own facilitators, and be able to run Lencioni sessions without bringing in a consultant every time. Other organisations want ongoing support. They want the consultant to stay involved, run the sessions, and hold the team accountable.

Internal facilitation works best when:

• You have someone on the team with facilitation skills and the relational credibility to hold senior leaders accountable.

• You are planning to use Lencioni’s frameworks regularly across multiple teams, not just at the executive level.

• You have the budget and time to invest in training an internal facilitator properly.

Ongoing consultant support works best when:

• The leadership team needs an outside voice to name dynamics they cannot see or will not name themselves.

• The dysfunction is serious enough that an internal facilitator would be too close to the problem to be effective.

• You want deep expertise and do not want to spend the time building it internally.

Questions to ask the consultant: Do you train internal facilitators, or do you prefer to stay involved as the ongoing facilitator? If we want to build internal capability, what does that training look like? If we want you to stay involved long-term, how do you structure ongoing engagements?

23. Embedding the frameworks into existing rhythms

The teams that get the most value from Lencioni’s work are the teams that embed the frameworks into their regular cadence. Working Genius becomes part of how the team assigns projects. The Five Dysfunctions language becomes the shared vocabulary for diagnosing why a meeting went badly. The Ideal Team Player virtues become part of how the team evaluates new hires.

This does not happen by accident. It happens because the consultant designs for it, or because the leadership team has the discipline to make it happen themselves.

What to ask the consultant: How do we make sure this does not become a one-time event? What are the specific habits or practices we should build into our regular meetings so the frameworks stay alive? Will you help us design those, or is that something we need to figure out on our own?

The best consultants will have a clear answer. They have seen this pattern dozens of times and know exactly which structures make the work stick.

WHAT TO EXPECT TO PAY

Lencioni consultants in Australia and New Zealand charge anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a single-session workshop to tens of thousands of dollars for a multi-month engagement. Knowing what drives the price helps you assess whether you are getting value or just paying for a name.

24. Day rates vs fixed-price engagements

Some consultants charge a day rate. Some charge a fixed price for a defined scope. Some offer packages that bundle the session, assessments, and follow-up into one price.

Day rates typically range from:

• $3,000 to $6,000 per day for experienced local facilitators.

• $6,000 to $12,000 per day for senior consultants or specialists with deep sector expertise.

• $12,000+ per day for international consultants or The Table Group practitioners.

These rates usually include preparation, facilitation, and a debrief. They do not always include assessments, travel, or follow-up sessions. Always ask what is included.

Fixed-price engagements: Some consultants offer packaged engagements (Half-day Five Dysfunctions workshop for $8,000, 90-day Working Genius implementation programme for $25,000). Fixed pricing gives you cost certainty but less flexibility to adjust scope.

What to ask: What does your fee include? Are assessments charged separately? Do you charge for travel time? Is follow-up included or is that an additional cost? How do you handle scope changes if we realise mid-engagement that we need something different?

25. When higher price means better value (and when it does not)

Price is not a reliable proxy for quality in this market. Some of the most expensive consultants are worth every dollar. Some are trading on a certification and a polished deck. Some of the most affordable consultants are excellent practitioners who have not yet built a premium brand. Some are cheap because they are undertrained.

Higher price usually correlates with better value when:

• The consultant has facilitated hundreds of sessions and brings deep pattern recognition.

• The consultant offers substantial follow-up and accountability structures, not just a one-day workshop.

• The consultant customises the engagement to your specific dysfunction rather than delivering a standard package.

Higher price does not correlate with value when:

• The consultant is charging for their brand rather than their capability.

• The engagement is a standard workshop that does not account for your team’s specific context.

• There is no follow-up, no accountability, and no plan for making the insights stick.

The best value question to ask: What will be different about my team 90 days after this engagement? If the consultant cannot give you a specific answer, the price does not matter. You are not buying a transformation.

If you have read Lencioni’s books and your leadership team still does not function the way the books say it should, the problem is not the frameworks. The problem is application. The right consultant does not just teach the models. They use the models to surface the specific dysfunction your team is carrying, hold you accountable to addressing it, and design for the 90 days after the session when the real work happens.

Your next step is simple. Identify the dysfunction you are dealing with. Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, or results. Choose a consultant who has deep experience addressing that specific dysfunction in teams like yours. Book a discovery conversation and listen for whether they ask more questions than they answer. If they do, you have probably found the right person.

Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org if you want a conversation about what Working Genius or the Five Dysfunctions could unlock for your team.