Debugging Teams with the Lencioni Model | Hacker News Reader

Debugging Teams with the Lencioni Model

addyosmani.com

31 pointsfeross13 comments

The book in this article, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," is a book that influenced me, as well as his other (maybe more) famous book, "The Ideal Team Player." Both are very easy reads, and have good content. The latter book introduces traits to look for in candidates/coworkers: "humble, hungry, and (people) smart." This is an overly simple framework, but I find it often useful for identifying issues with myself, teammates, and interview candidates. This is especially handy for technical roles. It's generally easier to identify and quantify technical strength than it is to know if the person is/will be effective in the role. These books help fill in the gaps of the soft skills framework.

If you like Patrick Lencioni's books, you may also like Gino Wickman's, especially 'Get a grip', which is written in a similar 'fable' style.

If you're in San Francisco, and ever pass near 17th and Valencia, pop into Community Thrift. There are usually 1-3 Lencioni books available for $2-$3 each. The business books are at the South East corner of the store, diagonally opposite the entrance.

Outside of family and public school, I began my education in libraries, second-hand bookstores, and thrift shops. Thank you for calling our collective attention to these resources.

So this guy make bucks by drawing 2 layered triangles of common place, general, not so much insightfull, management concepts.

Surely the bullshit run high in modern corporate.

> Surely the bullshit run high in modern corporate.

Ain’t that the truth. At least he didn’t have the 2x2 matrix- the pinnacle of management fluff. You can basically put any two attributes on each axis and an audience will often connect the dots and mistake that for something of actual value…

I wonder if there are authors like this with a reasonable number of research references at the end of their books (such as the last 50 pages of a 300 page book)? If you draw a pyramid with 5 vague concepts like this, I'd want research showing why 4 or 6 isn't the right number of levels, or why levels 2 and 3 are necessarily in that order with the upper level actually having some dependence on the lower which doesn't hold for the opposite direction.

Something about Lencioni really bugs me. There is no other business writer about whom I feel that strongly.

He's extremely ad-hominem and paints that picture of that "dysfunctional team member" (read "asshole"), and his whole idea of an organization basically boils down to saying that you don't want an asshole in it: Don't risk hiring an asshole, even at the risk of a huge false-negative rate in your hiring decisions. Cleanse your organization by instituting a witchhunt for assholes and putting them through the wringer to make sure they're reformed or fired.

Contrary to what Lencioni preaches, I believe that management is about selecting teams comprised of individuals who know how to do stuff, telling them what to do, and giving them incentives to make sure they actually do it.

Lencioni seems to think a manager is like a spouse who cares primarily about who their spouse is, or like a mother who wants their child to be a certain kind of person behaving a certain kind of way.

This ad-hominem level is precisely what you learn to steer clear of, if you've ever taken a course on conflict management. Focus on the issue, not the person. ...it's also borderline illegal in certain jurisdictions. For example in German employment law and constitutional law there is the idea of the "allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht" which says that basically, while you can discriminate between employees on the basis of competence and what they accomplish for you, you can't discriminate on the basis of who they are or what kind of person they are.

I once worked in a workplace where managers high up the ladder were very fond of Lencioni's writing, and pushed the philosophy on middle management too. The place just felt unprofessional and cult-like. I felt I was constantly under pressure to prove that I wasn't an asshole, and whenever I'd disagree with a manager, it was hard to even just have a meaningful conversation about the topic of the disagreement. Instead, the conversation would immediately turn to this unspoken accusation that I might just be an asshole for disagreeing in the first place, and now I needed to prove that I wasn't one, or else my career would be deeply in jeopardy.

I strongly advise reading Lencioni, and then thinking long and hard about how not to fall into the trap of thinking about organizations the way he does.

Then again, we have all seen that Asshole that destroys a whole team.

It's management's job to set up a team in such a way that an individual on a team, just by virtue of being an asshole, can't destroy it.

This commonly fails if the manager himself is the asshole, in which case the job falls to the manager's manager.

Part of the problem is that the "asshole" concept comes across as objective when it's actually quite subjective. So "don't hire an asshole" in practice just means "don't hire anyone who, based on your subjective whim, you don't like" and "fire the assholes" in practice just means "fire whoever, based on your subjective whim, you don't like."

How can a team be invincible to "assholes" if a team is the sum of the result of the people who compose it, "asshole" included?

I think anyone can ruin teams that would previously jell well together. A team that can't be destroyed is one that is mature and independent enough to detect the issue and make sure the problem is taken care of, even if it involves moving the individual out. Usually, that's a responsibility that we attribute to Managers, but theoretically self-organizing teams could do that (never saw it in practice tho).

That being said, I agree with you that it's not healthy to think of people that way. "Focus on the issue and not on the person"; we want to work on the issues on the long run instead of labelling people as "assholes". That requires: - A Manager that can detect the issue and/or that does not ignore the issue. Needs to be comfortable with difficult conversations and doesn't stall - A team that provides meaningful feedback constantly and in time, not only at performance reviews. - A chance for the person in question to develop and work on the feedback (and openness and willingness from the person in question)

And if none of the above work, moving the person out does not necessarily mean firing them. It could be a move to another team with more similar values, other projects, etc... People sometimes are just in the wrong place and are incompatible with the way the team works. Though sometimes they really are incompatible with the company and firing is required but that is not the only answer.

> How can a team be invincible to "assholes" if a team is the sum of the result of the people who compose it, "asshole" included?

I can think of lots of ways.

You can connect two pieces of wood together with a chain: If any one link in the chain fails, the connection fails. Or you can connect them together by banging lots of nails into them: If any one nail fails, the connection still holds.

The same is true for organizations: You can have organizations where one asshole can ruin it for everyone else, and you can have organizations where the result of one person being an asshole is simply that everyone else ends up avoiding and ignoring that person and business happily goes on without that individual.

For example: Imagine a flat law firm where each partner is highly autonomous, and one partner just happens to be an asshole. His clients will ask the firm for another partner to handle their account. His support staff will try to get reassigned to work with another partner. In the end you'll just have an asshole sitting in an office, not interacting with anyone.

Other example: Imagine you're in a strict military-style chain of command and the soldier next to you just happens to be an asshole. ...well, as long as it's not your commanding officer who is the asshole, you can basically just ignore that guy.

Now a counterexample: Imagine a matrixy, committee-cratic "cloud management" sort of tech company with maybe some 360-degree peer review systems thrown in just for fun: Well it's going to be very political, and any one politicking asshole will be able to ruin it for any given other person, so no one will ever be able to afford ignoring someone else, even if they're assholes.

Your theory reduces to just hoping that what you need is available to purchase. What if you can only find (or afford) people with untapped potential?

I'm not sure why you would think avoiding assholes creates a huge false negative risk. Our process filters for jerks and I'd estimate that accounts for maybe 5% of total post-screen rejections.

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