The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni | with guest Alisa Cohn

0:01unknown host:Welcome to Business Book Club, where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're talking about the five dysfunctions of a team.

0:17unknown host:Even smart, well-funded executive teams fail, and today you'll learn exactly why and how to fix it. Patrick Lencioni has sold over 8 million books and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is his absolute masterpiece. It completely exposed the silent killers of company growth through a gripping yet fictional story about a Silicon Valley startup, giving you a practical, no-nonsense framework to turn a dysfunctional group of smart, capable people into a truly cohesive team. And joining me to unpack it is Alyssa Cohen. She is an award-winning executive coach who's worked with the C-suites at Venmo, Etsy, Microsoft, and Google.

0:58unknown host:She was even ranked as the number one startup coach in the world. And this episode is just packed full of gold. Today, just for you, Alyssa is going to break down Lencioni's framework, showing us how to build vulnerability-based trust, why your department is not actually your most important team. That'll make sense more when we get into it. and how building self-awareness is the ultimate cheat code for leadership. Let's get into it. Alyssa, why did you choose The Five Dysfunctions of a Team as your most impactful book?

1:33Alisa Cohn:Well, first of all, Sam, thank you so much for having me today. I'm very excited to be here and I do love this book. And the reason I chose it is because I think it is super accessible, super practical, and super effective. And that's what teams need. Accessibility, practicality, effectiveness.

1:51unknown host:Can you tell me what the biggest and first lesson is that you've brought?

1:55Alisa Cohn:The biggest lesson is the framework for how great teams work. So what Patrick Lencioni prescribes is a triangle. So it's a triangle of what are the most important things the team has to get right first and increasing, I would say, less levels of importance, but more levels of impact. And so that framework, and I can discuss it, is extremely practical. It's commonsensical, and it's something that anybody can do inside of their team to improve their results. And that's what teams want to do, improve their experience together, improve their function together, and improve their results together.

2:29unknown host:Amazing. So yes, let's dig into this framework. How does it work?

2:33Alisa Cohn:So I'm going to go through the framework and we'll talk about how they're linked. So first of all, the framework is to build trust, then to use that trust to have powerful conflict. And then And after you have conflict, you can have commitment, true commitment from everybody, which then leads to accountability, which ultimately drives results. So unpacking that a little bit, the reason teams don't have results and the reasons teams aren't honest with each other and have good conversations is because they don't have a baseline of trust. And what Lencioni means in this book is around vulnerability-based trust, what Amy Edmondson would call psychological safety, the ability to say anything to anybody and know it's going to be okay.

3:09Alisa Cohn:hey, by the way, not to be a jerk. Like I'm gonna say anything to you, i.e., you know, your ideas suck. That's not the kind of trust that we're looking for. The kind of trust we're looking for is, I don't agree with what you're saying, or I think we should do something different. And the way to do that, to build that trust is through personal disclosure and getting to know each other a lot better. Once you have that trust, you're able to then use it to drive conflict. Again, back to this notion of productive conflict, not like, oh, you're a jerk, but like, oh, I don't like your idea or I don't think you're trying hard enough or you're not building your team in order to kind of accomplish these goals.

3:50Alisa Cohn:Once you're able to really have it out with each other and say what there is to say, everybody can then decide to commit. So once you have true commitment, then everyone's driving in the same direction. What happens is with teams, they often haven't really committed. Their mouths say yes, but their eyes say no. And so they haven't really committed to a course of action. Once everyone is committed to a course of action, then and only then can you hold people accountable and hold yourself accountable to that course of action. And all of the combination of all these things repeated over and over ultimately drives strong results.

4:24unknown host:That was an amazing explanation and summary of that opening section of the book. You do a lot of coaching for exec teams. And can you explain some of the difficulties that you see when you try and introduce this framework into these teams?

4:37Alisa Cohn:Well, part of the whole framework includes, you know, this idea of a diagnostic, like what's the problem here? So there are some, one team I worked with once where they had a lot of trust with each other. They knew each other really well. That was great, but they did not feel comfortable having conflict together. They hadn't gotten to the step of like, conflict is expected. Smart adults disagree. So they didn't have the practice or the skills or the muscle memory around how to have productive conflict. So teaching them how to do that brought up a lot of inconsistencies, differences in opinion, actually like completely different styles around how they thought the work should go.

5:13Alisa Cohn:Once we resolved all of that, they were able to, first of all, have important conversations, which surfaced a lot of topics, important problems to solve, and then ultimately help them drive forward. So that was like an area of conflict that really needed to get resolved. Another team I worked with, they knew each other well enough. They had good trust. They had good conflict. And they even had good commitment. For whatever reason, they didn't have the muscle around holding themselves and each other accountable. So they would say, yes, we're going to do this thing by this date. And then that date would come and it would go and there'd be all these reasons.

5:45Alisa Cohn:They didn't get it done. And they didn't have the sense of like, we really need to meet our deadlines and figure out what's going on that is preventing us from meeting our deadlines or from meeting our commitments. And so really building that accountability muscle was what the important thing was. So I think the way to use this, the way I use this in my teams, teams that I coach, and the way you can use this, anybody listening to this, is to really think about where are we lacking in that framework and how do we begin to build the muscle, the skill set and the mindset to improve our ability on that particular aspect of the framework.

6:18unknown host:People who are listening to this and thinking about their own executive teams and where they might fall down in that framework. If they're trying to diagnose where the problem area is, I think what you're saying is you can't start with results. You have to start right at the base of the pyramid. You have to start with trust. If that's not the problem and they trust each other fully, then escalate it to conflict. Figure out if they're having a problem with conflict, then the next level is commitment and the next level is accountability. So you've got to start at the base and work upwards.

6:47Alisa Cohn:If your team is doing great and getting results, then maybe there isn't a problem, right? So like I sort of think it's helpful to diagnose it along the way. But yes, the way you've laid it out is that trust drives the ability to have conflict. Conflict drives the ability to have commitment. And true commitment drives the ability to have accountability. If you haven't figured out what you're committed to, how can you hold anyone accountable?

7:08unknown host:Let's move on to the second lesson then.

7:10Alisa Cohn:Sure. Well, the second lesson I think is very powerful. It's called the first team. If you think about the executive team or you're the CEO or you're the founder, you're the leader, If you have a staff or an executive team around you, the question is, who does everybody relate to as the most important constituent of their team? Most people, most executives, like the head of marketing, the CMO, will say, my team is marketing or like the head of product. My team is product. The head of engineering. My team is engineering. That is not true. When you think about it, the executive team needs to be working together to be a steward of the company.

7:45Alisa Cohn:the most important team to them in the company needs to be their peer executives and the CEO. Now, that might sound counterintuitive, but don't you want to make sure that you're okay? You're taking care of your people in marketing, but don't you want to make sure that your people in marketing know that they're working for you and that you're in it together and you've got this like loyalty together? Of course, you want that feeling. Of course, you want to build camaraderie in marketing. And of course, you want to like advocate for your people and all that stuff. But if you're advocating for your people at the expense of what's good for the company, then you're going to run into problems.

8:18Alisa Cohn:What tends to happen in a lot of these companies is that the executives will spend the majority of their time in their functional unit. And so what that means is they feel the most loyalty and camaraderie with their team. They think they're so amazing. They're working so hard. They want to advocate for them. If something's not working in marketing, it's probably sales fault. Or if something's not working in marketing, it's probably product's fault. But you need to get over that natural human inclination to recognize that you and your team of executives are the ones who are really charged with running the whole company.

8:49Alisa Cohn:And what that means is there might be problems in your team that you need to look at. You can't advocate for your team at the expense of advocating for the company as a whole. And that's why it's so important to get this muscle memory around first team embedded inside of your leadership team.

9:04unknown host:What do you see when things go wrong and leaders like the CMO does think of his team, his marketing team as his team and not his executive team? Is it just that they're on different pages? What are the conflicts that you see come out of that misalignment?

9:19Alisa Cohn:Broadly, you see politics and you see finger pointing and blame. That's broadly what you see. But what that means is you have the engineering folks who are saying, we're building a great product, you guys can't sell it. And the salespeople are saying, hey, our customers don't want the product that you're building. And then each of the leaders of the team kind of support their people like, yeah, your people have to do better. And you're not looking to solve the problem again in service of the company. You're looking to make sure that like you and your team are blameless. So those are some symptoms of what happens when you don't have the first team mindset.

9:52unknown host:That makes a whole lot of sense. And I'm sure that there's so many people listening that have just gone, ah, that's maybe the cause of something in my company. How do you approach things with the CMO who is adamant that he needs to look after his team, which obviously he does? How do you get him to think about the exec team as his first team?

10:10Alisa Cohn:Well, I think it's the CEO's job to recognize what's the mission of what we're trying to do here. It's important for the CEO to get the executive team on the same page with that mission. And then it's very helpful to think about what needs to go right to achieve this mission. So we need to get marketing right and product right and engineering right and all these things. And then how do we, the executive team, need to work together to steward this mission? What are the behaviors that we need to be doing? And what are the behaviors we need to not be doing in order to achieve that? That's where the conversation comes up.

10:44And by the way, it does continue to build or highlights the absence of trust, conflict,

10:50Alisa Cohn:commitment, accountability, and results. Because you sort of say, oh, yeah, I know that this is our first team. I say yes, but really how I act is no. There was a company I worked with where the executives will get in the room. They'll all decide that they need to take these specific actions with their teams. And they're very much like, you know, like we need to be on top of spending, for example. So we need to kind of go back and really be more mindful about the spending our team is doing. So then one of the executives does that and one of the executives doesn't do that because, well, really, engineering is so important here, or really product development is so important here, they couldn't possibly have meant that I should look at my expenses.

11:35Alisa Cohn:Also, my team's working so hard. They need these kinds of things. They'll quit if they don't get them. That's the kind of stuff that shows that you have kind of a first team problem. And the CEO needs to really look at that. And then, as I say, hold people accountable to that first team approach, but continue to discuss why it's so important for the good of the company, and frankly, the good of the executives and even the team because winning solves a lot of problems.

12:01unknown host:I wondered, reading this book, how you think about this filtering down into an organization? Is this framework only useful for the exec team?

12:10Alisa Cohn:No, it's useful for all the cross-functional staffs inside of the company. I think it's very helpful for the executives to think this is our first team, for the directors of marketing reporting into the CMO to think this is our first team. It's very helpful for people to kind of look up and realize that my stewardship, what's important to me, the service I need to give is in service of the greater good, not to the direct line that reports to me. Again, I want to say it's not to say, ignore your team. Do not do that. Don't have one-on-ones with your team. Do not do that. If they need something, ignore them.

12:42Alisa Cohn:Do not do that. If they need something, it's very helpful to examine why they need something. If it's something that the rest of the company is not getting, so for example, we can't do a 10 % reduction in our team, we have to actually do a 10 % increase, bring that to your first team and talk it through. Because everybody should be doing this in service of the company. And if you need extra resources when it's working well, the team should be able to give you extra resources because everybody understands why that's important.

13:11unknown host:Something else that they touch on a lot in the book is ego. When you say everyone should be acting in service of the company with the company's best interest at heart. How important is ego? So how do you tackle those sorts of situations?

13:23Alisa Cohn:Yeah, that's really challenging. It reminds me actually of basketball because, you know, with basketball and the NBA here in the US, star players score more points. However, their teams do not win playoffs and do not win championships when individual stars score more points. So melding that mindset together and recognizing that we all win together if we can manage our individual egos is the art and the science and the work of being a leader, hiring the right people, incentivizing them the right way. It kind of also gets into the last point around the importance of self-awareness. How are you personally cultivating your own ability to recognize that even though you have an ego, sometimes you need to act in service of the team for the greater good?

14:14unknown host:I think that's one that everyone is going to have to work on a hell a lot. And it does start right from the start, like you mentioned, hiring the right people.

14:21Alisa Cohn:Definitely.

14:22unknown host:What is lesson number three?

14:23Alisa Cohn:So the importance of self-awareness, I think, is in some ways an undergird of everything. So first of all, self-awareness and then personal disclosure really helps to build trust with the folks around you, which is the first part of the framework and the most essential part of the framework. The second thing is that everybody has strengths and weaknesses. Everybody needs to be on a continuous learning journey to continue to build their strengths, use their strength to the maximum, and really work through their weaknesses. So what's powerful about self-awareness is that when you talk about that openly with the whole rest of the team, it really does do a great job of building trust and also building a sense of esprit de corps and helping everybody see that like actually this person kind of needs my help and that back to first team and I want to help them or actually this person understands they have a blind spot and they're working on it so I'm not going to get as mad at them when they do this like behavior over and over again so that's

15:20unknown host:why it's such an important journey it's difficult to communicate and be vulnerable with people you don't trust so I suppose that's where the trust element kind of comes in here one of the things I like to do when I've got a new member of the team is I have this working with me document it's a between one and two pages of things that I like things that I can't stand what I value in a team that sort of thing. And I also encourage people on my team to make one and distribute it as well. I think the act of writing it helps with understanding yourself a little bit more. And then the act of giving it out and other people reading it helps with them understanding what your preferences are and working styles and methods of communication and that sort of thing.

15:58unknown host:How do you suggest that people cultivate this self-awareness?

16:02Alisa Cohn:Three things. What you just said is very powerful. The working with me document, what I call personal operating manual, because you have to meld and sort of dive into and probe your own understanding of yourself, which builds self-awareness. And then you showcase it to other people. And so like you can all build your self-awareness and all build your awareness of how others view you or should view you or should take you. So that's a very powerful tool. The second is 360 feedback so that, you know, again, you're asked to reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses and the folks around you to reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, and you get a snapshot of how you're showing up.