The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, 20th Anniversary Edition

I asked my boss for a suggestion on a leadership book that he would recommend. He is someone who reads a lot of books in this space and when he told me this book without hesitation I knew I needed to pick it up. After I picked it up, I literally never put it down and read it in a day! The author presents and outlines his premise through the use of a hypothetical example of a team that was together for awhile but was dysfunctional. Although the scenario is from a corporate/business setting, I think the principles can be applied easily to educational settings or even interpersonal relationships. This book is accessible to anyone, entertaining and eye opening in its direct simplicity and easy to understand principles. I would highly recommend this to anyone!

This is a novel, not a reference book, but the storytelling works fairly well. Consequently, while it works okay for replicating the success in the story within your own team, if you happen across a situation that falls outside something they addressed in the story, you may be a bit lost in how best to deal with it. That's the nature of dealing with a novel instead of a direct implementation guide. On the plus side, it's a heck of a lot easier to read a story than a dry manual. :)It does feel just a bit contrived to me. The situations are relate-able, but they feel just a little forced... like the situations are designed to fit the lessons, rather than being strictly based in reality. The company and characters sometimes don't feel *real*... they feel as though they were designed to be generic, so as to be more generally relate-able... but in so doing they lose a dimension of their personality, and it's (paradoxically) harder to relate to them very deeply. It makes the story feel rather "jack of all trades, master of none." Which is okay, it provides a solid all-around basis, but I'd also want something more specific to either my industry or my field, or my particular problems.The actual 5 dysfunctions seem pretty solid to me. I somewhat disagree on just how bad each one might be and what sorts of behaviors will be better or worse, but it's a reasonably good framework for looking at a team and judging it's overall effectiveness.I do suspect that the book does not stress the lower dysfunctions (particularly the lowest one, lack of trust) strongly enough. This is based on my own experience- people want to try and talk about failures at all levels of the pyramid, but the reality is it's extremely difficult to effectively solve any problems above trust, until trust is already solved. Therefore, I believe it would be better to focus heavily on trust only until you're sure it's really nailed down, then move up the pyramid. Even the team in the story makes this mistake, and consequently backslides easily. I believe the book does not do enough to dissuade readers from trying to fix problems at every level right off the bat.To my earlier point of wanting a more focused book, I will add that if you're looking to fix an IT department specifically I'd *highly* recommend "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, even instead of this one. This is still good (and there's a lot of info that's complementary), but that one is just flat better, for that specific scenario. It is also in novel form, but reads much more naturally to me (as an IT manager). I could certainly relate to things in 5 Dysfunctions, but I could feel the protagonists challenges in my soul in TPP. It's a whole other level of precision and applicability. I imagine there may be books like this for other disciplines.

While it seems this book focuses more on executive teams, the principles are certainly applicable to all levels of teams

This was one of the best management books I’ve read. What I appreciate most is the surfacing of the manager’s inner dialogue as she navigates the complicated process of turning a team around. Much of what separates an excellent leader from a poor leader when enacting major change management is what they do not do. Choosing when to allow situations to proceed without intervention and when it is necessary for them to direct the actions of others is far more difficult that one without such experience would assume. This book is offers exceptional guidance in a framework of a wonderfully told story.

I belong to a LinkedIn group whose members are all applicants for employment at a large company. One candidate told us that the company recommended this book to him in an interview, so I purchased it. It is well written, easy to read and understand, and really gets to the heart of how companies can form good leadership teams.It starts with a "story" that describes how one leader put these practices into play to "save" a struggling leadership team at a tech company. The story part is entertaining and effectively demonstrates the steps to team effectiveness. I think it's interesting that the author couched the title in negative terms, a better title for this book would have been Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. But maybe that was too long. The second half of the book deals in more direct, technical terms with the dysfunctions identified and how much time should be spent on overcoming each along with suggestions for steps to do so. The one thing I missed in this book was that there wasn't just a list of the Five Dysfunctions so that I could refer to it to refresh my memory.The ideas were all ones I thought were obvious after decades as a team leader, but they were well-distilled into one place here, and this book would be a valuable addition to any leadership library. The big bonus was that I purchased it for Kindle, so my Echo Dot at home could read it aloud to me. I listened while I did my household tasks on a weekend, then I sat down with my mobile device and Kindle app, to review the more in depth portions of the book.Overall, I found this book well-written and well worth an afternoon's time to read it.