The 5 Team Dysfunctions Are Symptoms. Nobody's Treating the Disease.
A few years back I watched an organization run the full playbook. Offsite retreat, trust falls, the vulnerability exercises, the whole Lencioni pyramid built brick by brick over two days. Everyone left inspired. Six months later, I sat in the same conference room and heard the same complaints. Nobody trusted anybody. Meetings were still polite and useless. Nothing had actually changed.
That's when it clicked for me. They hadn't failed to implement the model. They'd implemented it perfectly. The model was just aimed at the wrong target.
The Book Everyone Quotes and Nobody Questions
If you've spent any time in leadership circles, you know the pyramid. Absence of trust at the base. Then fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results stacked on top. Lencioni's argument is that these five things are interrelated and cascading. Fix trust, and conflict gets healthier. Get people debating honestly, and commitment follows. Commitment builds accountability. Accountability finally produces results.
It's a clean model. It's also sold millions of copies for a reason. But clean doesn't mean correct, and I think the framework has quietly misled a generation of leaders into treating the wrong thing.
Here's Where It Falls Apart
Lencioni presents these five items as if they are the underlying dysfunctions themselves. Fix them, in order, and your team moves from broken to functional. That's the pitch, and it's the part I can't get behind.
Trust, conflict avoidance, weak commitment, dodged accountability, and blurry results aren't the disease. They're symptoms. Real ones, worth noticing, but symptoms all the same. Treating them as the root problem is like handing someone a fever reducer, a cough drop, and a nap and calling it a cure. It might make them feel better for an afternoon. It does nothing about the virus underneath.
The actual disease is leadership inefficiency or outright leadership breakdown. Somewhere upstream of that team, a leader isn't setting clear expectations, isn't modeling the behavior they want, isn't creating a structure where trust and honest conflict can even survive. The five dysfunctions are what that failure looks like once it reaches the team level. They're downstream evidence, not the source.
The Flu Doesn't Care What Symptom You Treat First
Think about it this way. If someone shows up with a fever, chills, fatigue, body aches, nausea, and a sore throat, you don't treat each symptom as its own isolated disease. You recognize they probably have the flu or something like it, and you treat the actual illness. Treat only the symptoms, one at a time, and the person might feel marginally better while the underlying infection keeps running its course.
That's exactly what happens when a team goes through a trust exercise, a conflict workshop, and an accountability training as three separate interventions. You're medicating symptoms. The leadership problem generating all five of them in the first place never gets touched, so give it a few months and the symptoms resurface, sometimes in a different order, sometimes wearing a different name.
Lencioni's List Isn't Even the Whole Chart
Here's what really gets left out of the conversation. Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results are five symptoms Lencioni chose to build a tidy model around. They're not the complete list. Toxicity, disengagement, retention problems, recruitment struggles, and slipping productivity and efficiency standards are just as much symptoms of the same underlying leadership breakdown. They rarely make it into the pyramid conversation, but ask any HR leader watching turnover climb or any manager who can't fill open roles, and they'll tell you it traces back to the exact same source.
To Be Clear, This Isn't "Blame Leadership For Everything"
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this as leaders are the villain in every organizational story. That's not what I'm arguing. Plenty of problems in a business have nothing to do with leadership. Markets shift. Supply chains break. Bad luck happens.
What I am saying is that leaders create the climate a team operates in. They're the ones who decide whether that climate is conducive to people thriving, speaking honestly, and doing their best work, or whether it's one where people quietly shut down, disengage, and eventually leave. A team's dysfunction is rarely a team problem. It's a reflection of the environment leadership built around them, on purpose or by neglect.
What This Actually Means for You
If your team keeps cycling through trust exercises and conflict workshops without lasting change, stop looking at the team. Look one level up. The five dysfunctions will keep reappearing, sometimes with new names, until someone addresses the leadership inefficiency actually producing them.
If your organization is quietly running trust falls and accountability trainings on a team that's really just absorbing the fallout of unclear, inconsistent, or absent leadership above them, the problem isn't the five items on that pyramid. It's the leadership creating the conditions for all of them, and a few others nobody's bothered to name yet.
If you're seeing these symptoms in your organization and want lasting change, let's talk.
Until next week...
Dr. Neal McIntyre, DPA
Dr. Neal McIntyre is the author of Leadership Is Dead: Why Traditional Leadership Is Failing - And What Must Replace It. He works with executives and boards to turn leadership from a concentration risk into a structural advantage. Through his PRISM™ Leadership Continuity Framework, his clients build organizations where leadership transfers, holds, and compounds so that the next transition strengthens the enterprise instead of destabilizing it.
Comments