Arts organizations globally have faced a year or more of challenging environments - and teams have evolved to more than meet this challenge.  However, months of changing norms, responsibilities, and team composition due to remote work, furloughs, and new capabilities such as digital production mean the new year is a perfect time for a team tune-up.  

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, management expert Patrick Lencioni suggests that a team composed of fallible, imperfect human beings (that is, any team you will ever lead or be a part of) is necessarily prone to politics and confusion. Conversely, fostering a cohesive, functional team is the key to differentiating your organization from others. High-functioning teams work more efficiently, make better decisions, and have better long-term retention. 

Ultimately, Lencioni argues the root causes of dysfunction are both identifiable and curable. When leaders target the root causes of dysfunction head-on, they can reduce the number and severity of obstacles faced by the team. Whether you’re planning the group’s first team-building exercises, or you’ve been working together for decades, it’s never too late to examine the levels of dysfunction you may be facing, and work to address them.  

Lencioni’s five dysfunctions are presented as a pyramid, each forming a base that must be created before the next level can be overcome.  Use this article to determine where your team most needs work and to find tools to help you overcome each level to become a high-functioning group.

Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust

In teams lacking trust, team members don’t feel comfortable asking one another for help, communicating their needs, or showing vulnerability or weakness in a competitive, fast-paced work environment. This baseline sense of comfort is paramount to avoiding second-order problems: how can team members hold one another accountable, for example, if their relationship is one of fundamental distrust? 

Signs that your team may need to invest more time in developing trust include: 

• Team members feel inclined to blame one another and/or to avoid taking responsibility when things go wrong.

• Team members do not know much about each other’s interests, background, or life outside of a work context. 

• Team members often encounter gaps in knowledge due to a lack of information sharing. 

Building Trust

To help team members get to know each other, Lencioni suggests a Personal Histories exercise, which is easily transferable to in-person, virtual, or hybrid contexts. Classic bonding games (like Apples to Apples) and group problem-solving challenges (such as physical or digital escape rooms) are also great options for facilitating higher levels of trust across your team. To get the most out of trust-building exercises, notify the team ahead of time with an agenda, get buy-in from any supervisors or managers, and if possible, provide snacks or beverages! 

Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict

When teams experience fear of conflict, team members don’t raise contrary opinions. This may result from an excessive focus on politeness over transparency in order to maintain an artificial sense of harmony. Ultimately, fear of conflict can lead to premature decisions and misalignment across the team. In some industries, it can be fatal.

In 1990, the crew of Colombian pilots aboard Avianca Flight 52 neglected to notify American air traffic controllers that the plane was running out of fuel as they waited in a holding pattern. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that their failure to declare an emergency, among other factors, led the plane to crash 20 miles away from JFK International, killing 65 passengers and 8 crew members. Psychologist Malcolm Gladwell and others have attributed the failure in part to a culture of deep and abiding respect for authority, which caused the pilots to fear challenging their perceived superiors and therefore wait in the holding pattern for longer than the plane could manage. 

While the conflicts your team faces may not be a matter of life and death, chances are they are mission-critical. Lencioni suggests understanding conflict as a continuum, with artificial harmony (i.e. minimum conflict) on one end, and mean-spirited, uncalled-for personal attacks (i.e. maximum conflict) on the other. Constructive debate about important matters lies precisely in the middle of the continuum: it is about the humble pursuit of truth for the good of the team, rather than winning an argument seemingly for one’s own good. Leaders should encourage this type of conflict and, in fact, actively seek it out: constructive conflict spurs new ideas, fosters clear communication, helps break down hierarchies and silos, and encourages buy-in across the team. 

Signs that your team might need to address a fear of conflict include: 

• Your meetings are boring because everyone agrees with whatever is first suggested. 

• Your team comes to a vague consensus about important decisions, leading team members to leave with different understandings of that decision.  

• Team members avoid talking about contentious topics openly.

Building Constructive Conflict

Having a set of norms or writing a social contract for your team can set the stage for effective communication and make clear the expectation that team members voice their dissenting opinions. It is important to note that, according to research, large teams of experts in similar fields are in fact more likely to disintegrate into unproductive conflicts or stalemates than teams with disparate views and backgrounds. However, the same research shows that making mentorships a part of company culture, cultivating a sense of community through group social activities, and offering executive support (whereby leaders develop meaningful relationships throughout the organization and model collaborative behavior) can help teams overcome the conflicts that may arise from their own composition.

Dysfunctions #3 and #4: Lack of Commitment and Avoidance of Accountability

The next two dysfunctions go hand-in-hand: team members who are uncommitted to a decision or do not share a common understanding of its implications are in turn unable to hold one another — and themselves — accountable for that decision. Team members who feel forced into completing a task a certain way, who are bored of the status quo, or who believe their work is not appreciated may experience ambiguity about the direction of their team and their role in it.

The short life of Target Canada provides an excellent case study for this: poor planning for the corporation’s international expansion, coupled with a lack of commitment to the cause, led the Canadian subsidiary to file for bankruptcy after only two years. On the other hand, functional teams grow out of a shared commitment to the team’s work when leaders empower team members to make choices and set direction, validate team members’ opinions, provide the context for why the team mission is critical to the organizational mission, and offer new challenges and opportunities for employees. 

Reinforcing Commitment and Accountability 

Commitments cannot be evaluated or maintained without accountability. If your team chooses to clarify group norms through informal conversations about values and expectations or by writing a formal contract, make sure to set up procedures by which team members can hold one another accountable. Coaching and collaboration enable adjustments to be made in real time, and giving equal (or more) weight to successes when making results and consequences visible will help your team build a supportive culture. Note that emphasizing collective accountability evokes higher levels of personal accountability, whereas stressing individual accountability and praising only individual performance can lead to competition and a decline in collective accountability.

Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results

Are team members tending to the collective goals of the team, and the outcomes achieved, in addition to their own needs (such as career development or recognition)? Do team members sacrifice their personal interests for the good of the team, when necessary? Some teams live and breathe merely to survive; the most effective, functional teams are tightly bound by a common sense of purpose and belief in the importance of achieving team objectives, from serving the community to deploying a new initiative and beyond. 

Signs that your team may be affected by inattention to results include: 

• Team members are more likely to seek credit for their own contributions than to point out the contributions of others. 

• The team hasn’t established clear, shared benchmarks for success. 

• Morale is left unaffected when the team fails to achieve an important goal. 

Lululemon founder Chip Wilson caused public outcry in 2013 when he blamed issues with the company’s threadbare yoga pants on the body shape of the women wearing them. This, along with a slew of other offensive remarks largely targeting the very demographic the company was meant to serve, made it clear that Wilson wasn’t focused on delivering quality products as promised by the brand’s original vision. The inattention to results plagued the company with one PR disaster after another, in turn making it near-impossible for executives to focus on their mission. 

Tending to Results

In the words of Ernest Hemingway, “Never mistake motion for action.” To overcome inattention to results, teams have to be willing to openly clarify desired results and inspect actual outcomes. Many teams have chosen to use OKRs (objectives and key results) to identify team objectives (the “whats”) and articulate key results (the “hows”), a system popularized by Google as the company has scaled its operations. In an OKR, the team expresses unambiguous, objective, ambitious yet realistic goals, then the measurable milestones which will advance those goals. Interlinked objectives are refreshed quarterly and help coordinate priorities and results between people and between teams. 

ABA is here to support our members’ teams during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’re interested in learning more about any of the techniques or literature referenced in this article to continue to develop your team, please do not hesitate to reach out to your member advisor or info@advisoryboardarts.com.