The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick M. Lencioni
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Category: Book
List Price: CDN$ 29.99
Buy New: CDN$ 14.70
You Save: CDN$ 15.29 (51%)
New (11) Used (5) from CDN$ 14.70
Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 88
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 1
ISBN: 0787960756
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4036
UPC: 723812391165
EAN: 9780787960759
ASIN: 0787960756
Publication Date: March 28, 2002
Availability: Usually ships within 1 - 2 business days
Condition: Ships from US, Duties and taxes are responsibility of purchaser. Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
From Amazon.com
Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals--and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings. Like the author's previous books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, this is highly recommended. --Howard Rothman
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
 Whose team are you on? January 21, 2008
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
This is one in a series of "leadership fables" in which Patrick Lencioni shares his thoughts about the contemporary business world. His characters are fictitious human beings rather than anthropomorphic animals, such as a tortoise that wins a race against a hare or pigs that lead a revolution to overthrow a tyrant and seize control of his farm.
In this instance, Lencioni focuses on "the rarity" of effective teamwork, noting that "teams, because they are made up of imperfect human beings, are inherently dysfunctional." Is teamwork therefore doomed to failure? No. According to Lencioni, productive collaboration can be achieved by certain behaviors that are "at once theoretically uncomplicated, but extremely difficult to put into practice day after day." Moreover, the principles that guide and inform these behaviors "apply to more than just teamwork. I fact, I stumbled upon them somewhat by accident in pursuit of a theory about leadership" that he discusses in an earlier work, The Five Temptations of the CEO (1998).
Here's the fictional situation. A new CEO, 57 year-old Kathryn Petersen, has been hired by the board of DecisionTech to replace its co-founder and former CEO, 37-year-old Jeff Shanley, who continues to head the firm's business development. He was (in effect) forced to step down primarily because, although DecisionTech's 150 employees "seemed to like him well enough personally, they couldn't deny that under his leadership the atmosphere within the company had become increasingly troubling. Backstabbing among the executives had become increasingly troubling."
Almost immediately, it becomes obvious that Kathryn "just didn't seem to fit the DecisionTech culture" and that is a key point for reasons best revealed within Lencioni's narrative. She initiates a series of off-site meetings with her senior managers. Their discussions - and what does (and does not) happen between the off-site meetings - allow Lencioni to dramatize both the five "dysfunctions of a team" to which the title of his book refers and the solutions to each that he recommends. He is a brilliant business thinker but he also possesses the skills of a master raconteur, introducing a cast of characters, conflicts between and among them, and then allowing "rising action" build to a climax (i.e. resolution) also best revealed within the narrative.
As is his custom in each of the other volumes in the series of "leadership fables," Lencioni then provides a "Model" section and supplementary material (Pages 185-224) whose value-added benefits will help his reader to make effective application of the lessons learned from the experiences shared by Kathryn and her DecisionTech associates.
Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Patrick Lencioni's other books (especially his Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team) as well as these sources in which their authors share their insights about writing an effective business narrative: Stephen Denning's The Springboard, and his soon-to-be-published The Secret Language of Leadership, Doug Lipman's Improving Your Storytelling, Annette Simmons' The Story Factor and Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, and Storytelling in Organizations co-authored by John Seely Brown, Denning, Katarina Groh, and Laurence Prusak.
 Quick read with a few good points March 1, 2007
I. Dobson (Thunder Bay, Ont)
This book follows a similar format to "the Wealthy Barber". It is basically a fable with a message. A floundering high tech company gets a new CEO who redirects the management team to bring everyone back in line. It does not provide all the answers for a dysfunctional team but it does present lots of food for thought and can be read in a day or two. I passed my copy on to a dozen other colleagues who all thought it was worthwhile. It won't change your life but it will give you another perspective on management issues and is a good addition to any manager's shelf.
Highly Recmmended! June 23, 2004
Rolf Dobelli (Luzern Switzerland)
Patrick Lencioni offers a satisfactory fable about an executive wrestling to take hold of a company and create a smoothly functioning executive team. The narrative moves right along as he addresses the problem of feckless teamwork with the fictitious Decision Tech company as a test case. The novel is interesting, and you can read through it easily, getting to know the characters and participating in their business decisions. However, if you just want to learn about better teamwork quickly and leave, skim to the final chapters. Here, the author outlines a detailed model for diagnosing the five dysfunctions of a team and provides exercises and techniques to ameliorate those dysfunctions. The advice is complete and concrete. We recommend the meat and potatoes diagnosis and solutions as well as the cake and ice cream story, but how much narrative you want to read may depend on what shape your team is in when you start, as well as on your taste for tales.
Things to look for and fix on teams at all levels May 14, 2004
Lars Bergstrom (Chicago, IL)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is great because the simple narrative makes the 5 different disfunctions more concrete by showing exactly how they can manifest in a team. These are common issues not only executive-level teams, but also teams of lower-level folks like myself, working on individual features of a product. Some of the higher-level concepts like understanding what your 'first team' are a little bit less relevant, but most of the book is still very pertinent and easy to directly apply.The worksheets and exercises he has in the back are also great, no-nonsense ways to bring your team back on track. The only things I might've liked to see are some more information around what can go wrong when you try to "correct" the particular issues and maybe some more concrete details on what it means to be a leader by his definition. It's a bit vauge in places and seems to be more a matter of reporting structure than technical / feature leadership (i.e. a team of all true peers but where one person is the technical / business expert), though he works to call out some of the details at the end.
Inspirational April 16, 2004
Ron Atkins (California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
According to Lencioni, "the ultimate test of a great team is results," and in this fable told in the style of similar books, such as The Goal, and The Present, the author discusses how to build and profit from teams. This book is not about teamwork, so much as the deliberate creation of teams to analyze and resolve problems within an organization. The book is highly readable and informative for any executive aspiring to learn about teams or share an inspirational book with his or her workforce.Lencioni identifies 5 reasons teams fail: lack of commitment, failure to embrace conflict, lack of results focus, lack of accountability, and lack of trust. The author concludes his book and his philosophy with the statement success is a matter of "embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence." Read this book and share it with your fellow employees. I would also recommend you read Goldratt's book The Goal (ISBN: 0884270610) in conjunction with this book.
|
|
|
|
