Kim Gentes

Years ago, I was serving on the executive team with one of the best managers I've ever worked with. His name was Chris. He had the most highly attuned sense of team-building and leadership that I had seen in a CEO. One of the first books Chris asked our team to read was "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni. This last month, I revisited this book and read it again. It struck me again as a succinct and actionable treatise for any team.

What it exposes is the real reason that most teams fail- people are often more interested in personal accomplishment than achieving team success. Lencioni artfully narrates what he calls a "leadership fable" of a new CEO who comes into a high-tech company to try to turn it around. The scenario that unfolds sounds so familiar to any of us who have worked in a senior staff meetings that it's a little indicting just reading the book, let alone considering doing something based on it. But that is why using a narrative is so powerful.

Lencioni recognizes that we must hear these truths in a reasonably real context rather than simply have them extrapolated as another "5 steps to corporate success" or such business book claims. And this book does exactly that. The reader is allowed to enter the world of DecisionTech, a fictitious Silicon Valley startup with everything going for it- except results! The story strips back the layers of dysfunction in the leadership team to its very core, and draws some deft steps at deconstructing the failures and reconstructing a strong working team. Not only do you end up seeing the components, people and issues for the raw things they are, but you begin to see (by the dissociation of story-telling) how those might be addressed in your own situations.

The author doesn't leave it to story either. Once the narrative has completed, Lencioni retraces the core points of the "Five Dysfunctions" and you are given concrete steps to moving to building an effective team that can produce results. Since this book has become one of the best selling books on business leadership in the last 10 years, I am guessing many people have found this sage advice. I would be in that camp. Some of the observations and truths pointed out here are so poignant they may seem obvious. Yet, the real problem is that we often stay mindlessly aware of these "800lb gorilla issues" that are in the room, but fail to address them. Lencioni faces this head on and doesn't blink.

This is an excellent book, and it gets better each time I read it. I will be going back and reading it again in the next couple days. It's usable, thoughtful, and potentially revolutionary (to those who will act). The book is short (239-240 pages, depending on the version you read) so you should be able to read it in just a few hours. Well worth the time.

Amazon Book Link: http://amzn.to/VUpdNl

Review by Kim Gentes