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bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-07-17 10:38 am
bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-07-17 10:38 am
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Teamwork makes the dream work
For professional development this year I decided to read the books I got from our EAP last year, one of which was the management “classic” The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
Now, to be clear, corporate self-help literature is not exactly my favorite genre, but like every other modern adult I have been on my fair share of dysfunctional teams, so I figured I might as well read it.
It was not bad! The book is framed as a “fable,” a somewhat melodramatic but not entirely unbelievable story of a small tech company with everything going for it on paper but which is for some reason not performing well. A new CEO is brought in and identifies the main problem as being that the executive team is not actually functioning as a team, and has a series of controversial off-site leadership retreats where she tries to teach them how to work together in a way that’s actually productive. There are breakthroughs and there are also various cliffhangers and setbacks and backsliding but eventually the team shapes up.
The framework itself–what the five dysfunctions are, what the symptoms of them are, and what the not-dysfunctional thing you should be striving for instead are–seems fairly sensible, and are common enough failings, so I figure on that note it’s probably a fine framework as long as you don’t get too religious about the idea that there’s no possible sixth dysfunction lurking out there that could ever afflict a team. Probably most team fuckery could be more or less slotted into one of these five things, at which point you have now named it explicitly and can start trying to do something about it. The book is also honest enough to try not to come off like it’s promising you One Weird Trick about team-building; these things are simple enough to diagnose but difficult to eradicate (the foundational one is “lack of trust,” and obviously you can’t just order people to trust each other). So overall I don’t think this book was life-changing but it certainly leaped over the very low bar I have for this type of writing, and I think it could prove a useful enough diagnostic tool when I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on with a team that seems to be stalling out.
Now, to be clear, corporate self-help literature is not exactly my favorite genre, but like every other modern adult I have been on my fair share of dysfunctional teams, so I figured I might as well read it.
It was not bad! The book is framed as a “fable,” a somewhat melodramatic but not entirely unbelievable story of a small tech company with everything going for it on paper but which is for some reason not performing well. A new CEO is brought in and identifies the main problem as being that the executive team is not actually functioning as a team, and has a series of controversial off-site leadership retreats where she tries to teach them how to work together in a way that’s actually productive. There are breakthroughs and there are also various cliffhangers and setbacks and backsliding but eventually the team shapes up.
The framework itself–what the five dysfunctions are, what the symptoms of them are, and what the not-dysfunctional thing you should be striving for instead are–seems fairly sensible, and are common enough failings, so I figure on that note it’s probably a fine framework as long as you don’t get too religious about the idea that there’s no possible sixth dysfunction lurking out there that could ever afflict a team. Probably most team fuckery could be more or less slotted into one of these five things, at which point you have now named it explicitly and can start trying to do something about it. The book is also honest enough to try not to come off like it’s promising you One Weird Trick about team-building; these things are simple enough to diagnose but difficult to eradicate (the foundational one is “lack of trust,” and obviously you can’t just order people to trust each other). So overall I don’t think this book was life-changing but it certainly leaped over the very low bar I have for this type of writing, and I think it could prove a useful enough diagnostic tool when I am trying to figure out what the hell is going on with a team that seems to be stalling out.