The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni | with guest Alisa Cohn

**Sam Brown** (0:01)
Welcome to Business Book Club, where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're talking about The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.
Even smart, well-funded executive teams fail, and today you'll learn exactly why and how to fix it. Patrick Lencioni has sold over 8 million books and The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team is his absolute masterpiece. He completely exposes the silent killers of company growth through a gripping, yet fictional story about a Silicon Valley startup, giving you a practical, no-nonsense framework to turn a dysfunctional group of smart, capable people into a truly cohesive team. And joining me to unpack it is Alisa Cohen. She is an award-winning executive coach who's worked with the C-Suites at Venmo, Etsy, Microsoft and Google. She was even ranked as the number one startup coach in the world. And this episode is just packed full of gold. Today, just for you, Alisa is going to break down Lencioni's framework, showing us how to build vulnerability-based trust. Why your department is not actually your most important team. That will make sense more when we get into it. And how building self-awareness is the ultimate cheat code for leadership. Let's get into it. Alisa, why did you choose The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team as your most impactful book?

**Alisa Cohn** (1:33)
Well, first of all, Sam, thank you so much for having me today. I'm very excited to be here and I do love this book. And the reason I chose it is because I think it is super accessible, super practical, and super effective. And that's what teams need, accessibility, practicality, effectiveness.

**Sam Brown** (1:51)
Can you tell me what the biggest and first lesson is that you've brought?

**Alisa Cohn** (1:55)
The biggest lesson is the framework for how great teams work. So what Patrick Lencioni prescribes is a triangle. So it's a triangle of one of the most important things a team has to get right first, and increasing, I would say, less levels of importance, but more levels of impact. And so that framework, and I can discuss it, is extremely practical, it's common sensical, and it's something that anybody can do inside of their team to improve their results. And that's what teams want to do, improve their experience together, improve their function together, and improve their results together.

**Sam Brown** (2:29)
Amazing. So yes, let's dig into this framework. How does it work?

**Alisa Cohn** (2:33)
So I'm going to go through the framework, then we'll talk about how they're linked. So first of all, the framework is to build trust, then to use that trust to have powerful conflict. And then after you have conflict, you can have commitment, true commitment from everybody, which then leads to accountability, which ultimately drives results. So unpacking that a little bit, the reason teams don't have results and the reasons teams aren't honest with each other and have good conversations is because they don't have a baseline of trust. And what Lencioni means in this book is around vulnerability-based trust, what Amy Edmondson would call psychological safety, the ability to say anything to anybody and know it's going to be okay. By the way, not to be a jerk, like I'm going to say anything to you, i.e. your ideas suck.
That's not the kind of trust that we're looking for. The kind of trust we're looking for is, I don't agree with what you're saying, or I think we should do something different. And the way to do that, to build that trust, is through personal disclosure and getting to know each other a lot better. Once you have that trust, you're able to then use it to drive conflict. Again, back to this notion of productive conflict, not like, oh, you're a jerk, but like, oh, I don't like your idea, or I don't think you're trying hard enough, or you're not building your team in order to kind of accomplish these goals. Once you're able to really have it out with each other and say what there is to say, everybody can then decide to commit. So once you have true commitment, then everyone's driving in the same direction. What happens is with teams, they often haven't really committed. Their mouths say yes, but their eyes say no. And so they haven't really committed to a course of action. Once everyone has committed to a course of action, then and only then can you hold people accountable and hold yourself accountable to that course of action. And all of the combination of all these things repeated over and over ultimately drives strong results.

**Sam Brown** (4:24)
That was an amazing explanation and summary of that opening section of the book. You do a lot of coaching for exec teams. And can you explain some of the difficulties that you see when you try and introduce this framework into these teams?