Patrick Lencioni's book is simple to read--but some people need the know-how in 13 fast, simple slides. I created this with real-time stories to show that resistance to new technology was, and would always be, based on a failure to address trust. Having done that, I showed how to run the presentation backwards to start the trust repair process.
7. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict
8. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
9. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
Lack of commitment
10. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
Lack of commitment
Ambiguity
11. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
Lack of commitment
Ambiguity
Avoidance of
accountability
12. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
Lack of commitment
Ambiguity
Avoidance of
accountability
Low standards
13. Absence of trust
Need for
invulnerability
Status and
Ego
Inattention
to Results
Fear of conflict False harmony
Lack of commitment
Ambiguity
Avoidance of
accountability
Low standards
Hinweis der Redaktion
Patrick Lencioni’s book is a highly readable fable about a manager brought in to bring together a group of personalities with long-standing feuds and sides; some who avoid conflict, some who fight dirty, and all with issues around knowledge silos, mutual responsibility mismatches, and whose collective behaviors are sending their little company into a nosedive that has already hurt some careers. This book builds on his earlier book, Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars.
The fable is about a woman in charge with plenty of leadership experience who dares to do the right things in the face of bitter opposition and infighting.
Leilani, you could be Kathryn, but also know that the best way to get the most from the fable is to see yourself in each of the characters. I hope you choose to borrow my copy and read it to go deeper into the topic than this briefing can take you.
If I can’t trust you not to take advantage of me,
If I can’t trust you to not to take aim at me,
If I can’t trust you to help me, then I develop a…
need for a protection scheme. I need camoflage to protect myself from my fear of you. And I want camoflage so that you believe that I can’t be hurt, even if you want to hurt me. So I really start to focus on what you think, and how I can control what you think.
Now that I’m so focused on myself and what you think about myself, I need some stuff for my camoflage, some things to make me look important and maybe not a good person to attack. Also I need to make my priorities really important, relative to yours, so that you can’t take me away from whatever makes me look good.
In the book, this is explained in these words…
“When everyone is focused on results and using those to define success, it is difficult for ego to get out of hand. No matter how good an individual on the team might be feeling, if the team loses, everyone loses.” –Kathryn, p. 72.
So the results I’m not paying attention to are the team’s…because my status and ego needs have taken precedence. So I work on maintaining my knowledge silos and knowledge power (women are especially prone to this, according to the literature on motivation and competence), groom my performance anxiety, and resist sharing techniques, such as peer mentoring.
[Optional.] Discuss.
These two dysfunctions are mutually supportive. The more attention I pay to status and ego, the more I dig in to invulnerability, because it’s supporting my camoflage, and the less attention I pay to the results needed for the team. I’ve already elevated my concerns above the team’s, because the team is now background to me.
HOWEVER, a true team is not a set of submerged egos. It is a set of individuals, with different strengths, lending those strengths for a goal larger than any individual can achieve. So it gets difficult sometimes to assure that you have the right people, in the right roles, working at the right times, and appropriately standing their ground.
A good test for this is:
Does the team argue with sincerity and passion?
Does the team argue about productivity, or about principles?
If it gets personal, if people can’t fight hard and feel fine about a decision because they TRUST that all points got heard, and a hard choice had to be made, then you know that both of these dysfunctions are harming your group goal.
Once things get personal, a vicious cycle starts, confirming both my need for invulnerability and my shoring up of status and defensiveness. After this happens, we begin to be afraid of each other, and we start to fear conflict.
Now that we fear conflict, because it may punch holes in my camoflage and reveal me to people I distrust, I become very interested in pretending to get along.
I say little in meetings.
I never engage when I see someone else get excited—although I might try to soothe them, or suggest that the discussion happen at another time, whether it should or not. I maintain false harmony as a cover-up for my invulnerability and ego needs. I claim that tabling the discussion is saving time, but a review of what’s really happened over the months is voiced by one of those aggressive people that aren’t afraid of conflict:
“Don’t you think we’re wasting time by not hashing things out? How long have we been talking about this? I think it comes up at every meeting, and half of us are for it, half are against it, and so it just sits there because no one wants to piss anyone off.” –p.93.
So we do things like “deciding to decide.” But that doesn’t fix the problem because I’m still cherishing my status, I’m still maintaining my camoflage, and as long as I don’t attract too much attention, I can even be praised as a peaceful, easy-to-get-along-with guy. I’ll get the usual combatants fired up if I really have to, but I’d just as soon do without, so long as you don’t rock the boat and get my camoflage wet.
I don’t want you to notice how that leads to a new dysfunction of the team:
Since I don’t risk conflict, I don’t ever test my commitments…or anybody else’s. So I don’t know what really matters in the day-to-day scrum of things. And you don’t know what matters to me either: after all, I can’t really tell you that I’m more interested in my ego and status, and in maintaining my camoflage. That would be embarrassing, and lead to difficult conversations about unmentionable things like camoflage and invulnerability, and we already know what I think about conflict.
And that leads to…
Ambiguity, my new cover-up for my need for ego and invulnerability. It’s a great way to support my false harmony cover-up.
So I hate it when someone tries to pin me down to a decision, or set a deadline, or insist on anything that might lead you to notice…
And once I’ve avoided accountability,
low standards are not my fault.
And then I don’t have to hold my peers accountable, either, and that way I can avoid interpersonal discomfort caused by unravelling ambiguity, false harmony, and my need for invulnerability.
This is why I dread Meetings, especially Effective Meetings, which have rules about paying attention to results (meeting goal and relevance to the team’s goals that the project should enable), maintaining accountability (actions, decisions, owners, and due dates; and also Scrum). Meetings are a venue for conflict.
Specific and sophisticated behaviors exist to render meetings ineffective by making conflict difficult and disguising absence of trust. For example, I can:
Fail to define an agenda which tells you what’s going on and how long it will go on
Engage in diversionary chatter, clown around, hold my own meeting-in-a-meeting, and generally make it clear that “we’re a good group” and “have fun together” and that Affiliation matters more than Achievement—it’s more important to make each other feel good than to get things done
Bring up something that the group’s rehearsed and will set the conversation into known channels
Pile on to what other people say, agreeing at length
Shutting off my participation with “I don’t know” or shrugs
Bring my computer and do other work, not making eye contact; get offended and say “I’m listening” or “I’m taking notes”
Fail to disagree when I should contribute
Indicate by my arch and whiney tone of voice, my posture or gestures, or other means to show disrespect and intimidate other points of view
Fail to leaven my passion for something with a decent regard for the other person with whom I disagree (often happens when accountability and trust dysfunctions engage)