The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

WHAT?
In the last unit, our leadership class has been reading from the novel The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. The book consists of a story about a retired CEO named Kathryn Petersen who came out of retirement in hopes to educate a group of executives on what causes teams to fail, so that these executives can successfully lead their teams or businesses by knowing how to deal with the common issues. The story, as well as the closing excerpt "The Model" are all based on the Five Dysfunctions of Leadership Model. This model consists of a pyramid of five issues that teams often come across, which include inattention to results, avoidance of accountability, lack of commitment, fear of conflict, absence of trust.

SO WHAT?
After examining this model, I have observed that my group, Team Back Corner, has been able to avoid most of these common issues through both communicating to each other and showing dedication to team success. However, there is always of course the occasional conflict that teams will go through. The conflicts that our team have come across relate mostly to absence of trust, and avoidance of accountability. The absence of trust and avoidance of accountability go hand in hand with each other because if you don't think you can trust an individual or certain group members, you won't hold them accountable for their responsibilities. There are only certain group members that the other members of the group occasionally feel they can't entirely trust. Yet, I feel that as a whole our group is very resilient and works together to get through problems. We haven't had to particularly tell anyone to step up their game at any point, because I do feel that a majority of the group members are strongly dedicated to the groups' success and want to get along with one another, and we are therefore able to complete the tasks at hand.Everyone makes mistakes, including myself. But we have been effective enough as a group in our thought process and willingness to contribute in order for our team to succeed (shown in our score for the Maroon-Orange game, haha).

NOW WHAT?
Because our group has not yet performed our service project , we have to make sure we finish strong.  We have just finished reading on the five dysfunctions of teams, therefore we have a new found background on issues teams often have to overcome and how to avoid or solve these issues. We have a few team meetings left before we will execute our workshop, so we must communicate and make our final plans effectively so that our service project runs smoothly and we are able to pass on our knowledge of leadership to the new members of Sigma Kappa.