Take a photo of a barcode or cover
brianjmcguirk 's review for:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
by Patrick Lencioni
Most business books are crap. Most “leadership” books are crap. The best-sellers in both categories are rarely written by people who can either run businesses or lead. But this wasn’t bad. The decision to basically write a bit of fiction (fable) in the middle was a surprisingly liberating way to illustrate the principles the author espouses. And, having been on dysfunctional teams, a lot of this rang true.
A foundational problem, for the author, is “an absence of trust.” And he has some suggestions for how to engender it. That’s all very well and good, but what if one has evidentiary, persuasive reasons not to trust one’s teammates? Documented backstabbing? Targets on backs? The easy answer is: “Get rid of the people responsible,” but it’s not always quite that easy. Kathryn, the the fabled CEO in the middle section of the book, has leeway not experienced by all of us. Her hardest bit of strategy is how to construct a severance package without a scene. She’d find it a bit different in the public sector, for example.
A foundational problem, for the author, is “an absence of trust.” And he has some suggestions for how to engender it. That’s all very well and good, but what if one has evidentiary, persuasive reasons not to trust one’s teammates? Documented backstabbing? Targets on backs? The easy answer is: “Get rid of the people responsible,” but it’s not always quite that easy. Kathryn, the the fabled CEO in the middle section of the book, has leeway not experienced by all of us. Her hardest bit of strategy is how to construct a severance package without a scene. She’d find it a bit different in the public sector, for example.