TITLE: Dysfunctions and Business Books
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 27, 2008 11:03 AM
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Last week, I read Patrick Lencioni's
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
It's another one of those "parable" books, wherein the
author teaches his method, stance, or idea by telling a
story of the theme in action. The book has been in my
to-read pile for several months, after seeing a couple of
positive references to it on the XP mailing list a while
back. But I put off reading it in favor of other things
for a long time. Indeed, my experience mirrors the
one reported here:
I couldn't seem to get started for the longest time,
despite my wife's good recommendation, and then I read it
quickly and found it to be a "very good little book".
I recommend it.
Lencioni describes a
pyramid of dysfunctions
that sabotage a team's effectiveness. This model can also
be viewed as a sequence of patterns of effective teams:
trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and collective
results. I have experienced elements of all five layers in
my current "team". I would not say that we are as self-destructive
as the team in his story, but even small chinks in the
foundation can weaken the structure above. I hope that in my
time as head we have taken steps in the right direction from
dysfunction to function. Certainly, trust has been one of my
focal points. I have been less successful in encouraging
healthy conflict as I had hoped, which indicates weakness in
trust. This is an area in which I can grow more able as a
leader. Lencioni's model gives me a standard against which
to evaluate myself.
Of course, as
Seth Godin says,
Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than
actually doing it. That is one of the underlying themes
of this blog and its name.
Speaking of Godin, I am reminded of a misgiving I've had
about the parable books that dominate the popular business
press. I've enjoyed many of them, but these days I am less
eager to read another. I even told my wife that I was planning
to skip past the story in Lencioni's book straight to the
appendix that explains his model in about 30 pages. Typical
academic that I am, I hungered for the meat of the book,
not the appetizer.
Almost every one of the popular business books could be boiled
down to a single chapter that states the main idea and tells
me how to implement it. That doesn't make for much of a book,
though, and wouldn't attract many readers. But why should a
busy guy like me waste time reading the fully dressed version?
Am I missing something? I didn't think so, but... There is a
big gap between knowing and doing.
I was lucky to read Godin's blog entry
How to read a business book
within a day of finishing Five Dysfunctions, and he
set my mind at ease. My understanding of these books is spot-on,
yet the parable itself really is important. It is where the
author hopes to cultivate in us the motivation to act. Godin
says as much about his own books:
... if three weeks go by and you haven't taken action on what
you've written down, you wasted your time.
Three weeks is probably too tight for me, with the onset of
summer vacation and the end to regular interactions among the
whole faculty until fall. I either need to re-read the book
in August or find a way to act on what I've learned during the
summer.
In closing, I see Godin's prescription as something like a
unit test for my reading about teams and leadership:
Effective managers hand books to their team. Not so they can
be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say
to them, "are we there yet?"
Kent Beck would be proud.
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