The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop

This is a team workshop designed for teams that want to take their performance and collaboration to a new level. It is based on a book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, written by Patrick Lencioni, where he explores the common pitfalls that hinder effective teamwork within organizations. You will learn about the characteristics of every dysfunction in order to overcome it and work better as a team!

Step 1: Ice-melter (5 min)

Set the timer for 5 minutes and let the team members first pick their avatar. This will give then additional anonymity later in the workshop. They just pick one animal and move it to the triangle. After that asked them to share their favorite team moments. It can be more of them, not just one. 

Step 2: 5 dysfunctions of a team (5 min)

Present the characteristics of the 5 dysfunctions, help yourself with the content written on the left.Step 3: Where are we now? (5 min):

Each participant thinks about what dysfunctions are present in their team based on step 2. For each dysfunction, they have to write down a number between 1 (absolutely not true) & 5 (absolutely true) and place the sticky not on the dysfunction. We suggest you use Private mode function here. After that the facilitator calculates the averages. Highest average shows the dysfunction that the team is dealing with.

Step 4: What might we do about it? (10 min)

After the team identified the dysfunction, take it and go into ideation. You can use How might we questions. For example: How might we overcome our fear of conflicts? Set the timer to 5 minutes and let the team members come up with ideas. After 5 minutes, it is time to vote on the best ideas. Use Voting function, adjust votes accordingly to the number of participants and the number of ideas. Give team members 3 minutes so that they can first read all the ideas, then vote on it for 2 minutes. 

Step 5: My personal promise (10 min)

Based on the voted best ideas, give team members 5 minutes to write what they will do on Monday morning to bring those ideas to action and to write their personal promises. After that, each team member individually shares their promises to the team, starting with a sentence: "I /name/ promise to the team to...