Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Off-Site Agenda

Overview and Assessment (one or two hours)

Another warning: The agenda that follows is not meant to prescribe or dictate how you build your team. It is simply a structure my colleagues and I have found to be useful with many of our clients. But keep in mind that every situation is a little different, and requires a measure of judgment, even art, on the part of the facilitator and leader.

So don’t be afraid to deviate from this agenda—or from anything else in this guide, for that matter—to best serve the needs of your team and your unique situation.

Overview and Assessment (one or two hours) Overview of the Five Dysfunctions (around half an hour) Begin the off-site by providing the team with a clear and complete overview of the model; it is critical that everyone understands and embraces it. You can do this by presenting the model yourself and providing your own stories, or by showing The Table Group’s video on The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. In either case, it is certainly helpful if team members have read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team ahead of time.

Review of Team Assessment Report Results (about one hour) If the team completed the team assessment before the session, walk them through the results. If they have not, you can have them Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team complete the short-form paper-based assessment shown on page 116 of this guide.

Once the team has reviewed—but certainly not resolved—the issues highlighted by the team report, you are ready to move on to the first part of team building: building trust.

Personal Histories Exercise (around fifteen minutes) The first step in building trust is helping people get comfortable being vulnerable with one another. (See page 118.) Behavioral Profile Exercise (around two to four hours) The next step in ensuring vulnerability-based trust is giving team members a tool for understanding themselves, and one another, in a deeper way. Behavioral profiling tools such as the Myers-Briggs make it easier for people to reveal their own strengths and weaknesses. (See page 119.)

Consider revisiting the findings from the Team Assessment Report that you reviewed at the beginning of the off-site. Often, a team’s collective profile provides insights into why a team may or may not struggle with a particular dysfunction.

During a two-day off-site, the team should begin Day 2 by taking time to review team members’ individual insights around their profiles and potential areas for improvement. (See Step 7 within)

Building Trust

Mastering Conflict (one or two hours)

Conflict Profiling (around thirty to sixty minutes)

The next step in building your team is learning to engage in productive conflict around issues. To make this possible, it is important for the team to understand its collective and individual preferences for dealing with conflict.

Your team may want to use other models, such as the ThomasKilmann Instrument and the Depth-Frequency Model to better assess its conflict profile.

Conflict Norming (around thirty minutes)

Once the team has determined its profile, it can then establish a set of norms around how the members will engage one another in conflict.

Conflict Resolution Obstacles (around thirty to sixty minutes)

Even teams with clear norms around conflict can often struggle to resolve issues that they are debating because they encounter distractions unrelated to the issue being discussed. The Conflict Resolution Model can help them understand these distractions and eliminate them during conflict.

Achieving Commitment (two to six hours)

Clarification of Team and Organizational Principles This is the part of the off-site where the team begins diving into business-related topics.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Using the conflict norms and trust-related insights from the previous exercises, it is now time to clarify and commit to a variety of operational and behavioral principles, which may include core purpose, values, strategy, goals, roles, and team expectations around behavior. Topics will vary depending on the nature of the team and its role in the organization (for example, executive leadership team, line management team, employee task force). All teams will want to clarify their thematic goals and supporting categorical objectives.

Embracing Accountability (one or two hours)

Team Effectiveness Exercise

To create a culture of accountability, team members must learn to provide one another with direct feedback, both positive and constructive, around their behavior and performance. (See page 139.) Focusing on Results (one hour)

The team should create a means for quickly and effectively gauging its ongoing success against its goals. (See page 141.)

The Initial Off-Site

Off-Site Wrap-Up and Follow-Up

Commitment Clarification

To ensure alignment and clarity coming out of the off-site, the team must review what it has agreed upon and resulting actions that must be taken.

To ensure consistent messaging, the team must be clear about when members are to communicate results of the off-site to their teams or others within the organization.

To ensure that momentum coming out of the off-site is not lost, it is important for team members to take specific steps to review, communicate, and follow up on the actions discussed and the commitments made.

This is the segment where we provide step-by-step instructions for using the tools and exercises mentioned in the earlier parts of the book.

Review of the Online Team Assessment Purpose of exercise: To help the team identify its current strengths and weaknesses, and prepare them for the rest of the off-site.

This example assumes the team took the online version of the assessment and received their final team report, and thus has all the analysis that is included in it. Here is how to take them through that report:

1. Review the overall team profile and scores.
2. Ask the team to individually review the next three sections— Strengths, Areas for Improvement, and Areas of Key Difference—and look for particularly interesting highlights.
3. Have different team members read aloud the list of team strengths, areas for improvement, and areas of key differences.
4. Ask the group for their insight as to why the team scored the way it did, on all three areas. (You may also want to break the team up into smaller subgroups of three or four people and have them discuss why certain questions scored particularly high or low.)
5. Record their responses on flip charts for reference during the remainder of this session.
6. Clarify any misunderstandings or confusion that may arise around any particular question that has been highlighted.

1. Hand out copies of the Team Assessment included on the following page, and give the team members time to complete it.
2. Ask team members to share their individual responses.
3. Average the team members’ responses to determine the overall score for each dysfunction.
4. Ask the group for their insight as to why the team scored the way it did. (You may also want to break the team up into smaller subgroups of three or four people and have them discuss why certain questions scored particularly high or low.)
5. Record their responses on flip charts for reference during the remainder of this session.
6. Clarify any misunderstandings or confusion that may arise around any particular question that has been highlighted.