In a story-telling format, he’s laid out an interesting case for what are the dysfunctions keeping most teams from optimal performance — and how to get around them.  Here is a sampling of each of the five dysfunctions. If these resonate with you, the book may be helpful. It is a very fast read.

1. Absence of Trust: In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.
2. Fear of Conflict: All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business. Unfortunately, conflict is considered taboo in many situations, especially at work. And the higher you go up the management chain, the more you find people spending inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to avoid the kind of passionate debates that are essential to any great team.
3. Lack of Commitment: In context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with the complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision. They leave meetings confident that no one on the team is quietly harboring doubts about whether to support the actions agreed on. The two greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty.
4. Avoidance of Accountability: In the context of teamwork, accountability refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team. The essence of this dysfunction is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations. Members of great teams overcome these natural inclinations, opting instead to “enter the danger” with one another.
5. Inattention to Results: The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group. An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance.

It takes trust from each member to create such a leadership team. There needs to be a transparent environment where difficult situations are directly addressed and individuals are clearly held accountable.

Many mistake a “cordial” team as most effective. These teams tend to have non-confrontational members who are unwilling to hold each other accountable. Remember you need some degree of friction to hone a blade. During challenging times, these teams have difficulties making needed changes. They also tend to have collective blind spots that make the overall leadership team vulnerable.

A team that is too confrontational has its own problems. These leaders create dysfunctional work environments where trust is completely absent. Much of the collective energy is inwardly focused on internal conflicts rather than outwardly toward customers or competitors.

In my experience, more organizations suffer from a leadership team that doesn’t challenge one another enough. If this is the case with your leadership team then create better transparency within the group so that everyone is clear on how each member is being held accountable. Such an environment  usually provides the right foundation for everyone to give constructive feedback to one another because it’s clear what is supposed to be done and by whom.

There are three key principles can help an organization maneuver through such drastic changes.

1. Compelling Vision: There needs to be a clear and compelling vision behind the change. If the reason is just to cut costs to only improve the financials, you’re just bailing water out of a sinking ship. Good luck. People may understand this rationale, but it is not inspiring. What an uninspiring tone to set during a difficult time of change. People will feverishly rally together in times of uncertainty if they believe that their actions will lead to bigger and better things. Be clear with a compelling vision.
2. Be Decisive: Implement the changes quickly. Take too long and the leadership quickly loses credibility within the ranks. Obviously, the proposed changes came about for a reason. Don’t lose sight of that while making the needed changes.
3. Make the tough personnel decisions upfront – as much as possible. At uncertain times, people need to focus on objectives ahead with confidence. Do not let the team waste energy speculating about further personnel changes. Let them rally around the vision that was outlined.

I was very specific when starting Lift9 (which has since become Intrepid Consultants) that I wanted a business that was global.  I had a lust to travel again as I had done during most of the 90s when helping to build ARIS to its IPO in 1997.

Last month I was in London for three weeks, returned home to Seattle for just the past week, and am now on an airplane to Ho Chi Minh City for the coming week.

The good news is that our company is doing so well that such travel is necessary. It’s exciting to see a plan come together. It was about a year ago that I initially came to Vietnam with the idea of starting a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, I’m visiting again because the group has been so successful that we’re moving the research center to a better and bigger facility.

Our vision was always to make sure that our global offices, including the one in Ho Chi Minh, were going to be integrated into one core culture. In other words, we wanted to allow people in each office to all have equal opportunities to grow and contribute to Intrepid. After watching the “two-class” dysfunctional relationships that were built with many of the off-shoring efforts of the IT industry,  we wanted to build something very different.

To that regard, when I return from this trip, one of our most promising rising stars, a researcher from the Ho Chi Minh, will be accompanying me back to Seattle, then to a trade show in Chicago. It wasn’t easy to get his visa for such a trip, but lots of people helped to make it possible. It will be his first trip to the US, and the Seattle office has some good events planned for his welcome.

So, while the jetlag and the long-stints in hotels can be tiring, when I see what we are building, and the relative success in such a short period of time, I’m still happy to be getting “what I had asked for.”

An effective CEO also knows when someone on his/her management team will not make the team better, and does something about it decisively. Inaction often has as much, if not more, consequences than making an ineffective decision with the right intentions.

When building an executive team and personalities are involved, a young CEO and entrepreneur may not be able to decipher who on the management team is effective and who is not. Other times, he/she do understand the shortcomings of the team but is too inexperience or immature to move quickly to fix the problem.

I’ve met with a lot of young companies and their management teams. I can usually tell within a couple of minutes whether the team has the right chemistry or not, whether the individuals push each other constructively, or whether the team is dysfunctional.

In one company, many made excuses for one of the top executives before I even met him. That was not an effective management team. Recently, I met another management team where everyone comfortably contributed to a meeting. No one person dominated, including the top executive. I knew right away that this group headed for success.

Be honest now, how effective is your management team? Are you making excuses?

Trust determines your relationships with your most intimate peeps, with your work colleagues, with strangers, with everyone. Some of us have the propensity to trust too much, others too little.

In a team environment, it is critical to trust your teammates. When a superstar athlete does not trust his teammates, he tries to do everything on his own, usually losing to the other TEAM.

In the work place, it is no different. I’ve always said that I’d take three capable and collaborative people over three extremely-brilliant people who can’t work together — or trust one another. The military understands this well, and breaks down new recruits until they are completely built back up in a team concept, learning to trust their fellow soldiers. This is because at times of extreme crisis, trust becomes critically challenged. In order to overcome difficult situations, teammates need to trust one another even more.

In the workplace, people must trust one another to build a powerful team. If people don’t trust one another, then micro-management, finger pointing, gossiping, politicking will begin to dominate. Most energy will be internally focused rather than outwardly toward customer needs or market opportunities and threats.

Building a trusting environment starts at the top. Leadership must show trust toward the team and vision. Then the leaders need to build an environment where failure is okay when trying to solve problems creatively. There needs to be a net for people who may fail, such as a good, clear escalation path and a mechanism by which each experience is used as a constructive learning lesson.

Such a strong, ever-improving team is much more scalable, sustainable and effective than a manager trying to “do it all”.

In all your relationships, do you have the foundation to build trust? In times of marital or parental crisis, your trust will surely be tested. And either you will have the core foundation to trust or you will not.

Unfortunately, it is during these times of change that leaders are buried in the day-to-day and communicate the least. Often, unsure of next steps or too wrapped up in effecting change, we are hesitant and forgetful to be transparent with information.

So, clearly, it is when we need to communicate the most that we communicate the least, causing a crisis situation that further spiral out of control.

Here are some communication priorities during such times:

• Address the situation at hand with frankness. By speaking clearly and realistically, you as a leader can build credibility that the situation is truly being recognized.
• Put the current situation in context of the bigger picture. Usually, change causes both progress and pain. Both needs to be understood in context.
• Clearly outline a plan to address the current situation. Let people know that there is a plan in place and the leadership team is being proactive to remedy the situation. Also, a clear plan dismisses unhealthy rumors that arise.
• Recognize people’s efforts during the change. Some great talent rises to the top during such times. Re-enforce the attitude, behavior and efforts of such people.
• Walk everyone to the “light at the end of the tunnel”. Hope is eternal.
• Communicate more than you think you should.

The reference topic is “Three Core Components to A Great Work Environment” from an old blog post.

The first and most critical component is business success and stability. Many see being “too” focused on financial numbers as somehow not complementary with creating a great work environment. It is only through financial stability that a company can protect its work culture. I’ve seen some of the most creative and fun work environments crumble from the strain of financial instability.

The second most vital component is the work culture. Often people confuse work culture with work place personality. The work culture are the underlying principles that govern how employees interact, how success is measured, and how people are held accountable. The work culture reflects the overall value system of the company. Therefore, I believe strong emphasis on mutual respect, accountability, collaboration and individual empowerment will help create substantive and successful work cultures.

Some work cultures protect processes more than actual results. Others reward creativity and risks. A lot of the elements of work culture aren’t even written in any employee handwork. Yet, they strongly influence how people behave with one another, or whether deadlines are likely to be met, or whether everyone is aligned to the same vision.

The last component is the work place personality. This is the most obvious of the three components but the least important. Leaders, however, spend most of their time focusing on the work place personality as a way of influencing the work environment.

The work place personalities can take many different forms. In the digital marketing space, many offices have open work areas without cubicles for better collaboration. In a call center, there might be a sales scoreboard in the middle of the room measuring individual successes for the day. In many startups, video game consoles are a common part of the office equipment for developers during breaks. At one of my companies, we used to run remote control car races as a team building exercise.

Too often, executives put too much emphasis on the personality of the work place, and not enough on the work culture. A fun work place personality can only be effective with a foundation of a solid work culture that encourages collaboration, accountability, mutual respect and individual empowerment. And that solid work culture can only be successful if the company is enjoying business success and financial stability.

Many think an entrepreneur’s first task is to come up with a killer concept. Yet, it’s been said many times that  ”ideas” can be a dime a dozen, but execution is where most fail. Who executes? The team. As Jim Collins points out in his book, “Good to Great”, first the Who? then the What?

Maybe it’s also because I’m not a technical whiz kid, or a genius financial mind that I keep stressing the team. Or, I’d like to think it could be that I’ve been involved with six startups and figured out what helps in success.

So, as I’m admiring the work of Seattle Mariners’ GM Jack Zduriencik this off season in putting together a more competitive professional baseball team, I’m reminded about my primary job of finding the right people for the the right jobs in my company. Like a baseball team, a startup environment requires everyone to be cohesive and supportive of one another.

Sometimes an entrepreneur needs to take risks on inexperienced people, or on an experienced person who has never been in a startup environment. You build such a team with an unwavering core philosophy about the type of team you want.  And when the team members need guidance, you coach them; when they prove themselves, you give them control. You always keep scalability and performance in mind.

In the end, it’s my job to look at ways to improve my team continuously based upon our performance against the competitive environment out there. If this means possibly bringing in more capital or merging with a complementary team or hiring faster, I will do so, always making sure that each new player within the company are complementary with one another. It’s my responsibility to ensure that the sum of the parts really make a much more compelling whole.

The character and performance of the team will ultimately be my scorecard as the founder of Lift9.