Debugging Teams with the Lencioni Model
Something about Lencioni really bugs me.  There is no other business writer about whom I feel that strongly.<p>He&#x27;s extremely ad-hominem and paints that picture of that &quot;dysfunctional team member&quot; (read &quot;asshole&quot;), and his whole idea of an organization basically boils down to saying that you don&#x27;t want an asshole in it:  Don&#x27;t risk hiring an asshole, even at the risk of a huge false-negative rate in your hiring decisions.  Cleanse your organization by instituting a witchhunt for assholes and putting them through the wringer to make sure they&#x27;re reformed or fired.<p>Contrary to what Lencioni preaches, I believe that management is about selecting teams comprised of individuals who know <i>how</i> to do stuff, telling them <i>what</i> to do, and giving them incentives to make sure they <i>actually do</i> it.<p>Lencioni seems to think a manager is like a spouse who cares primarily about <i>who</i> their spouse is, or like a mother who wants their child to be a certain kind of person behaving a certain kind of way.<p>This ad-hominem level is precisely what you learn to steer clear of, if you&#x27;ve ever taken a course on conflict management.  Focus on the issue, not the person.  ...it&#x27;s also borderline illegal in certain jurisdictions.  For example in German employment law and constitutional law there is the idea of the &quot;allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht&quot; which says that basically, while you can discriminate between employees on the basis of competence and what they accomplish for you, you can&#x27;t discriminate on the basis of who they are or what kind of person they are.<p>I once worked in a workplace where managers high up the ladder were very fond of Lencioni&#x27;s writing, and pushed the philosophy on middle management too.  The place just felt unprofessional and cult-like.  I felt I was constantly under pressure to prove that I wasn&#x27;t an asshole, and whenever I&#x27;d disagree with a manager, it was hard to even just have a meaningful conversation about the topic of the disagreement.  Instead, the conversation would immediately turn to this unspoken accusation that I might just be an asshole for disagreeing in the first place, and now I needed to prove that I wasn&#x27;t one, or else my career would be deeply in jeopardy.<p>I strongly advise reading Lencioni, and then thinking long and hard about how not to fall into the trap of thinking about organizations the way he does.