Understanding the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

A full-day facilitated workshop built around Patrick Lencioni’s classic model — showing your team exactly where trust breaks down, and what to do about it.

Most team dysfunction isn’t a mystery. Lencioni’s five dysfunctions — absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results — explain why so many capable teams underperform. This workshop walks your team through the model, held up against their own working relationships, indoors and out, so the insight actually sticks.

Why Do This Course?

Lencioni’s model stacks five dysfunctions on top of each other, trust at the base, results at the top. Fix a layer out of order and it doesn’t hold. This workshop takes your team through all five, in the order that actually works.

Trust is the foundation, not a soft extra

Without vulnerability-based trust, every other behaviour on this list quietly falls apart. We start here, not with communication tips.

Good teams argue well

Teams that avoid conflict don’t avoid problems — they bury them. We teach people to disagree about ideas without damaging the relationship.

Clarity beats consensus

Commitment doesn’t need everyone to agree. It needs everyone to leave the room genuinely bought in — even when they didn’t get their way.

Peers hold the line, not just managers

The best teams call each other out — directly, early, and without needing a manager to referee every conversation.

Collective results beat individual ego

When status and ego come before the team’s shared goals, performance quietly erodes. We put results back at the centre.

What This Workshop Includes

This session is practical and grounded in your team’s own real dynamics — not a lecture on a theory. Each workshop is tailored to your team, but typically includes:

A full breakdown of Lencioni’s model

A clear, practical explanation of all five dysfunctions and how they build on one another — no jargon, no theory for its own sake.

An honest team health check

A structured reflection exercise where your team maps itself against each of the five dysfunctions — together, out loud.

Indoor and outdoor exercises

Practical activities, some in the room and some outdoors, that surface real trust and accountability dynamics rather than hypothetical ones.

A plan your team actually owns

Concrete commitments and ways of working the team sets for itself — not a slide deck that gets forgotten by Friday.

What’s In It For You as a Leader

If you’re the one signing this off, here’s the honest case for a single day out of the business.

Fewer repeated arguments

Teams that learn to disagree productively stop re-litigating the same decision three meetings later.

Faster decisions

Genuine commitment at the point of decision means less second-guessing and backtracking afterwards.

Less managing-up, more managing-across

Peer accountability reduces how much conflict resolution lands back on your desk.

A team that pulls in one direction

When individual status stops being the scoreboard, collective results start improving.

Sticky notes from a workshop session capturing participants’ honest reflections on trust

One-Day Understanding the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop

This immersive, full-day experience walks your team through Lencioni’s model step by step — building trust, practising healthy conflict, and leaving with real commitments — through expert facilitation, honest reflection, and time spent working together outdoors.