From Five Dysfunctions to Five Cohesions: A Strengths-Based Lens on Lencioni’s Team Model (PART 1)

What happens when we stop asking, “What is wrong with this team?” and start asking, “What do we want to strengthen?”

Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has given leaders a powerful way to understand what gets in the way of teamwork: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. But Lencioni’s work does not stop at identifying dysfunction.

In The Advantage, he places building a cohesive leadership team as the first of four disciplines for creating organizational health. The Table Group, Lencioni’s organization, describes this first discipline as developing a high-performing team and mastering the five behaviors outlined in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Those positive behaviors are: Trust → Conflict → Commitment → Accountability → Results. 

As a team coach, I think of these as the Five Cohesions, a strengths-based lens for working with Lencioni’s model. It is not a different model. It is a different starting point for the conversation. 

Instead of focusing primarily on what is dysfunctional, we ask: What do we want to strengthen?

Build Trust

Trust is the foundation. Lencioni’s teamwork model focuses on vulnerability-based trust, where team members can be transparent and honest with one another.

A strengths-based conversation asks the team: “When do we experience trust at our best, and what would help us create more of it?”

This also connects with Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety. Her work describes psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and links it with learning behavior in work teams. 

The goal is not to pretend a trust gap does not exist. It is to give the team something tangible to build.

Make Conflict Productive

Highly cohesive teams are not teams that never disagree. They learn how to disagree well. Within Lencioni’s framework, trust enables team members to engage in constructive debate around ideas. 

Instead of focusing on why the team avoids conflict, we ask: “What would help us challenge ideas more openly, honestly, and constructively?”

That opens a richer team conversation: Which perspectives are we not hearing? How do we respond when someone challenges our thinking? How can we remain curious when we disagree? 

The goal is not more conflict. It is better conflict.

Strengthen Commitment

In Lencioni’s model, productive debate supports commitment. When team members offer opinions and debate ideas, they can feel heard and are more likely to commit to decisions.

We can ask the team: “What creates clarity, ownership, and commitment on this team?”

The shift is subtle but important. We move from diagnosing disengagement to identifying the conditions that help people align around a decision and move forward together.

Practice Mutual Accountability

Accountability is sometimes viewed as something the leader does to the team. On a cohesive team, accountability becomes something members practice with one another. Lencioni’s framework specifically describes team members holding one another accountable after committing to a clear plan of action.

The team is invited to explore: “What should we consistently be able to count on from one another?”

That changes the conversation. The focus moves away from blame and toward shared expectations, behaviors, commitments, and collective ownership.

Focus on Collective Results

The ultimate goal of Lencioni’s positive teamwork framework is achieving collective results, supported by trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability.

A powerful team-development question becomes: “What outcomes require us to succeed together?”

That question matters because it brings the conversation back to the reason the team exists. Teams are not simply collections of talented individuals. Cohesion requires people to connect their contribution to something they are collectively responsible for achieving.

Why Might the Cohesion Lens Feel More Motivating?

This is where the distinction becomes particularly useful in coaching.

The dysfunction lens asks: “What is getting in our way?”

The cohesion lens asks: “What do we want to create together?”

We need both.

Diagnosing dysfunction can help a team recognize patterns that are limiting effectiveness. But a strengths-based conversation gives the team a positive destination toward which it can move. Research provides some support for this broader strengths-oriented approach. A study by Van Wingerden and Van der Stoep found relationships among meaningful work, strengths use, work engagement, and performance. Research by Gander, Gaitzsch, and Ruch has also examined relationships between character strengths and positive team roles and individual- and team-level outcomes, including teamwork quality, satisfaction, and performance. 

These studies do not demonstrate that a “Five Cohesions” intervention is more effective or motivating than Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions. Rather, they provide useful research context for why a strengths-focused developmental conversation may be valuable.

That's an important distinction. Strengths-based does not mean problems-blind. It means we can identify a problem without making the problem the centerpiece of the team's identity.

From Diagnosis to Development

Perhaps we do not need to choose between dysfunction and cohesion at all.

Dysfunction helps us diagnose. Cohesion gives us something to build toward.

The progression remains grounded in Lencioni’s work: Build trust. Make conflict productive. Strengthen commitment. Practice mutual accountability. Focus on collective results.

The coaching conversation shifts from: “Which dysfunction do we have?” to: “Which of these five areas, if we strengthened it together, would have the greatest impact on how we work and perform?” That takes the team from identifying what is wrong to imagining what is possible. And, more importantly, to deciding what they will do differently together.

What might change if your team spent less time labeling what is wrong and more time intentionally strengthening what it wants more of?

Research

• Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. The Table Group identifies “Build a Cohesive Leadership Team” as the first discipline of its organizational-health model. 

• Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The model identifies absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

• Amy Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. 

• Gander, F., Gaitzsch, I., & Ruch, W. (2020). The Relationships of Team Role- and Character Strengths-Balance With Individual and Team-Level Satisfaction and Performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 566222. 

• Van Wingerden, J., & Van der Stoep, J. (2018). The Motivational Potential of Meaningful Work: Relationships With Strengths Use, Work Engagement, and Performance. PLOS ONE, 13(6), e0197599.