The Five Dysfunctons of a Team - A MUST READ

Just got done reading "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" by Patrick Lencioni and it's a MUST READ FOR EVERY COACH. This book is written buy a guy in the business world, but it really applies to coaches as well. I was at Barnes and Noble last night with the wife getting a book for the mother in law's birthday. I was randomly picking up books and I stumbled upon this one. I started flipping through it and started to notice some similarities between the five dysfunctions and things I noticed with last year's team. I bought it yesterday and read it all today - it's only 216 pages. It's changed the way I'm going to approach program/team building from now on. If I'd had it last year probably wouldn't have been 1-21 and if we were, it was have been a little more positive experience - the foundation would have been better set for following years.

The book centers around the five things that poor teams have: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Most of the book is rapped up in a fictional story about a new CEO taking over a company and having to fix some dysfunctional behaviors - behaviors I think we see on a yearly basis on our own basketball teams. Now it's fictional, but it comes from the author's experiences with real live business teams. The nice thing is that it isn't completely perfect - there is some dissension at first, some hostility, and some of the people on this CEOs staff end up leaving and being pushed out because they were not toeing the line. It also shows how the fictional CEO handles the early criticisms of her staff, just as we might face some resistance early in the year.

The end of the book goes into detail about the five dysfunctions and also lays out some ideas for how to deal with fixing each step and all steps together. The approach is that all five of these are linked and depend on other dysfunctions, it comes at it from a complete approach.

Once again, I highly recommend this book for every basketball coach who wants to be better at team building next season or who wants to completely turn the culture around in their program. I am definately using it if I ever get the chance to be a head coach again!


Update:
Thanks to "CoachN" from the Xs and Os message board for adding that Coach Eric Musselman had previously talked about the book on his blog. I would look there as well if you are interested, as Coach Musselman is a far better writer than I!