Coaching practices for How to Assess Team Dysfunction

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Assess Team Dysfunction, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My team only ever talks about how we’re working together after something has already blown up
• Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
• My team feels off and I keep throwing fixes at it, but I can’t tell whether the real problem is that people don’t feel they belong, don’t feel safe to err, won’t volunteer ideas, or won’t disagree.
• When someone on my team drops the ball, everyone just waits for me to be the one to say something
• On my team nobody will admit they’re stuck or wrong or don’t know something

Practices that may help

1. Use regular team health checks to surface dysfunction early
   Teams that check in on how they’re working together catch dysfunction before it compounds.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
   Patrick Lencioni’s model describes five compounding failures that undermine teams: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results — each built on the one below. It is a practitioner framework presented as a business fable, not an empirically tested model, but its five dimensions align well with decades of team effectiveness research, making it a useful diagnostic even without controlled-trial support.
3. Align around collective results, not individual status
   Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
4. Diagnose which safety stage your team is currently in
   Before intervening, accurately assess whether the deficit is inclusion, learner, contributor, or challenger safety.
   The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
5. Create a culture of peer-to-peer accountability
   Teams that only hold each other accountable through the manager haven’t built real accountability at all.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
6. Build vulnerability-based trust
   Teams that can’t admit weakness, mistakes, or ignorance to each other cannot genuinely collaborate.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
7. Recognize and recover from stage regression
   A team that was Performing can drop back to Storming — and the recovery move is different from the original ascent.
   Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
8. Engage in productive ideological conflict
   Teams that avoid conflict don’t avoid disagreement — they bury it, where it grows into resentment and bad decisions.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
9. Map your team’s genius coverage
   Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
10. Assess readiness task by task, not person by person
    Rate competence and commitment for the specific task in front of them, not the person overall.
    Situational Leadership, Made Practical

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