Coaching practices for Lencioni Team Assessment

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Lencioni Team Assessment, 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
• On my team nobody will admit they’re stuck or wrong or don’t know something
• Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
• My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project
• We decide things by group vote and the loud idea-lovers always carry the room, while the one person whose gut is usually right about what won’t work gets drowned out

Practices that may help

1. 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.
2. 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
3. The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
   Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius model describes six activities — Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity — that are required to complete any meaningful work. Each person finds two of these energizing (geniuses), two draining (frustrations), and two neutral (competencies). The model is a practitioner framework; it lacks independent peer-reviewed validation, but it provides a practically useful vocabulary for team role awareness.
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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)
7. Route decisions to your Discernment genius
   Evaluation decisions drain Wonder and Tenacity geniuses — protect your evaluators and route decisions to them.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
8. 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
9. 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
10. Assign project phases to genius-matched people
    Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)

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