Coaching practices for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team After a Setback

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For The Five Dysfunctions of a Team After a Setback, 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
  • On my team nobody will admit they’re stuck or wrong or don’t know something
  • We had a reorg — lost a key person, changed direction — and suddenly the team that used to hum is fighting and second-guessing again, and I’m treating it like they broke instead of seeing the ground shifted under them.
  • When someone on my team drops the ball, everyone just waits for me to be the one to say something

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. 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. 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. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. Get genuine commitment, not false consensus
    Teams that avoid conflict often confuse silence for agreement — false consensus is catastrophic for execution.
    The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
  9. Run brief after-action reviews without blame
    After any significant outcome — success or failure — ask four questions together as a team.
    Psychological Safety in Teams
  10. Name frustrations without shame
    Frustrations are not weaknesses — they’re a mismatch signal that the team can act on.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)

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