Episode 028: 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to have you with us today. Joining me as always, Jeff Jenkins. Hey, but no Steve Saltz here. He's out doing a presentation this week, so want to wish him well and look forward to getting him back in the next episode. But today we're going to talk about a really fun topic, one we kind of alluded to this one several episodes ago when we were talking about our favorite books and books that had the most impact on us.

Leaders are readers.

Yep. You had talked about Extreme Ownership and what an impact that book had made on you. And I talked about 5 dysfunctions. And today we're going to talk about 5 dysfunctions. So we want to kind of roll out a little bit, talk about the model, talk about what the point of it all is, how it's helped us, and some things you can take back to your shop and your fleet, the teams that you work with to try to help eliminate dysfunction within your own team. As always, if you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear them at podcast@rtafleet.com. And with that, let's, uh, let's get into this. So one of the things, whenever I talk about Five Dysfunctions with my team or anything like that, I think the first thing to know too, like, we actually hand this book out to everybody in the company, sometimes pre-hire, sometimes pre-hire, um, when we really want to make sure we get a hire right. Otherwise, you know, when they show up like their first day, they have a, you know, like we've got little banners and things like that celebrating that they came and worked for us, but then on their desk as part of their welcome kit, their swag is 2 books, and Five Dysfunctions is one of those books. So when we're looking at the, the Five Dysfunctions, one of the first things that I always talk about is what's the point of a team? Like, why do we have teams? Why do they exist? You know, because we talk about teams, a lot of people get frustrated working in teams. They'd rather just let me go work by myself, let me work by my work work on my own. You know, if you ever did any school projects and you had to do teamwork as part of your school project, they were always the worst because they were temporary and there was only like 1 or 2 people that did all the work for a 5-person team.

Yes, I know.

And it was always the most driven and the people who were most motivated not to get a bad grade.

Yeah, and everyone else just kind of sat there.

And I think that happens a lot in work.

It does.

And so there's a lot of resentment usually towards teams and And a lot of that's because we've forgotten why teams are there in the first place. And the idea is that we want to— the whole purpose of a team is to achieve objectives. It's to bring together ideas, it's to bring together different strengths and skills, and to ultimately, like, the true measure of success on whether or not a team has succeeded is did it meet its goals? So we always liked using sports teams as an example. Because they're really easy to pick apart and the score's so clear. Yep. Right, did they, did they win the game? Did they lose the game? Did they win the championship or did they have an early playoff exit yet again?

Um, it's like Arizona sports franchises right there.

Oh my gosh, like the story of our life here in Arizona. Uh, you know, whether it's the Suns dropping, you know, we had a debate about that earlier today, uh, getting swept in the last 4 games of the, the season or You know, our Cardinals breaking our hearts every time they go to the Super Bowl, which is not often.

Hey, once every 40 years isn't bad.

You know, this year they might have a chance, 6-0, so let's see how it goes. Um, so the point is that you look at a team that's been assembled, and the team has been assembled for different reasons, and but the ultimate reason, if you wanted to roll them all up, it's to go and achieve a goal, you know, go to achieve an objective. Or accomplish a mission. The challenge that we run into a lot is that a lot of teams don't achieve their objective. They just don't meet the expectations. They don't deliver the results they're supposed to, and instead of making results, they make excuses. So the author Patrick Lencioni, who wrote this book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, was trying to figure out why is that. Why is it that some teams work really well and other teams fail? And he kind of broke it down. He figured out there's like these 5 key critical pieces of information that keep teams from achieving their true potential. And the first time I read this, it totally blew my mind. I was just like, alright, like I've been living in this type of situation. I've been in teams like this. I was working in a company that struggled with a lot of these things. And so it made a lot of sense for me and You know, it's one of the reasons why we do have everybody who starts here, they read that book because they understand why it's so critical that we live out our core values. Because if we don't, this is the kind of stuff we deal with. So I think without further ado, further ado, that was weird. Further ado.

Yeah, you got it.

Let's talk about the 5 dysfunctions.

Let's do it. Let's rock out.

So I'm going to read through them real fast and then let's go through, we'll dive into each one of them. The 5 dysfunctions are absence of trust. That's the base. It's the foundation, uh, which leads to fear of conflict. Fear of conflict leads to a lack of commitment. Lack of commitment leads to avoidance of accountability, and the avoidance of accountability leads to inattention to results. And so the way that Patrick Lencioni has this, it's set up in a pyramid, is that, you know, each one builds upon the other. It's talking about absence of trust. When we talk about absence of trust, we're not talking about reliability or trust that you're going to do something or, you know, like, I trust that the sun's going to come up in the morning, or, you know, yeah, he's— I really trust, you know, that he's going to do that. You know, he made that commitment. I know he's going to follow through because he always follows through. Or trust that— I can trust that, you know, that she's not going to lie to me. You know, she has— she's very honest and she's trustworthy. This is a different type of trust. What this is is really vulnerability. And so when we say absence of trust, you know, one of the things he says is a symptom of absence of trust is a need for invulnerability. And so at times, like, I've seen this in a workplace where you have somebody that just, I can't, you know, maybe I've heard some feedback or, you know, I always have to be right or I can never be wrong and I never admit my mistakes. And I go through life and like I've seen this where I've had people cover up things because they couldn't appear to not know what they were doing. They couldn't be wrong. Mm-hmm. And because of that need for invincibility or that lack of vulnerability, whatever you want to call it, it creates a total— like the foundation of your team will— is just— it stopped right there at the 1-yard line. It'll never get off the ground because you don't have a foundation of trust.

Yeah. And the worst, right? Obviously you've got— you're talking, we're talking from a team perspective. The worst is when the leader is the one that has the absence of trust. So I worked at a company and the president of the company, we'll call him Jim. That was really his name, by the way. Anyway, we'll call him Jim.

So much for pseudonyms.

But Jim was the type of leader, he was very good financially. Um, very, very smart guy. Uh, I learned more from him about financials than anybody else. But Jim's biggest problem was Jim always wanted to look good, and Jim would throw anybody else under the bus in order to look good. Yep. And so there was a huge distrust in that organization because of the way that Jim acted. They couldn't hold on to a director or VP-level position for more than a year because of the leadership and the way that people were treated. I would go to Jim and we have our one-on-ones and we talk about things to do. I would go and I would deliver and I would execute what he asked me to do, and then he would throw me under the bus to his boss about the fact that, you know, this was my idea and I just executed something me and him had talked about and then went and did it. So I very quickly learned that I couldn't trust Jim. Which made my job very difficult.

And if I were to guess, when things went wrong, you know, would Jim take the blame for that, or would it—

most cases, no, right? 99% of the time, he would not take the blame.

And that's usually a big sign of invulnerability, is, hey, can you admit you're wrong, and do you share credit for the success? And that, you know, are you willing, are you truly a team player? And that's why this is the foundation of it, because it will stop you from accepting criticism You, you know, you don't want to— you're stepping on eggshells all the time. Everything's political because like you could never be wrong.

No, and you hate being around those people. Yeah, they probably hate being around themselves.

Well, and the key— if the leader is one thing, but if even if it's just a team member, it creates a whole environment where like you want to get into some fun debate or you want to have an open discussion, but you can't because you know that if as soon as I open myself up, even though I might be able to trust 5 of the people in the room, it's that 6th one that I just, I can't open up to because they, I know they're going to come at me or they're going to keep score or they're going to hold something against me and use it against me later. And that creates just an absolutely dysfunctional environment. Yes. It keeps you from going any further. So some of the things that we do to help overcome that, Patrick Lencioni has some really good resources on overcoming the absence of trust. Uh, two exercises I love running are the personal histories exercise, which you basically just answer some questions about yourself, you know, where you were raised, um, you know, how many kids you had growing up, like how many siblings you have, what birth order you were in. Uh, and then, you know, like just a defining childhood moment, something from your childhood that sticks with you today or that had a major impact on who you became.

And the purpose of that one, I'm just going to interject because I just did this with my team, is to create vulnerability.

Yeah.

And if you don't use something in this that's vulnerable for you, it totally defeats the whole purpose.

Right. Because if you pull back from that and you don't lean into it, you're still guarded. And that's that need for invulnerability. The reason why we do this exercise, and you're not going to jump right into it, but I will tell you, the deeper you go or the more personal you get, the better relationship you'll have with your team. The more trust and vulnerability you'll have with your team. But the purpose of that is to think, when were you ever more vulnerable than when you were a child? There's very, very few times that any of us were more vulnerable than when we were kids. And so the idea is to think back to a time when, hey, we were all kids once. We all made mistakes. We all grew up. So this person that we are today is a result of all these experiences and You know, it's not necessarily because of like, well, no, we're just perfect. We're perfect today. And that's how we've always been. And everything goes great. So you do the personal histories exercise again. I'd recommend going and reading it. We're not doing it justice in this because we're, you know, we're going to be going through all 5 dysfunctions. But it really— we spend a lot of time on this one because it's the most important. The second one that we do, which I really like doing, but it's super uncomfortable. You have to be at a level as a team that you can have these type of conversations and not have feelings get hurt. But the next one I do is a, you know, helps and hurts exercise. Or I think Lencioni calls it the team effectiveness exercise. It's basically you go around and the leader, leader always starts with these, by the way. The leader always goes first because they set the tone for the message. But when you ask the question in the team effectiveness exercise, you go around the room and you say, what's something this person brings to the team that's just indispensable? You know, they are— what's the biggest thing they do to help the team? And this is why I call it the Helps/Hurts exercise. What's the biggest thing they do to help the team? You go around the room, everybody takes a minute, and they write down answers for everybody. And then the next question you ask is, what's the biggest thing that this person does to hurt the team? I think Lencioni might even reword it. And he says, you know, like, what's the one thing this person has to stop doing? You know, like, what behavior do they need to stop doing because it's detrimental to the the outcome of the team. The idea behind this is it really causes you to, you know, yeah, we want to give each other a pat on the back and it's good to highlight the good. And then the next thing that we all come out with is everybody has things that they're working on and then we're all giving each other permission that, yep, that's the thing I heard from everybody and I've now heard it. It's like a 360-degree feedback in real time. And so you have, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable. I know you've gone through a couple of these.

I have.

And sometimes it's like, yep, I know that about me. And so it's not a huge surprise. Other times you're like, wow, that kind of came out of left field. I wasn't expecting that. I'm going to work on this. And then we've had others where they hear it and they're like, nope, not true. That's not true. Or, you know, like, that just feels like you're making it really personal and they can't get vulnerable. And that helps us identify team members who shouldn't be on our team. Is how they accept that feedback, because it's really critical that you take that feedback from your peers graciously. And we aren't mean-spirited about it. That's the other thing about this. It's not about scoring points. It's not about being mean. It's about helping each other get better and be better versions of ourselves.

Yeah, this isn't something personal, whether it's the good or the bad, right? I'm not going to sit there and be like, hey, Josh, you hurt the team because your hairstyle doesn't look good and I have to stare at it every day. That's not the point. The point is talking about what you're doing that hurts a team.

Behaviors.

Yeah, totally all back to your behaviors. And it's okay through this exercise to ask for context to better understand.

Can you give me some examples?

Yes.

Was there a time I did that? Because I'm having trouble picturing it. Totally okay. And then clarify it, reword it if you need to. Maybe you just didn't understand what they're talking about. They meant one thing, but they said another. I've had that happen in the cast too. And that just helps avoid a lot of misunderstandings. But this absolutely sets the foundation for having a healthy team. If you don't have this, there's no chance that you're ever going to get the kind of commitment that's going to deliver the results you want. You have to be willing to be vulnerable with each other, call each other out, and have hard conversations, you know, and that requires a lot of vulnerability. It requires being wrong. And it requires opening yourself up to criticism.

It does. And it really rolls into what his next dysfunction is.

And that is the fear of conflict. Oftentimes, we avoid debate. We avoid having conflict in our meetings and our discussions. And like, you know, he has a lot of examples of this, but I've seen this too, where because we're so uncomfortable with conflict, we would rather leave the room. We'd rather say, you know what, let's table this discussion. Tell me if you've heard this one before. You know, let's table this discussion. We'll come back to that one later. Because this, it's getting too heated or we're, you know, like, it just doesn't feel productive. We just don't want to deal with it anymore. And the conflict becomes so uncomfortable that people want to flee. And so they just, they shut it down or people that are in conflict, like instead of arguing and voicing a very valid point, they don't like engaging in conflict, and so they shut down, and they just like, yeah, whatever. They start agreeing, even though they don't really agree.

And then the meeting's ruined.

Because the whole point of a meeting is to come up with a good decision. The whole point of a team is to reach your objectives. And so if you can't have conflict about what's the right idea, all of a sudden you're making terrible decisions because you're not getting enough good input into that decision-making process. So, like, you ever hear when you talk about, "Oh, that's just another yes man," you know, a yes person? No, they still call it a yes man. They haven't gender-neutralized that one. But the idea is—

I'm offended, so you might want to change it. I'm sorry.

Get over it. So, but the idea is that, you know, if you just have a bunch of yes people around you, that you don't have any conflict. Everybody's just agreeing. And all of a sudden, you know, I love the story of the emperor has no clothes, because nobody's willing to say this isn't okay, or, you know, it's not good enough. We can do better, or there's a better way to get this done. And conflict is what brings all that stuff to the surface, brings the best ideas to the table, and it brings the right type of behaviors from your team. One of the things that he talks about is a conflict continuum where instead of— everybody's so afraid of offending people and hurting each other's feelings, which is one side of conflict. Where it's like personal attacks and destructive criticisms. The other side of that continuum, the other side of the spectrum, is called artificial harmony. And we're so afraid of being over on the wrong side of that destructive and being seen as a jerk. And this kind of goes back to our Speak the Kind Truth episode, uh, that we flip all the way to the other side, which is maintaining artificial harmony. We don't say what we really mean because we don't want there to be a fight. We don't want to have or a real discussion because it's uncomfortable. And that's really what it is. We're trying to avoid the discomfort of being wrong or having a wrong idea or coming up with the right idea or a better idea.

Yeah, I really wish that prior to coming here that I had read this book and I had a better understanding of these dysfunctions because this one right here is extremely prevalent and a lot of people are very non-confrontational. And so because they're non-confrontational, you don't get very very many places in business, especially as a team. I can give numerous examples to where I have had my own executive meetings with my leadership team to where there was disagreement and we had the, hey, let's table it later, or hey, let's take this offline or something instead of resolving those together as a group. And I think that it did a very big disservice to our organizations by not—

like, after being here and resolving conflict together versus not resolving conflict together is night and Yeah, it's one of those that I wish I had known earlier on too, because it would have changed how I approached a lot of decisions. And if I'm really honest, this book— there's a lot of books that inspired me to do this, but this book is one of the biggest reasons why we started Fleet Success and why we talked about, you know, we created this podcast Fleet Success Show, is because these are the types of lessons that nobody talks about this stuff in fleet. You know, you've been in trucking for 20 years and hadn't heard of this until you came and worked here.

Not a clue.

And this is a fairly well-known author in business circles. If you follow a lot of business articles and things like that, he's a huge organizational behavior expert. But we don't hear about this stuff in fleet. And there's so many lessons that are ripe for the picking from authors like Lencioni, Jim Collins, Jocko Willink, that they apply no matter what we're doing. And so this fear of conflict is one of the biggest reasons that I'm like, oh, We need to have better debate. We need to make better decisions. And we can't do that unless everybody is voicing their opinion.

Not only that, but you also have to control that environment as well. You cannot let it get out of hand. The moment there's yelling, screaming, the personal attacks, it's just all out the window.

But don't table the discussion. What you have to do is just, hey, you know, like, let's take a quick 5-minute breather, but we are going to come right back to this. We're not leaving this alone because it's clear that there's an issue here. But we do need to kind of— you want to make sure that people have their logical minds around it. Although I've heard stories where Lencioni was, they were yelling up at the table, had the cops called on them and stuff like that. He was like, "Oh no, we were just having a debate. We weren't mad at each other. We were just passionate." So I think sometimes you have to kind of gauge that. Your team, run it your way, but don't shy away from the conflict. If people are disagreeing, one of the things to overcome the fear of conflict as a leader is to give it permission. And as soon as you have disagreement and suddenly you can feel people pulling back a little bit, step in as a leader and say, "Hey, hey, hey, it's okay. This is perfect. This is exactly the kind of debate that we need from you as team members." Too many leaders will say, "Yeah, okay, well, it's getting a little bit heated. Let's not, you know, like, let's go ahead and take this and take it offline." But the idea is that you want to lean in, give it permission, call it out, say, "Oh, this is awesome. I love that you guys are doing this. Keep going." Encourage it. The other thing to do is mine. I love when I'm in a meeting and I've got somebody that's, I can tell, not engaged. And I just, hey, Joe, what do you think about this? What's on your mind? What are you— what's present for you right now? Just to get them in. Or somebody tell me why we shouldn't do this. That's one of my favorites. I go to that one a lot because we're a pretty cohesive team. And so we'll come in, we'll look at this. That makes sense. Let's do that. There's not really any debate. I'll say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's think for just a second so we're not all blind.

Are there—

is there a reason we shouldn't do this? Is there anything that might be a gotcha later that we didn't think about? And let's just think about it for 5 minutes. No? Okay, moving on. But the idea is you want to give the conflict air to breathe. Yes. The reason you want to give conflict, and the reason why this is so important, most of the time I mentioned people who shut down and they just start agreeing to agree because they just don't want to deal with it anymore. Right? Whatever, whatever, whatever you say. You ever get in an argument with your spouse and they're like, nothing, nothing's bothering me. It's all fine.

No, I've never done that.

Never. So the reason why conflict is so critical is because of the next dysfunction, which is a lack of commitment. If people can't weigh in, they can't buy in. And the idea is that lack of commitment means that if I'm not sharing my opinions or I don't feel as I've been heard, I'm not really committed to the idea. Anybody ever have a team where you're sitting there and something didn't go quite as planned and there's that one person in the back of the room who's like, yeah, I knew that was gonna happen. And you're thinking, why didn't you say anything? You know, why didn't you, why didn't you say something? But instead they're more like, I told you so, I knew that wasn't gonna work. And, you know, or even worse is they start sabotaging and, oh, I hate that idea, I'm gonna do something totally different instead. Yes. And that lack of commitment comes because they didn't have a chance to really weigh in and have the conflict. Patrick Lencioni talks about, Intel says disagree and commit. That's their whole model. But Patrick Lencioni says convince or be convinced. I don't know that I ever go that far, but I do think that's really important is that we get to the point where we are either convincing each other that we're right, or at least we're convinced that there's a reason for that to work, you know, that this is something that could work.

Yeah, because, because if you don't have the opportunity to comment, have the conflict, and your opinion's not heard, then you're going to have an issue with it regardless. Now, you and I have had some disagreements.

For sure.

In our meetings, and I voiced my opinion. You voiced your opinion. But at the end of the day, right, I also respect you in your position and I will do whatever you ask me to do. But I can't do that if I don't believe in what we're talking about or what we're going to go and do.

Right.

And that's the part about having that conflict so that I can commit. You say something, I disagree with it. You say no because of this. And then I'm like, okay, well, I may not fully agree with it, but I understand the road we're going down. And so I'm— yes. And why? And so I'm going to commit and go down that road as well.

And I think that opportunity, the exchange, is what lets you kind of like, okay, I can see why you'd say that, but what about this? And I'd rather go do this, but if you're really set on this one, just, you know, like you have to have that discussion and you have to air it out, which is why conflict's so critical to getting commitment. I think the other thing that stops us from getting commitment is clarity. Sometimes we'll walk out of a meeting and nobody's really clear on what did we just decide? What did we just agree to do? And, you know, one of the things I like to do at the end of the meeting is we document our decisions as we go, and then we recap them, and we just say, okay, this is what we decided. Did I get this right? And then that's what, like, it goes and it's archived and we make a PDF of it. And out through all the week, we can go back and refer, what decision would you make on that again? And we can go look at our decisions and there it is.

And I think that follow-up when it comes to the documentation and then making sure everybody has that after is very important.

Important, right?

Because you're right, there's been many times where we leave, we don't know what's going on, and you're wondering, okay, so what am I supposed to do? So now I'm going to look like an idiot because I'm going to go back to my boss or whoever was running the meeting and be like, hey, what was going on? What are we going to do again? As opposed to if we had documented, sent it out afterwards. Yep, there's no question.

Well, because it's too hard to remember sometimes. Like, I remember us having all these discussions, but which decision do we end up on? Because we went like 5 different directions until we picked one. Getting that lack of commitment, getting really clear about what the decision was, and then getting clear commitments too. I love when you're in the airplane and the flight attendant comes over to you and asks you if you're sitting in the exit row, which I love doing at Southwest is going into the exit row. And they come over and they're like, "Are you capable and willing to help in the event of an emergency?" And they ask you not just to nod your head or shrug or whatever. They need an audible, clear yes. From every single passenger, even if there's 12 passengers in those exit rows. They'll go to each one. I need a yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because they need that commitment. And you'll remember that later too, that, oh yeah, I committed that I was going to do this and I was going to help. And so that's almost the level of commitment you have to get in your meetings. And the reason why you need that commitment— this is why I love this model, because everything integrates so well with each other. Like they just 1, 2, 3, they all lead, they flow. The reason you have to get that commitment is because most teams struggle with this part, and that's the avoidance of accountability. Most teams have trouble holding each other accountable, and one of the biggest reasons they can't hold each other accountable is because they didn't get clear commitments from everybody. And that's just as simple as it is. It's, you know, I don't want to— I don't know that that's— did we agree on that? How can I hold you to that if I don't have a clear commitment that, you know, you said in the meeting you were going to go do this, you agreed that we were doing this. Why did you go down a totally different path? And because we're not getting clear commitment, one of the things that comes up is if you're not getting the commitment and you say, hey, didn't you agree to do this? Oh, no, no, no, I never agreed to do that. Oh, that's not what I said. I thought we decided this thing over here. Well, it's really hard to hold you accountable if you were on page 9 and we were on page 6. We're reading from two different sheets of music. And so the foundation for accountability has to be that clear commitment. The second part of avoidance of accountability, and it ties a little bit back to that trust and the fear of conflict, but this is more about personal accountability, is that the team's not willing to lean in and say, you know, Jeff, you just didn't get it done. You didn't meet our expectations, or like, what do we need to do to help you? Like, this isn't okay. The other side of accountability is behavior. You know, Jeff, like, you're just— the way that you come off right now is XYZ. And then we kind of go back to that personal effectiveness exercise. What do you do that hurts the team? Because we're so afraid of hurting feelings or afraid of calling somebody out, sometimes we're afraid of calling people out because we don't want to get called out. Shelly here at RTA had an awesome little saying. And she says, and I think she got this from the coach of the Suns, Monty Williams. Monty Williams. And says, you know, we don't call people out, we call them up. Like, oh, that's good. And that's essentially what we're talking about when we're talking about accountability is we're calling you up to the standard. You're below the standard, we're trying to call you up to the standard. But most leaders and most teams don't want to do that. One of the things that I always preach with accountability is that the best accountability models, the ones where the teams that have the best accountability are the ones that have peer-to-peer accountability.

Yes. Okay.

A lot of times you go to an organization and the accountability has been held onto, the authority for accountability and the exercise of accountability is only done by the leader and nobody talks to each other. Instead, they just all— we call it hub and spoke. Everybody comes to the leader, tells them their problems about other people in other departments, and then they leave. And then the leader has to go from each hub, you know, down each spoke basically, and talk to each, each person on the wheel instead of having a peer-to-peer-led or a team-based accountability, which is really the ideal, you know, where the team is pulling together and the team is holding each other accountable to meet their goals and meet the objectives.

So I've got a lot of things that I hate when it comes to saying in business, but one of the ones I hate the most is, well, I don't want to get them in trouble. I'm not trying to get anybody in trouble. Oh God, it's annoying as all get out because here's the deal. And every time someone says that to me, I'm like, hold on a sec. This isn't about trouble. This is about getting better. It's about improving. It's about meeting objectives.

Yep.

It's not about getting someone in trouble. Right. And then you say, okay, did you say something to them? Well, no, that's my friend. I don't, I can't say that to them. Why? Well, because I want them to like me.

And it's right back to speaking the kind truth, right? The reason why we can't have hard conversations and have accountability conversations is because it's all about us. We want to be liked. We want to be nice. I don't want to get them in trouble. Well, you're not getting them in trouble. Why do you care? Right?

Like, you know, like they're kind of getting themselves in trouble if they're doing what you're saying.

Right. And it is, it's all about them. Well, I don't want them to know that I ratted them out. Why? It's all about preserving your own comfort and your own position.

Well, especially if whatever it is that you're ratting on about makes you have to do more work and be more stressed. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've been in that situation.

As long as you preserve the relationship, everything will be fine.

Well, we're friends outside of work. Who gives a rat's ass? You spend most of your time at work with them, and then you're sucking up for them all the time.

So then avoidance of accountability is a huge one. And, you know, go back and listen to Speaking the Kind Truth, because that's really what accountability is about. It's about holding people to a standard, calling them up to the standard, helping them be better and improving, and not being so worried about being nice, but about being kind. What all that leads into, you know, is if you have trust and if you have conflict and you get commitment, and then you can hold people accountable, almost always the next thing, the last thing that holds teams back, even if they nail all 4 of those, the last thing that holds teams back is what we call inattention to results. It's where we're focusing on the wrong score. I always like to think about, and this is where sports works really well, is because there's one team, one score. Inattention to results is where, well, I wanted to make sure, like, maybe it wasn't on my career path or my department did what we said we were going to do. Like in our case, maybe the sales department met their numbers and hit their revenue goals, but maybe the support department didn't do well on retention. Or like sales and marketing ends up being a big one here. What if the marketing delivered the leads, but sales didn't deliver the revenue? And so you end up with like the finger-pointing and, well, that's not important to me. And so we're focused on the wrong scores. In fleet, that could be the same thing as, well, you know, it's not my fault that the PMs aren't done on time. It's not, you know, we're doing all this other stuff, you know, it's up to the drivers, or it's the police department's fault, or it's somebody else's fault. And you're focused on the wrong results. And that inattention to results ends up creating a total dysfunction just by itself, as you've done all this work and then everybody has different objectives, they have different things that they want to achieve, they have different priorities. And so the idea here is that you have to sacrifice ego. You have to sacrifice your own self-ambition and focus and do what's for the best of the team. Whether sometimes that means, you know, if you're trying to hire and you only have a budget for one person, you may not be able to put that person in your team. It might be better that you give up a team member so that somebody else in a department that needs that team member can get it. So those are the kinds of things that you have to focus on. What's the overall result of the organization? It's why we talk about stakeholder satisfaction being one of the key pillars of fleet success is because you have to know what's the overall goal or the overall purpose of having the fleet department in the first place. If you're not focused on that and focused on the objective that makes everybody else successful, you're going to be focused on, well, you know, I want to make sure I've got the easy jobs. You know, if I'm looking at like a technician, I don't like doing that work, so I'm not going to take that work order. You know, I don't— I don't want to go through and do an inventory, even though that's really important for the company, but it's going to take away from this priority.

I don't want to do my pre-trip. Takes too much time.

As a driver, right? From the operations people, you know, oh, I don't need to turn in those driver defects or anything like that. Oh, you mean we actually need to write down the logs and store them? What? And so understanding and paying attention to the results. One of my favorite sports examples was You know, you take a kid on a soccer team and, you know, he goes out and his team loses 5-3. You know, I think Lencioni, one of his sons, this is his example, and they lose 5-3 and he gets in the car and he says, "Hey, you know, sorry you guys lost today." He's like, "Oh, you know, it's okay." "What? Why is it okay? Like, you lost, you know, one team, one score." He says, "Oh no, you know, on, uh, we scored 3 goals, it was the defense. You know, if the defense could have just held them, you know, our 3 goals would have been more than enough. And for a second, you know, Patrick Lencioni had to do kind of a double take. He said, well, but you still lost. Like, it didn't matter. You could have gone out and scored 3 more goals on offense and it would have made up the difference. You know, that's why teams don't like blaming the refs, because if it comes down to a bad call, why did you even, you know, why were you in that position to begin with? And making sure, so I think the key here is that making sure that you know what's the most important thing for your fleet department and that everybody else is aligned and united behind that same purpose and focusing on those results.

You know what I would liken this to, just like the whole process on all these different dysfunctions? Remember watching The Last Dance with Michael Jordan?

Yeah.

Like in the things that he does in that, right? I mean, Everyone trusted him. It was Michael Jordan. But he created that conflict in and out of those practices all the time. He got everyone to commit to what he was doing, even if they didn't like what— how he was pushing them, right? He held people accountable when they didn't do things, um, you know, the results, making sure that they got there and they were winning. I mean, Michael Jordan didn't care if he took the last shot in the game for a game winner. He cared about the fact that they won. And even when I see, um, like DeAndre Hopkins, right, wide receiver for the Cardinals, he's not blowing up the stats this year, but we're winning.

But we're 6-0, right?

So he's, he's, he's getting questioned about his stats and his productivity, which isn't all that great. Now he's got some good touchdowns, but his yards are way down, right? And it's like, it's not about that, it's about winning as a team.

Yep. And I think that's the key, is that if you are too focused, I mean you brought up Michael Jordan and the Bulls. If you're too focused on yourself, then what ends up happening is your own personal ego takes over. Uh, there's an episode in there where they do talk about the Scottie Pippen, you know, between the year when Jordan was retired and Pippen, they were in the playoffs and Phil Jackson drew up a play that went to, I think it was Kukoc.

It was, yeah.

And Pippen's like, look, I'm not doing that.

He was pissed.

He wanted the ball. He's like, come on, I've been second fiddle to Jordan for so many years. Now it's my time to shine and you're not going to give me the ball in the most important game of our careers, I'm not playing. And so he sat. And Jordan said it, you know, Scottie regretted it after the moment, right? And I think we all have done that before, so I don't want to judge him too harshly. But we get into those moments where we're putting our own needs ahead of the needs of the team, or we're putting our own, you know, scores, as you were, ahead of the scores of the team. And it hurts the overall team. Everybody was hurt by Scottie doing that. I think it was such a powerful episode. If you can go watch that, I think it's one of the last episodes, but just a great example of what happens when a team member puts their own needs and their own ego ahead of the needs of the team. It's so destructive because now all of a sudden you violated the trust of the team, which is we're here to win, not to pad our own stats, not to build up our own stories and build up our own egos and our own brands. We're here to win as a team. We win as a team, lose as a team.

Yep.

So those are the 5 dysfunctions. We could spend, you know, 20-30 minutes on each one of these things. They're so good. This is one of my favorite books. It's one of my favorite topics. There are resources online if you want to learn more about this. I highly recommend go online at thetable.com, um, or it's tablegroup— tablegroup.com. Scratch that, it's tablegroup.com. And there's tons of online resources. There's a team assessment. I actually like the team assessment quite a bit. It helps you if you don't know which area you need to work on first, you know, and you always have to start at the bottom. So even if you're green in conflict and green in commitment, if you don't have trust, you have to go back to trust and start there. Because you probably really don't have the conflict and commitment you think you do. But you go through, you do this team assessment, just basically asks your team, sends out a survey, asks them a bunch of questions. and then they can fill it out and then it scores them and then it tells you which area you need to work on first. There's a— go ahead.

I was just going to say there's also a very good resource sitting in this room. If anybody out there really wants to know.

Oh, for sure.

I'm telling you, Josh knows this left and right and he's a very good subject matter expert on it.

I live and breathe this. This is one of my favorite things. Another great resource is the podcast. Like we, we talk about this podcast here. But our inspiration for doing this podcast and the format we do it in came from Patrick Lencioni. And so he has a really great podcast called At the Table with Patrick Lencioni. That's a great one to listen to. He's got quite a few episodes on the Five Dysfunctions and different values of the Five Dysfunctions.

He doesn't have quite the manly radio voices we do, but it's still good.

That's okay. Yeah, he's fun to listen to.

He is fun to listen to.

He's ADHD, so he's all over the map, but—

and he's very energetic.

Yes. Which makes it fun and entertaining. So it's a good one to listen to if you need another podcast to listen to besides ours.

Ours is first. Don't forget.

Yeah. Don't listen to it instead of ours. You know.

Thank you.

Let's keep the main thing the main thing, right?

Yeah. Okay.

And then last thing, Fleet Success Summit. So we are going to be putting together a Fleet Success Summit where we're bringing together thought leaders from all these different industries. You know, we're talking fleet, business, technology, leadership, and we're basically putting them all together into one, kind of like we do with the podcast, but one just keynote after another, one main stage. We'll be doing an event. You can go to fleetsuccesssummit.com and we're going to have a bunch of information up there. Prices, locations still to be determined. We'll have speaker announcements coming up on there.

Yeah, by the time this is out and published, we should know location and price.

Yep.

The speakers we may not have nailed down yet, but we're working on that. Yep.

Again, totally agnostic, but it is going to be all about those things: fleet, leadership, business, and technology. Taking everything that we talk about here on the podcast, rolling it up, and just an absolute awesome 2 days of keynotes, you know, looking at 5 to 6 speakers per day. It's going to be awesome.

So I'm excited.

If you're interested in attending that or just want to hear more or want to know the dates, fleetsuccesssummit.com. You can go get signed up, just get signed up on the email list. And then as we have announcements, you can get subscribed to those and hear the latest details as they come available. And then ideally you'll be able to register and get signed up and book your hotel and come out and visit with us in person. So with that, tell your friends, tell your coworkers, tag us on social media at Fleet Success. And as always, if you have any questions or comments, want to know more about the 5 dysfunctions today, you can email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. Then go subscribe to the Fleet Success Show wherever you listen to podcasts. Peace.

Poppy goes the weasel. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.