Into the (leadership) void - A review of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Seven Strategic Questions

A couple of housekeeping things before I begin. First off, my email subscription system was bugged for a few weeks, which means that I've probably dropped some email subscribers. If you subscribed in the last little period, you might want to recheck if that worked. Secondly, I now have additional support tiers on my Patreon: you get nothing new for them, but if you're an oligarch, this does let you support my propaganda output. Finally, apologies for my hiatus for the last few weeks: I have been pretty seriously ill and have only just recovered enough to resume my usual cadence.

Review of The five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni and Seven Strategy Questions by Robert Simon

I recently went to a networking event run by the brilliant IT Partners in Hamilton (they have some really capable engineers on staff). The event was a lot of fun, and while I was there, I was lucky enough to win two books: Patrick Lencioni's The five dysfunctions of a team and Robert Simon's Seven Strategic Questions. These books are both very much in the "business book for executives or people who want to be executives" genre, with one focusing more on teamwork and leadership and the other focusing more on the strategic aspects of them. Naturally, me being me, I thought that writing a review of the books might be fun.

Seven Strategy Questions is undoubtedly the better, more thoughtful book of the two. Simon, on the whole, asks serious, important questions for any business: who is your primary customer, what are your strategic risks and so on and so forth. While there isn't anything that I'd consider hugely groundbreaking in the book, it is generally a good list of things for business owners and executives to think about, and Simon, in general, has the intellectual humility to know that he does not know your business better than you do. While there is a lot that he misses, and I'll discuss that below, what is there is generally solid.

Lencioni, by contrast, does not write well. Choosing a fable format for his text was a mistake, as the dialogue and prose that he writes are deeply wooden and his characters do not speak like any human I've ever met or characters in any book I've read outside of the Dick and Jane picture books for children. Take, for example, this excerpt:

This is, to put it politely, fucking deranged. People do not talk like this. They do not write like this. And all the characters in this book are like this: speaking stiffly, inhumanly and mostly without emotion (even, somehow, in highly emotional situations). Lencioni cannot write and should not be writing dialogue.

Now, a reasonable person might legitimately push back on this point, saying something along the lines of "you don't need to be able to write good dialogue to be able to write about leadership". And I'd agree, to an extent. You don't need to be able to write good dialogue. You do, however, need to be able to write dialogue that sounds somewhat real, even if it's rough around the edges, and this is something that Lencioni is quite incapable of doing. Not being able to write real dialogue and trying anyway suggests to me that Lencioni fundamentally doesn't understand people, and that makes it rather hard for him to talk about leadership and teamwork in a way that we can take seriously.

Lencioni's book also falls down in terms of facing objective reality. While Simon's book has some gaps in seriously engaging with the real world, he does at least tend to address real economic and corporate problems: questions about risk, positioning and strategic uncertainty are real issues that businesses face. As for Lencioni... he writes about a tech startup being taken over by a CEO installed by their investors, and while he talks about team dysfunction and leadership, there's a complete lack of discussion about what the company actually does, who it serves or what value it offers. It is fundamentally impossible to do leadership or work effectively as a team without a clear idea of those factors, and without that in place Lencioni has written a text that has literally no serious engagement with the real world.

So far, therefore, we have one book which admits being taken seriously and another that really doesn't. Why, therefore, do I discuss both of these books in one article? Part of it, obviously, is that I won them at the same event, so there's a weird kind of synchronicity at work here. The other reason is that both books, for all their differences, ignore some of the same important issues.

Follower blindness

As with an awful lot of literature meant to be consumed by a primarily elite audience (in this case, the executive class), both Simon and Lencioni write as though the work done by their audience is the important work that clearly needs to be focused on the most. In the context of executive leadership, this means that executives are the main figures written about in both these books, and to some extent that's broadly expected.

What's striking about all of this is that it almost never discusses the people who are being led or who are expected to execute the strategy, and when they are discussed it's only in the vaguest terms. The contrast with a serious book on leadership, such as David Marquet's excellent Turn the ship around!, is striking. Marquet goes into extensive detail about the nature of the group he's leading, the internal hierarchies and structures and horizontal bonds between crew members. He delves into crew psychology in significant ways, and it's clear that even the most junior sailor on the nuclear submarine that he captained deserved his consideration and attention. Neither Lencioni nor Simon, by contrast, think that people on the ground deserve this level of attention.

This is odd, as both leadership and strategy might operate from the top down, but they're built from the bottom up. For example, the ability of an army to operate effectively starts with leadership at the individual squad level: if your individual squads of six-to-ten soldiers don't function, there's no level of leadership or clever strategy that will let your army function effectively. Similarly, in any business the teams on the ground have to be cohesive, well-motivated and effective in order for there to be a hope of them executing on a strategy: in short, teams without a high level of cohesion are impossible to lead effectively, and there's nothing that a leader can really do about it short of trying to build that cohesion.

Ignoring the people being led is also a problem that will come up later, when we discuss what leadership is actually for, but for now we can leave this point as a strange gap in what's being written. Even if you genuinely don't care for the people you're leading and would prefer that they don't exist, the fact is that the organisation relies on them to be able to get anything done at all, and ignoring them entirely will inevitably get you in shit. It was true in the middle ages, and it's even more true now, considering how unbelievably complex the modern economy is.

Cargo cult conflict

Lencioni's understanding of horizontal team dynamics is equally bizarre. One of the major dysfunctions of a team that he describes is a lack of healthy conflict between team members, which might, in the right circumstances be an issue. The way it's described, however, is pretty weak.

In my experience, conflicts about matters of fact tend not to blow up, and we have pretty effective tools for dealing with them: there are usually solid objective reasons for making one decision as opposed to another. Real, intractable conflicts are almost always the result of conflicting values, which Lencioni simply will not discuss. Take as an example a conflict about what kind of database one might want to use for a web application: I might, for example, want to use PostgreSQL, whereas someone else on my team might want to use MongoDB. Objectively, this has a clear answer, depending on the nature of your tech stack, the experience of your team and the fact that MongoDB is Webscale and uses shards. You would then, if a conflict came up, discuss all these factors and make a call, and things would be broadly OK.

We can therefore deduce that, if this conflict becomes intractable, it can't be for an objective reason. Either different engineers are weighting the factors differently, or there's resume-driven-development at play, or someone in the executive team heard the siren song of the shamwow or something else like that happened. In order to resolve a conflict like that, value alignment is vital. And yet, it's not mentioned at all in Lencioni's text: in fact, I don't think there's any discussion of values at all. Simon's text is somewhat better: there is at least one chapter that discusses strategic boundaries, but even then (as we discuss below), it's remarkably weak. In general, both books are remarkably unwilling to seriously engage with real conflict or real values.

And this, in turn, raises a critical question: why do both texts consistently shy away from any consistent discussion of values?

The teleological void

This lack in the texts, in fact, goes beyond simple questions of value and into a complete lacuna where discussions of policy and grand strategy should be. Policy, in the Clausewitzian sense, is the level of analysis above strategy: it's the place where we discuss core values, what we as a group of people want to achieve and what our aspirations are. We usually discuss this at the level of nation-states, where the main policy goals are usually survival, general prosperity and social harmony (or at least, that's what a relatively functional state's goals should be), but it applies just as well to companies. In the company situation, a policy-level analysis should discuss what the company wants to do, how it wants to impact the world and what effect the company would like this impact to have on the people making up the company, or at least the governing coalition that controls it. Importantly, and quite counter to what our books imply, leaders have remarkably little flexibility in choosing policy: to the contrary, policy is mostly defined by conditions obtaining in the field and the desires of the ruling coalition. This needs to be stressed again: you do not have perfect flexibility when choosing a strategy. With this in mind, the job of leaders is, in a very real sense, to craft a strategy that will allow the state or company's policy objectives to be achieved in the most efficient way possible: that's what leadership, teamwork and strategy are for, and if they don't achieve policy objectives, they are useless.

And this is the core void in both of these books that makes them, in my view, weak educational texts and less than useful for business leaders wishing to learn: neither of them discuss what leadership and strategy are for. In fact, reading both texts one gets the distinct feeling that the authors are uncomfortable thinking about it too hard, and with good reason: most of the companies being discussed do not do anything good, and even the ones that outwardly have a positive mission tend to be heavily influenced by the Friedmanite doctrine of shareholder value above all else. Simon, for example, speaks in glowing terms about McKinsey and their strict code of conduct preventing their consultants from speaking about their consulting clients, even to their spouse. This is held to demonstrate the importance of having strategic guidelines and clear ideas about what you won't do in place. Naturally, if this were true, we'd find that McKinsey has had a perfect, unblemished history of making the world a better place...

... ah. So much for that.

This is what a policy lacuna looks like. McKinsey, for all their vaunted expertise, clearly has a very limited idea of what they want to achieve in the world and for whom. It's not even a question of mindlessly maximising for profit or deliberately being evil for the sake of evil: Nestlé is a good example of having both of those kinds of behaviour as policy objectives, and that leads to a rather different and much more ruthless and effective behaviour profile. McKinsey, by contrast, seems to be driven mostly by emotive strategy: a desire for power, social status and ego preservation that leads to them consistently doing serious damage to themselves and others in the process of seeking those things.

As in war, nothing should be done in business unless it's to move you towards achieving a policy aim. If you don't have a clear and realistic idea of what your policy is, you by definition can't do that. If your policy is fundamentally evil, you can do it, but you'll wind up with a demoralised workforce, a whole bunch of people in your organisation feeling fundamentally icky about what you do and an even wider group of people outside your organisation who are full of seething resentment and want your blood. The fact that neither of these books really touch on policy, and certainly not in an explicit sense, is thus unforgivable if the books are being written to teach strategy and leadership.

So, if these books aren't being designed to teach strategy and leadership (and given how popular they are despite their flaws, they clearly aren't), what are they for?

The social function of the five dysfunctions

These books aren't primarily educational tools or ways to teach people about teams, leadership and strategy: by contrast, they are largely tools designed to acculturate the upper echelons of large companies into American executive society.

Much of this acculturation is incidental, and Lencioni's book is an excellent example of this. The incidental characterisation of the CEO is striking in how much cultural baggage it packs in: the CEO has a nondescript background in the military (it's interesting, as an aside, that this really isn't delved into at all: if she were a commissioned officer or even a senior NCO, she would be bringing a wealth of leadership experience that would be highly relevant to the book, but this isn't mentioned), her husband and children are heavily stressed and she's described as having taught at a high school before completing a program at a local business school. These are all very upper-class-but-still-sees-themselves-as-middle-class, Midwestern American values, creating an overall image of an executive who is nondescript in a very particular way. It's almost hard to put into words exactly what's wrong with it, except to say that reading it as a person from outside the USA is downright bizarre.

Similarly, Simon's book is riddled with casual anti-union and anti-worker sentiment: it's never brought up directly, but in a hundred little ways, it reinforces that this is what you have to think and what you have to do in order to be accepted as a leader. It's a strange kind of thing: even relatively capitalist and right-wing people outside of the USA find this kind of thing a bit repellent, and yet there's a complete lack of awareness that these cultural touchpoints aren't that universal.

If these were strategy texts, this would be an unforgivable flaw. As texts for acculturation, however, they excel: blind confidence and an unwillingness to even acknowledge potential differences in viewpoint are an excellent technique for pushing a particular view of the world on people. The effect of this is to simply eliminate the existence of the viewpoint in the text, and thus to express it, people have to reformulate the viewpoint from scratch, which is a lot of work, and work that most people won't do. Moreover, it means that the cultural myopia exhibited is less of an issue: if you're already trying to acculturate someone to a weird worldview, what's a little bit more weird shit?

It's true that you have to acculturate people to some extent to get them to be a functional part of any group, but in this case, the culture being acculturated to is actually quite fucked up. After all, it systematically devalues skill or mastery, essentially communicating that there's no real, hard thing that you have to learn to do in order to lead. It devalues workers and makes them out to be either little worker drones or dangerous enemies of your business. It validates the mass accumulation of wealth by executives, and it mandates the destruction of our society by malevolent clowns. And this is what these texts are for.

An alternative model of leadership

In short, therefore, both of these books have a weird ideological lacuna about the actual purpose of leadership, teamwork, strategy and all these other glittering generalities. I've been fairly harsh about that here, but of course, it's rude to shit all over someone else's work without at least stating what you think leadership should look like. So, here are a few notes about my model.

It's important to note, when developing a model of leadership, that a relatively cohesive team doing business-as-usual work that they're trained to do does not need leadership. A team on a factory floor, a community group or a church committee doesn't need a leader. They do need management, but management and leadership are very different skill sets, and it could in fact be argued that much of what the modern business world calls leadership is in fact management. Leaders are only really required in situations of considerable uncertainty: building a new company, fighting a war or getting a nation through a crisis are all situations where leadership is actually needed. In this situation, what does a good leader look like?

Good leadership, in my experience, stems from clarity of thought. Every good leader that I've met has either seen something that other people haven't, or has been able to phrase things that other people have seen but not understood in an unusually compelling way. The second thing seems to happen a lot on this blog, going by the reader mail I get, and the first is exemplified by the likes of Steve Jobs (not a person whom I have a great deal of love for, but he was an effective leader). In short, a good leader is a person who can see a path from a current situation to a future desired situation and that can communicate it effectively in a way that brings other people along with them.

This is a view of leadership that is pretty diametrically opposed to the variety of leadership and the strategic model described above. First off, a clear idea of what the hell you're actually doing is pretty central to this kind of leadership, and neither book, nor our general gestalt idea of leadership, take that at all seriously. To be an effective leader, you need to care about winning your war, building your iPhone or minimising COVID deaths more than you care about your own status, which is a position that's deeply alien to these books. Secondly, this kind of leadership requires you to have a loyalty to your subordinates stronger than your loyalty to your shareholders: something that Lencioni and Simon both explicitly argue against. Finally, this model of leadership requires you to be seriously competent in the domain you're leading in: you can't lead a tech company without deep technical insight any more than you can be a good general without deep insight into war.

So, at the end of all this, why criticise Simon and Lencioni? Books like this are, in a sense, the stories that our ruling class tells themselves about why they deserve to rule. They purport to talk about leadership, teamwork and strategy, but in the end do nothing but reinforce the worst, most destructive impulses of the people who claim to be our leaders. And unfortunately, in the USA, we're currently seeing exactly how this script plays out in the worst case: leaders who feel that they have no obligation to anyone but themselves, people who think they're much smarter than they actually are burning down everything that wiser and more responsible people have built, and gangsters taking the opportunity to line their own pockets. This is fucking awful, and books like this represent a large part of the ideological justification for this wholesale looting of a country. We have to understand that these books have wide-ranging consequences beyond simply generating too many boring meetings. They rot the brains of the people reading them, and they lead, little by little, to things burning down. We badly need better leaders and better strategists, and these books are not going to be the ones giving us that.