Trust wasn't the first thing this team could fix

I watched a VP try to repair a struggling engineering organization by starting with trust. It seemed reasonable. Trust sits at the base of Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions pyramid; the rest of the model depends on it.

But that didn't tell the VP what to fix first.

The exercises landed on top of the real problem

The VP followed Lencioni's model seriously. The group ran the exercises, shared vulnerabilities, and had the difficult conversations the book recommends.

Three months later, people were still hoarding information and second-guessing decisions. The sessions had begun to feel performative.

A growth sprint had left a mismatch between several roles, the work those engineers now carried, and the support available to them. Colleagues checked and rechecked the output because it needed checking. Asking everyone to be more vulnerable did nothing to resolve that mismatch.

There was also a history the exercises couldn't resolve. A year earlier, a team lead had been blamed publicly for a failed project and then quietly managed out. Everybody remembered what happened. They had learned that failure could cost somebody their job, however safe the new exercise said the room was.

The VP was trying to begin with trust. The team first needed reliable work and evidence that the rules had changed.

A pyramid can describe the destination

Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team describes the dependencies clearly. Trust supports productive conflict. Conflict makes commitment possible. Commitment supports accountability and results.

Hold that model against a team that already works and you can recognize the parts. Using it as a repair sequence is harder. The word at the bottom of the pyramid isn't necessarily the first action available to you.

For this team, there were specific problems to address:

• Be honest about whether people were equipped for their roles, then give them the support or role changes they needed.
• Make leadership's response to failure predictable.
• Be clear about which decisions belonged to the team, and explain any intervention.
• Keep doing those things long enough for the old lesson to lose some of its force.

Until those things changed, people had good reasons to stay wary.

Courtesy is still useful on day one

Courtesy, positive intent, and room to act can all begin on day one. I wrote separately about what a manager can honestly promise a new hire. A damaged team needs something different: repeated evidence that reliable work receives support and that failure won't be punished unpredictably.

Why the exercises might help another team

I can see why the same exercises might help a team whose members can already rely on each other's work and on their leaders' response to mistakes.

In that setting, an exercise can help people name and strengthen a relationship they already recognize.

The engineering organization I watched didn't have that starting point. People were still having to recheck work, and they remembered what had happened to the team lead. The VP needed to address those problems before asking people to expose more of themselves in a room together.