“If we don’t focus on results, we will never achieve them.” — Patrick Lencioni
At the very top of the pyramid sits the dysfunction that everything else leads to: Inattention to Results. This occurs when team members prioritize something other than the collective goals of the team. Those “somethings” typically fall into two categories: individual status and departmental focus.
When individuals focus on their own career advancement, ego, or recognition above what the team needs to achieve together, the team loses. When functional leaders prioritize the success of their own department over the success of the organization, the team loses. In both cases, the common thread is the same: individual interests are placed above collective outcomes.
This dysfunction is the natural consequence of the four that precede it. When teams do not trust each other, avoid honest conflict, fail to commit to shared decisions, and refuse to hold one another accountable, there is no mechanism to align individual behavior with collective goals. Each person defaults to protecting their own interests because the team has not earned their commitment to something bigger.
Inattention to Results is the ultimate dysfunction because results are the entire point of having a team. If the team does not achieve results, then all the trust-building, productive conflict, commitment, and accountability are academic exercises. Everything in the pyramid exists to serve this final level: the team must deliver results, and every member must care more about those results than about their individual standing.
Teams suffering from this dysfunction display these patterns:
In the DecisionTech story, Kathryn notices that each executive is primarily focused on the success of their own department. The VP of Sales talks about sales numbers. The VP of Engineering talks about product launches. The VP of Marketing talks about brand metrics. But no one is talking about the company’s overall performance. Kathryn challenges them by asking a simple question: “How is DecisionTech doing?” The silence that follows is deafening. No one can answer because no one has been tracking the company’s collective results. They have all been watching their own scoreboards. Kathryn’s solution is to create a single, shared scoreboard that everyone is responsible for, and to make it clear that the team succeeds or fails together.
For some team members, merely being part of the team is enough to satisfy them. The title, the position, the prestige of being at the executive table becomes more important than what the team actually achieves. These individuals are not motivated by results. They are motivated by maintaining their status. As long as they keep their seat, they are content.
This is particularly common in organizations where tenure is valued over performance and where the consequences of poor results are minimal. Without a strong results orientation, these team members drift into complacency.
Other team members are driven by ego rather than collective outcomes. They want personal recognition, they want to be seen as the smartest person in the room, and they prioritize their own career trajectory over the team’s goals. These individuals may actually be high performers in their own domain, but their focus on personal achievement creates fragmentation and competition within the team.
The ego trap is insidious because ego-driven individuals often appear to be valuable team members. They work hard, they produce results in their area, and they are often charismatic. But their orientation is fundamentally self-serving, and over time, their behavior erodes the team’s cohesion.
One of the most common manifestations of this dysfunction is when functional leaders treat their departments as personal kingdoms. The VP of Sales cares about sales. The VP of Engineering cares about engineering. Each leader optimizes for their own silo and measures success by their department’s metrics. The problem is that departmental success does not necessarily translate to organizational success. In fact, departmental optimization often comes at the expense of the whole. When the sales team promises features that engineering cannot deliver, or when marketing launches campaigns that operations cannot support, the organization suffers even though individual departments may look good on paper.
Shifting from individual focus to collective results requires clear goals, public accountability, and reward structures that reinforce team outcomes:
Public Declaration of Results: The team must agree on a small number of clear, measurable results that define success for the team as a whole. These results must be public, visible, and regularly reviewed.
Results-Based Rewards: Compensation, bonuses, and recognition should be tied to collective outcomes rather than individual performance alone. When everyone’s rewards depend on the same outcomes, alignment follows naturally.
The Scoreboard: Create a visible, shared scoreboard that tracks the team’s most important metrics. This scoreboard should be reviewed at every team meeting. When the team can see how they are doing at a glance, it creates focus and urgency.
Elimination of Individual Status Markers: Reduce the emphasis on titles, perks, and other status markers that encourage people to focus on their position rather than the team’s results.
Shared Ownership of All Goals: Every team member must feel ownership over every team goal, not just the ones that fall within their functional area. The VP of Sales should care about engineering milestones, and the VP of Engineering should care about sales targets.
Create a shared team scoreboard in one meeting:
The act of creating the scoreboard is itself a powerful alignment exercise. Debates about what to measure reveal underlying disagreements about priorities.
Transform your team meetings with this simple practice:
This practice keeps results at the center of every conversation and prevents meetings from drifting into status updates and administrative topics.
The leader’s role in driving attention to results is perhaps the most straightforward of all five dysfunctions, but it requires genuine selflessness. The leader must set the tone by demonstrating that they care more about the team’s results than about their own personal recognition or status.
Specifically, the leader must:
Be objective about rewards and recognition. The leader must be willing to reward people based on contributions to collective results, not personal loyalty or individual heroics. This means being honest even when it is uncomfortable.
Stay focused on outcomes. It is easy for leaders to get distracted by process, politics, and the day-to-day. The leader must constantly bring the conversation back to: “Are we achieving our results?”
Make results public. Leaders who hide results or share them selectively create an environment where people can avoid confronting reality. Transparency about performance creates healthy urgency.
Model selflessness. The leader must visibly subordinate their own ego, status, and career interests to the team’s collective outcomes. When the team sees the leader making personal sacrifices for shared goals, it gives permission for everyone else to do the same.
Celebrate collective wins. When the team achieves a goal, celebrate it as a team achievement. Resist the urge to single out individual heroes, which reinforces the very dynamic this dysfunction creates.
If your team were a sports team, would the players care more about individual stats or winning the championship? What would a stranger observe if they sat in on your team meetings: a group of people aligned on shared outcomes, or a collection of individuals managing their own portfolios? What is the single most important result your team needs to achieve this quarter, and does every member of the team know it?
When all five dysfunctions are addressed, the result is a cohesive team that operates at a fundamentally different level:
This is rare. Most teams never get here. But the ones that do have an extraordinary competitive advantage because teamwork itself becomes their greatest strength. As Lencioni writes, a team that is truly cohesive will always beat a team of individuals, no matter how talented those individuals may be.