Fixing the Five Dysfunctions: How to Build a High-Performing Leadership Team
In every organisation, success starts — and stalls — with people. You can have the best strategy, systems, and data in the world, but if your leadership team isn’t aligned, everything slows down.
Patrick Lencioni’s classic framework, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, captures this perfectly. It reveals why even experienced leadership teams struggle to perform — and how the right development approach can transform not only the executive level, but the entire business culture.
At Board North, we help leadership teams turn these dysfunctions into strengths through targeted workshops, diagnostics, and operating rhythm design. Because when leadership is healthy, the business follows.
Understanding the Five Dysfunctions
Lencioni’s model identifies five interconnected issues that quietly undermine team performance. Left unchecked, they create silos, slow execution, and erode trust — no matter how talented the individuals are. Here’s what they look like in real life, and how we help fix them:
1. Absence of Trust → Building Vulnerability-Based Trust
Without trust, teams hide mistakes, protect information, and avoid admitting weaknesses. Decisions become cautious and collaboration breaks down.
How Board North helps:
Our leadership workshops start by rebuilding trust through data and dialogue. We use structured reflection exercises, personality and communication profiling, and performance data to surface hidden tensions safely.
Leaders learn to share openly, challenge respectfully, and understand each other’s styles — creating the foundation for honest debate and faster progress.
2. Fear of Conflict → Encouraging Healthy Debate
Many teams mistake harmony for health. But when people avoid conflict, bad ideas go unchallenged, and real issues fester.
How Board North helps:
We teach leadership teams how to debate constructively — replacing tension with trust-driven challenge. Through real-time facilitation, we model healthy conflict, helping teams learn how to challenge assumptions, question data, and disagree productively.
Our workshops normalise disagreement as a sign of strength — not dysfunction.
3. Lack of Commitment → Driving Clarity and Buy-In
When teams don’t fully discuss or challenge ideas, they never fully commit to decisions. This leads to hesitation, unclear priorities, and slow execution.
How Board North helps:
We help teams design clarity frameworks — translating strategy into measurable objectives, clear ownership, and defined success criteria. Everyone leaves the table knowing what’s been decided, why it matters, and what comes next.
Our digital operating rhythm tools reinforce that commitment week to week through data dashboards and scorecards.
4. Avoidance of Accountability → Creating Ownership and Follow-Through
Even with clear goals, accountability often slips when there’s discomfort in calling out underperformance or broken promises.
How Board North helps:
We build accountability into your operating rhythm.
Each team member owns measurable metrics, reviewed regularly via scorecards and structured meeting cadences. This takes accountability from personal confrontation to professional discipline.
Our CFO-led approach ensures every number has an owner, every project a clear lead, and every meeting a follow-up.
5. Inattention to Results → Embedding a Results-Driven Culture
When personal agendas or departmental metrics overshadow collective success, the organisation loses focus on what really matters — performance.
How Board North helps:
We unite teams around a shared scoreboard — one version of the truth that visualises business-wide progress. By connecting KPIs, financial outcomes, and cultural metrics, we make success visible, shared, and celebrated.
Our workshops align leadership behaviours to business outcomes, turning intention into measurable improvement.
From Dysfunction to Discipline
Each dysfunction builds on the one before it. That’s why real transformation isn’t achieved through one-off training — it’s achieved through consistent reinforcement.
Our Leadership Alignment Programme combines workshops, AI-powered diagnostics, and data-driven scorecards to:
- Strengthen trust and communication
- Embed healthy accountability
- Align metrics with behaviour
- Create clarity and rhythm across departments
When leaders model these principles, the culture cascades — trust builds across teams, conflict becomes constructive, and accountability becomes natural.
Permeating Change Across the Business
Fixing dysfunction at the top isn’t just about leadership development — it’s about cultural architecture. We help you embed high-performance behaviours through:
- Leadership Workshops: Trust, communication, and conflict resolution.
- Team Training: Translating leadership principles into day-to-day collaboration.
- Digital Operating Rhythms: Scorecards, dashboards, and meetings that reinforce clarity and accountability.
- Cascading Systems: Frameworks for aligning middle management and teams around shared objectives.
This structured, data-backed approach ensures culture isn’t left to chance — it’s engineered for consistency and performance.
The Board North Difference
What makes our approach different? We blend CFO discipline with human performance coaching. Where others focus on soft skills alone, we connect behaviour to measurable business results — using AI-driven data tools and dashboards that make culture visible and performance trackable.
Because culture isn’t just about how people feel — it’s about how people perform.
Ready to Build a High-Performance Team?
If your leadership meetings feel circular, if trust feels low, or if accountability has faded — we can help. Our workshops and diagnostics uncover what’s holding your team back, then build the systems and rhythms to move forward together.
Book a Leadership Alignment Workshop and discover how Board North can turn dysfunction into discipline, and alignment into results.