Study guide
9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness
APMG Change Management Foundation Exam
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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context
1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits
2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context
2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels
3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach
3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators
4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy
4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy
5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response
5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model
6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning
6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford
7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership
7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change
8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture
8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate
9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change
9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity
10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement
10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement
11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection
11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds
12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning
12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning
13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity
13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity
14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change
14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance
15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness
15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision
9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Lencioni identifies five dysfunctions characterising an ineffective team, pointing to five positive characteristics to develop
The five positive characteristics are trust and psychological safety, constructive conflict about ideas, commitment and follow-through, mutual accountability, and focus on team results
The characteristics build on one another, so trust must exist before constructive conflict is possible
Lack of commitment to decisions is the dysfunction corresponding to commitment and follow-through
- Teams that suppress conflict produce false consensus, which is why commitment fails downstream
- Last updated: September 2026
Patrick Lencioni (2002) identifies five dysfunctions that characterise an ineffective team . These dysfunctions point to five positive characteristics that should be developed when seeking to build an effective change team , and CM3 stresses that the five positive characteristics build on one another .
The five characteristics and their dysfunctions
- # Positive characteristic Corresponding dysfunction
- 1 Trust and psychological safety Absence of trust
- 2 Constructive conflict about ideas Fear of conflict
- 3 Commitment and follow-through Lack of commitment to decisions
- 4 Mutual accountability Avoiding holding one another accountable
- 5 Focus on team results Inattention to results
The exam most often gives you a behaviour and asks which characteristic or dysfunction it describes. The mapping to hold onto: commitment and follow-through corresponds to lack of commitment to decisions .
Why the sequence matters
The characteristics build on one another, which means you cannot fix a later one while an earlier one is missing . This is what makes the model diagnostic rather than merely descriptive.
1. Trust and psychological safety
The foundation. Trust here means being able to be vulnerable with each other — to admit a mistake, a gap in knowledge, or a wrong call. This is Edmondson's psychological safety, and Lencioni's placing it first is the same argument.
2. Constructive conflict about ideas
Without trust, people will not argue honestly, because disagreement feels risky. With trust, teams can have vigorous debate about ideas — the qualifier matters. Constructive conflict is about the substance, not about people.
A team that appears harmonious is often not healthy but conflict-avoidant. Real disagreement exists and is being routed into corridors, private messages and passive non-cooperation instead of the meeting.
3. Commitment and follow-through
This is the characteristic that reveals whether stage 2 actually happened. People commit to decisions they have had the chance to argue about. A decision reached without genuine debate produces nodding in the room and nothing afterwards — the false consensus that change managers experience as an agreed plan nobody delivers.
So when a change team repeatedly agrees actions that do not happen, the intervention is usually not tighter action tracking. It is going back to whether the disagreement was ever surfaced.
4. Mutual accountability
Team members holding each other to account, not waiting for the leader to do it. This requires commitment, because you cannot hold someone to a standard they never agreed to. Where accountability runs only through the leader, the team is dependent rather than effective.
5. Focus on team results
The apex. Members prioritise the collective outcome over individual status, departmental interests or personal recognition. It requires all four beneath it — without mutual accountability, individual agendas are never challenged.
Applying Lencioni to change work
The model is most useful applied to the change team, the change agent network and the sponsoring leadership group — the three groups whose effectiveness determines whether a change is deliverable.
A practical diagnostic sequence, working from the bottom:
Can people admit mistakes and gaps in this group? If not, everything above is compromised and trust is the only useful intervention.
Does real disagreement surface in the meeting, or only outside it? Silent meetings followed by corridor dissent indicate fear of conflict.
Do agreed decisions actually get delivered? Repeated non-delivery usually traces back to conflict that never happened.
Do members challenge each other, or only the leader challenge them? Leader-only accountability indicates a dependent team.
When individual and collective interests conflict, which wins? Consistent individual precedence indicates inattention to results.
Working upward from the lowest failing level is the whole point of the sequence. Adding an accountability process to a team that does not trust each other produces a process that is complied with and ignored — which is, in miniature, the same lesson Kelman teaches about compliance.
The link to psychological safety and diversity
Lencioni's first characteristic explicitly names psychological safety, which ties this model to Edmondson and to CM3's guidance on team diversity — where diverse teams need time to develop their full effectiveness and the psychological safety that frees them to perform . In Tuckman's terms, a diverse team may spend longer in storming, and Lencioni explains why that is productive rather than problematic: the storming is where constructive conflict about ideas is learned.
Building trust deliberately
Since everything in the model rests on the first characteristic, it is worth being concrete about what builds it. Lencioni's sense of trust is specifically vulnerability-based — confidence that being wrong, not knowing, or asking for help will not be used against you. That is a narrower and more demanding thing than reliability.
Three behaviours build it faster than any team-building exercise:
The leader goes first. A change manager who opens a review by naming their own misjudgement has demonstrated the cost of admission and shown it is survivable. Nobody more junior will do it before someone more senior has.
Mistakes are handled consistently. One instance of a mistake being used against someone erases months of stated openness, and the team will treat the exception as the true policy.
Not knowing is normalised. "I don't know, I'll find out" from a leader is a more useful signal than a confident wrong answer, and it licenses the same response from everyone else.
This is also where the model connects to change specifically: change teams are usually new, cross-functional and temporary, which means they have the least accumulated trust at exactly the moment they most need to disagree productively.