Trust, Conflict, and Knowing Your Genius

What I took away from two of Patrick Lencioni’s frameworks and how I’m using them with my team and my clients.

Over the last couple of months, I dug into two of Patrick Lencioni’s frameworks: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the 6 Types of Working Genius. I’ve been skeptical of these kinds of tools before; they don’t always tell the whole story, but both gave me real, usable takeaways that I think would be helpful to share.

If you haven’t read it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a leadership fable. It follows Kathryn Petersen, a seasoned executive brought in to lead DecisionTech, a well-funded Silicon Valley startup that’s stalling out despite a talented, expensive executive team.

The group isn’t really a team at all. Meetings are tense and unproductive, decisions stall, and people guard their own turf.

Through a series of off-sites, Kathryn walks them through a pyramid of five dysfunctions and slowly rebuilds them into a team that trusts each other, debates openly, commits, holds each other accountable, and focuses on collective results.

It’s a quick read, and the model underneath the story is what stuck with me.

It Starts With Trust

Lencioni’s pyramid stacks five dysfunctions: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

• Absence of trust. This is the foundation, and it's about an unwillingness to be vulnerable with one another. On teams that lack it, people hide their mistakes and weaknesses, hesitate to ask for help, and jump to conclusions about each other's intentions. Without that vulnerability-based trust, nothing above it in the pyramid can hold.
• Fear of conflict. Without trust, teams can't engage in honest, passionate debate, so they settle for artificial harmony instead. Disagreements go unspoken, meetings stay polite and boring, and real issues never get worked through. Productive conflict is actually a sign of health, not dysfunction.
• Lack of commitment. Commitment comes down to clarity and buy-in, and both depend on people having aired their opinions first. When team members haven't weighed in through open debate, they rarely truly commit. They may nod along in the room but never get on board. The result is ambiguity about what was actually decided.
• Avoidance of accountability. Once commitment is shaky, people hesitate to call peers out on behaviors or performance that hurt the team. The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort wins out over holding the line on standards. Lencioni frames the enemy of accountability as ambiguity and you can't hold people to a plan no one was clear on.
• Inattention to results. At the top sits the ultimate dysfunction: people prioritizing their own ego, status, or department over the collective goals of the team. The team may stay busy and individuals may hit their own numbers, but the organization stops winning. Great teams keep their focus on shared, measurable results.

The foundations of trust and fear of conflict really stuck out to me. As a fractional CMO, I see it all the time. I could build the greatest marketing plan in the world, but if people won’t be vulnerable about their mistakes and weaknesses, it goes nowhere.

Real growth means getting past that, and past the fear of conflict that keeps teams from honest, unfiltered debate.

Trust doesn’t mean everyone is getting along and not challenging each other. Quite the opposite. Healthy and open disagreements are HUGE signs that you actually do have trust. It’s the quiet and agreeable rooms that can often be signs of issues.

Heard Isn’t the Same as Agreed

A big takeaway: being heard doesn’t mean everyone agrees, and it doesn’t strip a leader of the final call.

It means everyone gets the chance to weigh in and, just as importantly, understands why a decision was made. Once it’s made, accountability runs both ways. I hold the team accountable, and they get to hold me accountable, too.

This comes straight out of the book. When the DecisionTech team gets hung up on needing everyone to agree, Kathryn makes the case that most reasonable people don’t actually have to get their way; they just need to be heard and to know their input was considered and responded to.

It’s the idea of “disagree and commit”: you can argue a point and lose, then still get behind the decision as if you’d backed it all along. Without that, people may nod along in the meeting but never truly buy in, and the commitment falls apart later.

Everyone Owns the Result

One idea stuck with me: the new CEO gets her leadership team to stop measuring success by their own department’s wins and start owning one shared scoreboard. This often looks like collective results like revenue, customer success, and product quality.

At first, she’s met with crazy looks and pushback. They’re used to lobbying for their own functions and staying out of everyone else’s lane, until she explains further.

The point is simple but powerful. Everyone shares accountability for the organization’s growth, even if they don’t touch every job every day. That beats people guarding their own status out of fear.

Knowing Your Genius

Moving on from the book was the corresponding research and assessment I went through on Working Genius. I was seeking to understand and improve the team dynamics between both myself and Brandon here at GC Strategies, as well as some of our client and 1099 relationships. 

Working Genius shifts from team behavior and personality to the work itself. It breaks work into six stages, and the idea is that everyone has two geniuses (the work that energizes them), two competencies (work they can do but don’t love), and two frustrations (work that drains them). Here’s what each of the six looks like:

• Wonder. The instinct to step back and ask whether things could be better. People strong in Wonder naturally spot problems, gaps, and untapped opportunities that others walk right past. Their strength is identifying that something needs attention in the first place.
• Invention. The drive to create original ideas and solutions from scratch. People strong in Invention love a blank page and turning a problem into a fresh concept or approach. Their strength is generating genuinely new answers rather than tweaking old ones.
• Discernment. The intuition and judgment to evaluate ideas without needing a mountain of data. People strong in Discernment can quickly sense what’s good, what’s off, and what needs refining. Their strength is acting as a reliable gut check that keeps good ideas moving and weak ones from advancing.
• Galvanizing. The ability to rally people and build momentum around an idea. People strong in Galvanizing inspire others to act, championing a direction and getting everyone moving. Their strength is turning a decision into energy and forward motion across a group.
• Enablement. The willingness to provide the support, help, and resources a project needs to get going. People strong in Enablement step in to assist wherever they’re needed, without ego about whose job it is. Their strength is being the responsive, dependable support that lets work actually happen.
• Tenacity. The drive to push work all the way through to completion. People strong in Tenacity stay locked in until the finish line, holding standards and making sure results actually land. Their strength is closing the loop and delivering, not just starting strong.

My geniuses are Invention and Discernment. I laughed during the assessment because I already had a pretty good idea where I was going to end up.

Brandon, who works with me at GC Strategies, landed on Wonder and Discernment, so we share one and contrast on the others. We even share a few frustrations, which fit the work we do.

Double Down, Cover the Gaps

A strong team needs all six geniuses working together.

Part of what the model recommends is to organize work around people’s natural strengths rather than expecting everyone to be good at everything.

The goal isn’t to “fix” your frustrations; it’s to spend as much time as possible in your areas of genius, lean on teammates or alternatives to fill your gaps, and stop judging people for struggling in the very areas that happen to drain them.

When a team maps out who has which geniuses, it can match the right people to the right stages of work, which reduces burnout and gets more done with less friction.

So, here at GCS, we’ve taken steps to double down on what we love and do well, then got honest about the gaps and what we could do to address them.

As a small team (relatable to many of you I’m sure), we can’t necessarily just hire out or automate certain things we don’t want to do, or that don’t give us that energetic rush.

So, where we can’t hand something off, we’ve at least identified it, so it never becomes a blind spot and we can proactively address it. 

For an initial skeptic, I’ll say I’ve really enjoyed the takeaways from both the book, assessment, and follow-ups. I’ve already watched small improvements taking place as part of having this greater understanding, both internally and with clients.

Do I think these frameworks are a magic bullet for every problem inside an organization? Of course not.

But the value isn’t in treating them like a perfect answer. The value is in using them to create better language for the issues teams are already feeling.

They help make the invisible friction visible: where trust is thin, where conflict is being avoided, where accountability is unclear, or where people are spending too much time in work that drains them.

That’s been the real takeaway for me. Frameworks don’t fix teams. But they can help teams have more honest conversations and give a common language about what’s actually getting in the way.