Why Most Teams Are Stuck (And Don't Know It)
Stuck cat, does he know it? Not sure what it has to do with teams but I like it
I've been in this work for 28 years. And in that time, I've walked into a lot of rooms.
Conference rooms. Boardrooms. Retreat centers. Ropes courses in the redwoods. And in all of those rooms, with all of those teams — from Fortune 500 companies to scrappy startups to nonprofit boards running on fumes — I've noticed something.
Most teams think they're doing okay.
They're not fighting. People are showing up. The work is getting done. More or less. And nobody's quitting. So it must be fine, right?
Except it's not fine. Not really. There's a low hum of tension that everyone's learned to ignore. Meetings that feel productive but somehow never land anywhere. Decisions that get made and then quietly unmade. People who smile in the hallway and vent in the parking lot.
Sound familiar?
Here's what I've come to believe after nearly three decades of working with teams: most performance problems aren't strategy problems. They're people problems. Not because the people are bad — they're usually talented, committed, well-intentioned. But because nobody ever taught them how to actually work together.
That's where Patrick Lencioni comes in.
I discovered Lencioni's Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team the way I discover most things that matter — by living the problem first.
Back in the 90s I was working at a TV station, selling commercials. The sales team and the production team were constantly at odds. We'd come back from client meetings excited, and the production team would be less than thrilled with what we'd promised. There was friction. There was gossip. There were conversations that should have happened in the room but instead happened everywhere else.
Nobody trusted each other enough to just... say the thing.
I eventually left that world, stumbled into experiential learning, and built Synergy Learning Systems around the belief that when people truly connect — when they get out from behind their roles and their titles and actually see each other — everything changes.
Lencioni's model gave me the language for what I'd been witnessing for years.
The Five Behaviors model is built as a pyramid. Five layers, stacked intentionally — because each one depends on the one below it.
At the base is **Trust**. Not the surface-level, "I'm sure you mean well" kind of trust. Vulnerable-based trust. The kind where people are willing to say I don't know, I was wrong, I need help. Without this, the whole pyramid is shaky.
Above that is **Conflict** — specifically, productive conflict. The willingness to disagree openly, to push back, to have the hard conversation in the room instead of after. Teams that avoid conflict aren't peaceful. They're stuck.
Then comes **Commitment**. When people have been heard and had the chance to weigh in, they can commit to a decision — even if they'd have chosen differently. No buy-in and no clarity means no real commitment.
Next is **Accountability** — peer-to-peer, not just top-down. The willingness to hold each other to the standard the team agreed on. This is the one most teams flinch at.
And at the top: **Results**. Collective results. The team's wins matter more than any individual's scorecard or any department's numbers.
Simple, right? In theory, yes.
In practice, this is where the real work happens.
Over the next six weeks I'm going to go deep on each behavior — what it actually looks like, why teams struggle with it, and what to do about it. Not from a textbook perspective, but from 28 years of sitting in the room when the real stuff surfaces.
Because here's what I know: every team gets stuck somewhere on this pyramid. The question isn't whether you're stuck. It's where — and whether you're willing to do something about it.
That's where everything begins.
Which behavior do you think your team struggles with most?
