RESULTS: The Team Wins. Not Just You.
Team Summits together as one.
We've made it to the top.
And here's what I want to say about results before anything else: if your team has done the real work on the four behaviors below this one — if you have genuine trust, productive conflict, real commitment, and peer accountability — results almost take care of themselves.
Not because success is guaranteed. But because a team operating at that level is pointing in the same direction, telling each other the truth, holding themselves and each other to high standards, and actually doing what they said they'd do.
That team is rare. And when you're in one, you know it.
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But here's where it falls apart, even for teams that have done a lot of the other work.
Lencioni identifies four things that pull teams off course when it comes to results. Four distractions that cause people — good, well-intentioned, talented people — to prioritize the wrong thing.
Ego. The need to be right, to be credited, to be seen as the one who made the difference. I've watched teams make worse decisions because the best idea came from the wrong person.
Career development. The calculation — conscious or not — of what this decision means for me. My visibility. My advancement. My brand. When individuals are optimizing for themselves, the team pays for it.
Money. Not just individual compensation, but departmental budgets, resources, turf. The instinct to protect what's yours at the expense of what's ours.
My department. Loyalty to your function, your team, your slice of the org chart — above the collective goals of the whole. Sales protecting sales. Engineering protecting engineering. Everyone rowing hard — just not in the same direction.
None of these things are inherently bad. Ego, ambition, financial security, team loyalty — these are human. They're not pathological.
But when they consistently come before the team's collective results, performance suffers. And usually, everyone knows it's happening and nobody says it out loud.
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I think about a leadership team I worked with a few years ago. Individually, they were some of the most impressive people I'd encountered. Smart, experienced, driven.
And yet the organization was underperforming. Decisions took forever. Initiatives launched and stalled. The CEO was frustrated; the team was frustrated; the employees watching from below were frustrated.
When we dug into it using the Five Behaviors framework, the issue became clear: every person at that table was, consciously or not, running their own agenda. Not out of malice. Out of the very human instinct toward self-preservation and self-advancement.
Nobody was focused on the collective result. Everybody was focused on their piece of it.
It took real work — and real honesty — to shift that. But when it shifted, the organization changed almost immediately.
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Here's what I've come to believe about results: they are the output of everything else.
You don't get to great collective results by starting with results. You get there by building the foundation. Trust first. Then the willingness to have hard conversations. Then real commitment to shared decisions. Then the accountability that keeps everyone on track.
When those four things are in place, results aren't just possible — they feel almost inevitable.
And the other thing that happens — the thing I love most about this work — is that people start to actually enjoy their work more. Because when you're on a team that trusts each other, fights productively, commits fully, and holds each other accountable, coming to work feels different. The meetings are real. The relationships are real. The wins are shared.
That's not just performance. That's a place people want to be.
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A few questions worth sitting with as you think about results on your team:
When a decision is made, is everyone actually rowing in the same direction — or are people quietly protecting their own agendas?
When something goes wrong, is the conversation about what happened and how to fix it — or about who's at fault?
When something goes right, does the whole team celebrate — or just the person or department most visibly responsible?
The answers will tell you a lot.
