Leading your team out of dysfunction
Every team experiences challenges, but dysfunction occurs when unhelpful patterns become ingrained. Dysfunction can sap energy, erode trust, and prevent teams from achieving their purpose. By understanding the sources of dysfunction and applying targeted interventions, leaders can reset dynamics and create conditions for teams to thrive.
Types of conflict and how to manage them
Conflict is not always negative. In fact, healthy conflict about ideas and decisions can strengthen performance. Problems arise when conflict becomes personal, destructive, or avoided altogether.
- Task conflict – disagreement over ideas, strategies, or approaches.
- Useful when managed well, as it encourages innovation and robust decision-making.
- Relationship conflict – personal tension, mistrust, or clashes of style.
- Harmful when it becomes emotional or undermines collaboration.
- Avoided conflict – silence or withdrawal that masks issues.
- Leads to unresolved tensions that resurface later in unproductive ways.
Leadership interventions:
- Set clear ground rules for respectful discussion.
- Surface assumptions early rather than letting them fester.
- Model curiosity by asking questions rather than defending positions.
Reflect
- What types of conflict show up most in your team?
- How do you currently respond to conflict — do you lean towards avoidance, resolution, or escalation?
- What could you do differently to create space for healthy, constructive conflict?
Resolving team conflict
Conflict is inevitable. What matters most is how leaders guide the team through it. The Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) describes five common approaches:
- Competing – pursuing your own needs at the expense of others.
- Useful in urgent, high-stakes decisions, but risks damaging relationships.
- Collaborating – seeking win–win solutions where both sides’ needs are met.
- Builds trust, but takes time.
- Compromising – finding middle ground.
- Practical, but can leave both sides partially unsatisfied.
- Avoiding – sidestepping the conflict.
- Useful for small issues, but risks leaving problems unresolved.
- Accommodating – prioritising others’ needs over your own.
- Builds goodwill, but may create imbalance if overused.
Effective leaders adapt their approach to the context, balancing short-term pragmatism with long-term relationship building.
Quick tip for leaders in the moment:
When conflict heats up, pause and ask: ‘Help me understand your perspective’.
This simple phrase signals openness, de-escalates tension, and shifts the focus back to curiosity and shared problem-solving.
Learn more
Check out LDC’s Navigating opposing ideas page in the Influencing without authority toolkit. It explains the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and includes an activity to help you and your team identify which style is most effective based on the context and outcomes you aim to achieve.
Reflect
- Which conflict style do you most often default to? How does this affect your team’s ability to move forward?
- What conflict modes do you observe in your team? How does this affect team collaboration?
- In what situations could you experiment with a different conflict approach?
The five dysfunctions of a team (Patrick Lencioni)
Patrick Lencioni’s well-known model highlights five interrelated dysfunctions that undermine team performance. Each requires specific leadership interventions:
- Absence of trust
- People are unwilling to be vulnerable or admit mistakes.
- Leadership intervention: model vulnerability as a leader, share your own learning moments, and create space for open conversations.
- Fear of conflict
- Teams avoid healthy debate, leading to artificial harmony.
- Leadership intervention: encourage respectful disagreement, normalise debate, and set ground rules for how conflict is managed.
- Lack of commitment
- Decisions are unclear or lack buy-in, so people hold back.
- Leadership intervention: clarify decisions, restate commitments in meetings, and ensure everyone has been heard before moving forward.
- Avoidance of accountability
- Team members hesitate to challenge one another or hold each other to standards.
- Leadership intervention: agree on clear goals and measures, and create peer accountability through regular check-ins.
- Inattention to results
- Focus drifts to individual agendas rather than collective outcomes.
- Leadership intervention: keep team goals visible, celebrate shared wins, and link individual success to team success.
Lencioni’s framework is an invitation to pause and consider how your team works together. Be mindful of moments when trust is fragile, conflict is avoided, or accountability slips. If you notice patterns that may be undermining performance, consider seeking guidance from your HR team to address these. They can provide neutral support, help ensure conversations remain constructive, and enable the team to rebuild confidence.
Learn more
To learn more about Lencioni’s Five dysfunctions of a team, check out the below links.
Reflect
- Which dysfunction do you notice most strongly in your team?
- How do you see one dysfunction feeding into another?
- What leadership behaviour could you change to break a cycle of dysfunction?
Challenges to watch for
Leading through dysfunction is demanding. Leaders can unintentionally make problems worse by:
- Normalising unhealthy conflict
- allowing personal clashes to persist unchecked.
- Leadership intervention: step in early and reset expectations.
- Avoiding tough conversations
- letting issues slide to preserve harmony.
- Leadership intervention: use direct, respectful conversations to address concerns quickly.
- Over-focusing on harmony
- prioritising peace over performance.
- Leadership intervention: remind the team that healthy debate is part of high performance.
- Blaming the team
- framing dysfunction as their fault, rather than acknowledging your role as leader.
- Leadership intervention: take responsibility for shaping conditions for success.
Leaders also need to be aware of their own triggers. Strong emotional intelligence and self-awareness help prevent leaders from escalating conflict and allow them to model calm, constructive responses.
When to get external help
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a team can’t move past its challenges. As a leader, it’s important to recognise when the situation calls for support beyond your own skillset. Bringing in external help, such as your HR team or a facilitator, can provide fresh perspective, specialised tools, and a neutral space for resolution.
Pause and reflect on leading dysfunctional teams
All teams will experience dysfunction at times. What matters is how leaders respond. By recognising the types of conflict, adapting your approach, and addressing the root causes of dysfunction, you can shift unhelpful patterns into constructive ones. Even when dysfunction takes hold, teams can repair and come back stronger. In fact, moving through conflict and recovery together often builds resilience, trust, and deeper commitment. Dysfunction isn’t a permanent state, with the right leadership, it can become a turning point for stronger performance.