If you’ve been walking through a UNMC office or talking at a coworker’s desk, you might have seen one of them: a little red hardcover book.
The book is “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,” by Patrick Lencioni, and — having garnered high praise from UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D. — it is showing up at many places around campus.
The book charts the efforts of a new CEO at a fictional company who must unite a dysfunctional leadership team to turn the company’s fortunes around. Lencioni, the founder and president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm, has the CEO attempting to deal with recognizable personality types as she works to build an effective team.
Howard Liu, M.D., asked his team at the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska to read the book. He purchased five or six books for them. Some had already bought their own.
“In one of his earliest interviews, I read that Dr. Gold felt it was a critical book for senior leadership to understand at UNMC,” he said.
“The biggest lesson I took away from the book is that team building must be an intentional process for leaders on this campus,” Dr. Liu said. “The first chapter on trust is the critical element that makes everything work. As a leader, I think that it is easy to get so caught up in what we need to accomplish that we don’t pay attention to the care and feeding of our team members.”
“It isn’t like any leadership book or ‘how to’ I’ve ever read,” said Joan Hill, director of Student Services and Student Financial Services. Her team plans to meet and discuss the book at some point this fall. “All through the story the five dysfunctional areas are discussed in a positive way that is easy to understand.”
Kathleen Brandert, director of the Great Plains Public Health Leadership Institute, has been using “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” as part of the leadership institute and separate workshops on workplace issues for more than five years. She was excited to find that Dr. Gold knew of the book.
“I got a nice feeling when I heard that,” she said. “It’s not even directly related to that book. Just the idea that Dr. Gold appreciates leadership,and the need for leadership training, and the need for conversation around leadership — that’s thrilling for me.”