Summary
Joe and Brett explore team dysfunction by inverting the question: how would you deliberately build the most dysfunctional team? Joe references a CIA document from the 1940s-50s designed to sabotage enemy organizations — defer decisions to committees, create groups over six people, remove autonomy — and notes how many organizations inadvertently follow this playbook.
A key reframe is that team functionality is not binary (functional vs. dysfunctional) but a continuous, endless scale. Even high-performing teams can always grow more functional. Joe identifies the critical traits of dysfunctional leaders: being political or blaming, indecisive, conflict avoidant, and allowing or exhibiting defensiveness. He then describes observable signs of team dysfunction: people talking without listening, uneven participation, rabbit-holing into examples, unclear roles, context-switching in arguments, preferring talk to action, and needing to be right.
The episode concludes with a powerful practical hack: leaders should aim for two consecutive weeks where every meeting is a “five-star meeting” — one that leaves them feeling invigorated rather than depleted. This forcing function naturally eliminates dysfunction because blame, politics, avoidance, and conflict-avoidance are all incompatible with consistently invigorating meetings. Joe emphasizes that the best measure of team dysfunction is simple: do you leave meetings feeling invigorated or depleted?
Key Concepts
- Team functionality is an endless scale, not a binary
- Indecisive leaders destroy team trust
- Conflict-avoidant leaders trade short-term comfort for long-term pain
- Allowing defensiveness kills team communication
- Needing to be right prevents the best solutions
- The five-star meetings hack transforms organizations
- How much dysfunction a company survives depends on market context
- Unfelt emotions in a team create all the dysfunction
Key Quotes
“The best way to measure if a team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted.”
“There’s always a way to take the team to the next level. There’s always a place to get more functional.”
“If a CEO or a leader commits to that — two weeks of five-star meetings — within a month that organization is completely different.”
“The more accurate thing is: I am participating in a dysfunction, and the idea that I can’t do anything about it is a great part of the dysfunction.”
“Being right really hurts relationships because it’s a zero-sum win-lose… nobody is 100% right. So if two people disagree on something there’s some sliver of wisdom in both things.”
“Your anxiety is going to kill the company and everybody in this room knows it.”
Transcript
foreign the best way to measure the team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson last week we talked about what makes a functional team and how to build a functional team and today let’s do a little bit of the opposite let’s talk about how to build the most dysfunctional team you possibly can yeah that sounds fun just to start off there’s this great maybe we can put it in the show notes there’s a great I don’t know how much we’ll talk on this but there’s this great thing that the CIA put out and I had somebody in the CIA actually verify it so I know that it’s it’s apparently true but I think they put it out in the 40s or the 50s or something like that and it was how to go into an organization and make it dysfunctional because they were trying to plant people inside of key organizations of what was considered an enemy at the time and make it dysfunctional and it’s it’s a great document because when you see it you see so many organizations are run the way that they tell you to corrupt an organization so really cool stuff yeah what were some of the characteristics of how they would do that defer decision making defer decision making to groups make sure that the groups that you’re deferring the decision making to are over six um always try to get everything in the hands of a committee you know take away the autonomy of people who know the the work stuff like that that sounds about right exactly yeah when I see like you know uh oftentimes when I’m working with an executive for the first time that one of the first questions I’ll ask them is how many direct reports you have and if they have over five it’s a red flag if they have over eight it’s I just know there’s no functionality happening or not a great deal functionality happening in that organization to have that many direct reports is just you can’t make a decision it’s already incredibly hard to make a decision yeah the the committee thing sounds like a lot of non-profits and like a lot of government yes that happens in a lot of governments and non-profits exactly but but also happens and and way more for-profit companies than you can imagine yeah so this is how the CIA would make a dysfunctional team How would how would Joe make a dysfunctional team yeah I might have some things to add there but before I even begin I want to tell you a story because I think what happens with people is they think that it’s a very binary thought process I have a functional team or I have a dysfunctional team and people don’t even think about teamwork unless it’s like a an extreme pain point and I’ll give you an example of this so I recently worked with the young some chapter of the young president’s organization and there’s some form I don’t know all their technical terms and and I asked them all before I arrived what does this group need to go to the next level and and it was a group of eight and these guys were you know CEOs of companies that are probably market cap between two three hundred million to two or three billion dollars so it’s that size of a company and almost all of them answered with some version of nothing like we’re good everything’s cool you know like I can’t think of anything that we need and if I would have asked those same people what does your company need to to flourish and to take it to the next level they would have all had an answer you know whether it be a better marketing or better people or more Capital whatever they’d all have an answer that they would they would be looking for and it tells you the mentality behind teamwork that often happens which is like either have a functional team or I don’t but it’s not like they don’t look at it the way one would say look at Revenue which is there’s always a way to grow the business there’s always a way to get to more Revenue there’s always a way to increase my mission in the world those things seem to be um you know kind of what in Game Theory they call it an endless game whereas oftentimes when people think about functionality teams it’s like a game that has an end it’s functional or or not functional or it’s very binary and I think that that’s the first thing that has to change in a Leader’s mind to really get the optimal team or get more and more optimal of a team because there’s always room for growth there’s always a way to take the team to the next level there’s always a place to get more functional so even the idea of a functional or dysfunctional team I think it’s more of a scale that’s just where are you on the scale and the scale happens to be endless in both directions so super dysfunction can be killing each other literally and super function can endlessly go on yeah I could imagine it can be both and as well you could have an extremely functional team that whenever a certain topic comes up Suddenly seizes up into dysfunction and then that dysfunction might persist for a long time under the surface or block the functionality of an otherwise functional team that’s right that’s right unless it’s addressed yeah it’s just like the the transformational journey or the spiritual journey there’s just no end to it there’s just always ways to refine just I would say like any Journey but something in our mind you know we have some sort of artificial limit on it and when you can blow that blow your mind on that when you can say oh actually there might be like this highly functional team might be able to get three times more functional that’s when some really creative and cool stuff happens and so yeah an interesting corollary there that you made to personal transformation uh in in the transformation process if you stay the same you will eventually encounter the reality that breaks your model breaks your your Consciousness your identity and requires growth and this must be true as in as a team as well as a company grows or as a company shrinks and how do dysfunctional teams exist and stay in business yeah that’s a great question so you know a functional team is one component of making a successful company you know a great product is another component um how much what your margins are is another component level of the talent in the room is another component there’s so many things that are are components of a successful company and then there’s also momentum meaning oftentimes when companies get dysfunctional like a big company a Fortune 500 company it can take years for them to recognize it in business results and even when you have those business results they can last for years before any actions you know poor business results can can be there for years before you know an activist shareholder comes in or before you get crushed by your competition so so you have the momentum and then you also have the Forgiveness of the company based to the other strengths and so both of those can allow for greater levels of dysfunction so for instance if you are in a low margin business in a highly competitive space where there is a shrinking Market a total addressable Market then you are if you’re dysfunctional you’re going to be dead really really quickly as a company whereas if you are in blue space where there’s no real competition where it’s a super high margin business and the total addressable Market is growing then you can be dysfunctional and still succeed or if you have um you know a way to keep your competitors at Bay whether that be with patents which are less useful these days or Trade Secrets or distribution monopolies whatever that is then you can be more dysfunctional and still survive how would scale factor into this how do scale and dysfunction interact yeah well I would say it’s harder to hold a functional team like to have a functional team the bigger that the company grows so that I think that’s one correlation um it’s just it’s more difficult because people are creating functional teams are hard to replicate and structures are hard just for people to operate in that kind of size you know so there’s companies like I think it was Gore-Tex for a while that every time they had part of the company that got over 150 people they would do osmosis and they’d break it into two at 75 and then they would grow them to 150 and break it into two to keep the number of people that they’re interacting with to a to a pretty limited number so there’s been a lot of people doing tricks like that but it just gets challenging the bigger the company is but it’s definitely not impossible but otherwise the kind of dysfunction that can be allowed or that can exist that doesn’t disturb the business is not really based on scale as much as it is based on those other components like margin and product and and what the market is doing and that kind of stuff so it’s more based on the requirements of the space that the company is in the requirements of the company’s business to remain to remain profitable to exist and the same dysfunction that might plague a family business might plague a large business all the same or not depending on the differences of what it’s what’s required for them to survive in the market correct like one of these one of these ways of looking at it is like creativity so some companies don’t need to be creative to stay in business and some companies really need to be creative to stay in business if your business is innovation and dysfunction will kill Innovation really really quickly it’s why very few big businesses innovate effectively and if they are they’re doing it through acquisition and so you have to be highly effect functional to continue to iterate successfully and be Innovative successfully comparatively highly functional so that’s just an example so if your business requires that you’re going to have to stay functional if your business doesn’t require that at all then functionality is is less important to the maintenance of your business but to the growth of your business to the flourishing to the rapid expansion functionality is is is always helpful and that’s the thing that’s interesting is you know for instance you know great marketing is always helpful for a business some businesses don’t need the marketing some businesses do need the marketing but great marketing is always helpful for the business it’s the same with teams so if you’re really looking to optimize your company teamwork is a one of the best levers to pull because it affects everything else it’s like the soil in which Everything grows in is people’s relationships and their Dynamics and if you have bad soil it’s hard for anything to grow So speaking of the dysfunction within a team and how you know most of most of what goes on in a company is some reflection of the consciousness of the the leader or in a team how can you relate what we’re talking about with teams to the leaders of them and what do you see in Dysfunctional leaders so there’s a couple like really big ones like linchpins that um if a leader shows these qualities it’s going to be really really hard for the team um one is the easiest one to name is like being political or blame and what this does is it makes it so people don’t know how to succeed or how to win because it’s really based on the mood of the leader and blaming obviously just is a horrible way to motivate people and it also doesn’t solve anything so that that’s like kind of the obvious one the less obvious ones are indecisive leaders super super super bad for a team like the team loses trust really quickly if if somebody’s indecisive indecisive doesn’t mean that you make every decision in a Split Second uh it means that you are you can make decisions easily or that you don’t even notice their decisions you’re not in that fear-based place of like oh my God what should I do um that you’re taking the next iterative step so that’s another one uh conflict avoidant leaders is another huge huge issue we are people we have conflict um avoid the conflict you avoid building Trust you avoid uh sorting out the problems you avoid finding the inefficiencies you avoid um seeing the problems that you need to fix all those things happen if you avoid conflict and though on some leave level nobody wants the leader to come in and go what the hell is going on here but they also don’t want a leader they can’t trust to do that so it’s oftentimes you see the leaders in trade the short term discomfort for the long-term discomfort and so if you if you’re okay with the short-term discomfort you have a lot less long-term discomfort that’s a critical piece as well another one is that they allow defense or they are defensive themselves and you know they there’s a meeting and one of the people is really defensive if a leader allows that to exist that Dynamic to exist it’ll definitely kill a team because what happens there is that if someone’s getting defensive then people in the team if they’re super functional they’ll be like hey you’re defensive like what’s happening here but if they’re not um then people start being scared to say things to that person and then communication gets all gummed up and so allowing defensive behavior is just super toxic for a team and you can try to coach them out of it or you can be really direct and say wow we don’t do defensiveness here like can you please leave the meeting until you can come back in a non-defensive way and show up lots of ways of handling defensiveness but it’s really critical to make it so that everybody feels safe and comfortable sharing whatever it is they need to share I think it might even be interesting to do an entire episode someday on defensiveness and allowing it and coaching it and just addressing that in a team because that’s a that’s a really big one right there and I can see how tricky it can be when if somebody’s defensive it’s because their nervous system is seizing up and they’re they’re detecting threat it would be interesting to talk about how to approach and work with somebody who’s already in threat without making that threat wrong you know to say we don’t do defensiveness here could be taken as to say you’re not allowed to feel afraid right now correct yeah or you help them to say I am afraid right now instead of being defensive you know this thing is bothering me or even asked the question is like oh am I being told that I’ve done something wrong what’s what’s happening so there’s all sorts of ways around it to not make it wrong and it’s like and there’s a huge difference between we don’t allow defensiveness here which is in itself defensiveness as compared to saying like oh hey like I see that you’re being defensive you know this isn’t something that we do here so take a break you know get back to yourself come on back and and we’ll continue the conversation okay so is there anything else you wanted to touch on with regard to dysfunctional leaders and then next I’d love to talk about what do you look for in a team what to observe when you’re looking for dysfunction yeah I think the other thing to talk about is um another thing this is a more subtle thing but leaders who don’t lead or follow either one of those can create super dysfunctional teams so when I mean follow is that they’re actually listening to the wisdom of their Executives or the people that they’re working with and and letting them have authority and autonomy super important also leading being the first in taking the responsibility having the quote unquote the buck stop with them being the person who leads the charge in their own kind of vulnerability um not kind of their own vulnerability their own Wonder their own not knowing without that kind of leadership it’s it’s really hard for a team to be functional not owning that role of oh I am the decision maker on these key components it’s less less common but it happens that would be the other thing that I would really look for if I’m you know I get called into places often and say can you assess this team and those are that’s kind of the checklist of stuff I look for I guess my my next question then has shifted a little bit then from yes from the signs of a dysfunctional leader what do you see in a team that has a dysfunctional relationship with their leader yeah it’s a slightly different question I mean I recall this time that I was asked to sit a CEO asked me to come in and sit with the executive team and the CEO introduced me for five minutes I don’t know if I’ve told this story on the podcast um they introduced me for five minutes and then when they handed it over to me I said so my first question is what makes it that you’re not listening to the CEO I just watched all of you guys check out while the CEO was talking so what’s happening there and then I asked the CEO what made that acceptable and how like how is it that he’s living with that level of not being heard so that’s that’s one example of it but uh a lot of fear is another example of it like you definitely see a lot of fear reactions um a lot of self-protection and and a reaction to leaders who are indecisive or not leading or following or are political or indecisive you just see a lot of people start protecting themselves because when without that trust you don’t have people willing to put themselves out there you don’t have people willing to throw in their lot with the teams a lot instead they start saying what this team’s not going to be successful or I don’t trust it and therefore I’m gonna I’m gonna throw in my lot with my lot and take care of myself then continuing here what are what are some other examples of just when you’re when you’re walking into a team you’re looking at whether it’s the leader communicating with the team or just the team having a meeting what are the things that you look for to find areas of dysfunction that can be improved upon and addressed yeah so if I hear people talking without listening to each other like the one I just described that’s a huge sign a conversation requires both somebody who wants to talk and somebody who wants to listen so that’s a huge sign um generally both in both you know not just one person yeah that’s right and then also I’d look for who’s participating and who’s not and and how many people are not participating and kind of what’s the distribution of participation in the conversation I look for people doing rabbit holes where everybody gets lost in the example instead of the higher on the higher topic that’s being talked about that kind of level of distraction is sometimes incredibly useful in certain kinds of conversations but in execution conversations really not useful I look for unclear roles and responsibilities anytime that I see something where at the end of the meeting people don’t know what they’re supposed to do at the end of it if it’s a meeting about execution that’s another example of it means that they they either there’s no accountability or people don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing and I also look for context switching where like if one person is talking about this and they’re arguing with someone who’s talking about that and they’re not even talking about the same thing and they don’t even recognize that they’re not talking about the same thing happens all the time um so that’s another one um teams that prefer talk to action especially in bigger organizations but not only where people like to hear themselves talk but they’re not interested in like making it all happen and they can get lost in the the thought instead of in the doing oh where being right is important that’s a huge one so if I see it so that you know like people are defending themselves because they need to be right that means that they think being right has something to do with their value to the business and that’s a horrible thought process yeah that’s an interesting one to zoom in on a little bit more too because I can see being right is a personality characteristic that people bring to a team and it can also become the culture of the team correct yes yes that’s right it’s the same way if you look at us like a soccer team if somebody has to be the guy getting the goal or a woman has to be the woman getting the goal in the soccer team um instead of making sure that the top soccer team gets the goals that’s pretty much the same thing as being right and um in a business where it’s about ideas and relationships and also being right really hurts having to be right really hurts relationships because it’s a zero-sum win-lose it means one person gets it one person doesn’t and it’s also just super ineffective in the fact that nobody is 100 right no nobody nobody nobody is 100 right so if two people disagree on something there’s some sliver of wisdom in both things at least and if you can combine those two you’ve got a better solution than either one of them alone and so being right needing to be right totally prevents those greater solutions from coming to the surface yeah you’re 100 right on that no I’m not so what else do we have here then uh I mean the defensive discussions that we talked about with the leader the blame that we talked about with the leader um I think the other thing that’s a more subtle thing that you can see is people don’t feel accountable for the team they feel oppressed by or like controlled by the team dynamic so super functional teams you’ll hear somebody say on occasion wow this meeting is really not working for me how do we make this meeting work better you’ll hear people say oh the way this conversation is going doesn’t feel optimal like they’re all taking responsibility for the dynamic of in which the team interacts rather than thinking that the leader is responsible for it you’ll also see this in accountability where the team holds themselves accountable instead of the leader being the only person to hold people accountable that the team takes responsibility for their Dynamics instead of just the leader-taking responsibility for the Team Dynamics and if I don’t see that then there’s lots of very easy room for growth I can see there being Dynamics where a number of members within a team Identify some dysfunction within the team and then they decide I’m in a dysfunctional team there’s nothing I can do and that contributes to the dysfunction first Yeah the more accurate thing is I am participating in a dysfunction and the thing that the idea that I can’t do anything about it is a great part of the dysfunction and I don’t you never blame people for that because nobody’s given us the toolbox right it’s like okay you’re in a dysfunctional organization and you’re the administrative assistant to the you know you’re low level on this team nobody’s told us like here are the five moves you can make to help that team become more functional right and when they find out what those five moves are let’s use a couple of examples there like um say out loud wow this meeting doesn’t feel productive or to say out loud wow I noticed that people seem to be interested in getting it right instead of getting to the best solution or to say who are the people in the meeting that should be here and who are the people in the meeting that shouldn’t be here it’s not like a good use of their time or to say is this meeting a decision-making meeting or is it a execution meeting or is it a discovery meeting you know what what is Our intention what’s the goal of the meeting those kinds of things some less some more scary are once scary and and most people don’t know that that will make a huge difference so once they’ve done it a couple times it’s a lot less scary because it’s like oh crap that works and everybody now respects me even more but most people are scared to say it and or just don’t know to say it yeah and often when you’re when you’re in that space where you’re scared to say something and then you get yourself to say it anyway it often comes out a little sideways and then triggers people into defense and then it proves that it wasn’t a good idea to say and then proves that this is a dysfunctional team that I can’t do anything about and there you are again and there you are again that’s right yeah if you’re saying it if you built it up so much and then you say it with harshness or you say it with uh with a lack of confidence you have a good chance of getting you’re getting a sub-optimal result yeah yeah and so you could actually see a lot of these characteristics as you know like the rabbit hole where somebody wants to be seen in a certain feeling and maybe they’re going down a rabbit hole into an example to hide in that example and hope that the example can prove what they want to say without them having to fully own it or the blame which is really saying that I’m seeing something going on this team you know that that’s not working for me or that’s not that that I see as dysfunction and maybe there’s a dynamic in the team that I’m not allowed to be the one who wears that so it’s got to be someone else’s fault a lot of these things that are dysfunctions are actually at their core their attempts if partially occluded attempts at actually bringing the team into function some of them are for sure I would say the other thing that’s happening is people like I can watch a team in the way that I see a team operate it’s like what emotions are they avoiding and what emotions are they embracing and and how are they what are the strategies that people are using to embrace or avoid the emotion or to bring teamwork together or create conflict and those strategies really will tell you a tremendous amount about where the dysfunction lies and what the root cause of the dysfunction is yeah which points back to our emotion Series where the the impulse in the emotion which is the room in a dysfunctional team in a dysfunctional meeting will be dripping with emotion yes that is unowned somewhere in that emotion is all suppressed usually suppressed yeah yeah and somewhere in that emotion is the entire all the ingredients to bring the team into functionality yeah and to the extent that they’re suppressed that’s how you see this dysfunctional Dynamic show up yeah so great example of this would say let’s say you have a leader who yells at their team as an example right which I guess is another sign of dysfunction that people don’t usually do that in front of me but um but let’s say you have that the emotion that is usually being suppressed is fear or hurt and aloneness as an example and they feel that way because they’re there’s a stagnation happening that they know will hurt the company and so the suppression of that emotion creates the frustration and the frustration often drives some sort of movement the anger drives some sort of movement which is a surrogate for the best kind of movement but at least its movement and so that’s a great example of how the unfelt emotion turns into a strategy that is less functional whereas the more functional approaches wow I noticed that I have very little confidence that we’re going to succeed and that scares me and the reason that I have no confidence that we’re going to succeed is because I don’t see movement happening and I don’t want to be a part of a team where there’s no movement happening so how do we get to movement and how do we all take responsibility and ownership for that because I don’t want to be the only person driving this team that’s a completely ineffective use of my time and it disempowers you guys that would be that brings me a more effective approach if you can actually be in the emotion see what’s happening with you and speak to it yeah so that brings me into just one one final question for this episode what’s the most poignant example of when you saw a team in utter dysfunction begin a transformation into function oh that happens like every day well not every day but every day I’m in the teams that’s that’s what happens I think maybe ant on his episode which is coming up I think he might have told the story but I can’t remember exactly but it’s like it’s a good poignant one where I wear it in an off site we’re doing something and I was supposed to trigger him on something and I said um I said your anxiety is going to kill the company and everybody in this room knows it that’s a poignant moment and I’m doing it with a tremendous amount of Love um and and a just a deep truth that allows everybody to go and relieve including ant in that moment there’s like a sense of relief because it’s like oh the thing has been called out now we can actually address it and look at it and and it’s not being considered wrong it’s not being blamed it’s not something that you know is is makes anybody more or less than one another so that would be an example another example let’s see where I’ve seen that yeah there’s this uh great little thing that I’m I do with Executives where I say I want your goal for the your goal is in in within a month have two weeks in a row where every meeting that you attend you you consider it a five-star meeting like you rank your meetings one to five stars and everyone is a five-star meeting so you that and that means you feel inspired and vigorated and energized by the meeting and you have to do whatever it takes to do that whatever you need to do like whether it’s telling your you know the chairman of the board you’re not coming to a meeting or whether it means um walking out of meetings or whether it means saying this meeting sucks how do we fix it whatever you need to do to get to that place and if a CEO or a leader commits to that man that within a month that organization is completely different it’s like a beautiful little hack to totally transform um that thing because it’s it’s basically saying I’m not going to put up with this function because dysfunction does not I mean that’s the best way to measure it the best way to measure if a team is dysfunctional is at the end of a meeting do you feel invigorated or do you feel depleted how invigorated do you feel how depleted do you feel is a great Mark of the dysfunction it just hits it right where it lives yeah I guess my question in that example is if you have a if you have a leader in that situation who’s avoiding a certain set of emotions what stops them from avoiding those particular meetings and having a lot of other meetings and saying great I got my five star meetings we’re now not paying attention to a significant issue in the business that’s why I do it for two weeks because eventually uh the avoid the thing they’re avoiding is going to be put onto their lap and they’re going to have to deal with it that’s exactly why um with the goal of a five-star meeting you can’t have all happened meetings and avoid it’s just you can’t have all happy meetings and blame you can’t have all happy meetings or productive invigorating meetings if you are political it’s just it just doesn’t allow for it so the avoidance is is kind of the last thing that gets caught but it’s it definitely gets caught the other thing that happens is when they realize how to the the techniques of creating a five-star meeting for themselves they’re less likely to avoid because they realize it’s not the issue that they’re avoiding it’s the conflict that arises around the issue that they’re avoiding right well I think this is excellent foreshadowing for a future episode in this series on five star meetings and meeting culture awesome all right a pleasure as always and I do want to make a call out there’s a book called five dysfunctions of a team which I think is an excellent book there’s the five dysfunctions but they all if I encourage you to see that all is the first dysfunction which is a lack of trust so they talk about things like accountability and not paying attention to results and avoiding conflict but all of that is ways to deteriorate trust but it’s it’s told in some in a very very beautiful way and it’s like a story it’s easy to read so I highly recommend the book if you want to dig deeper in this topic thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com