Lencioni's books are business fables — a story with the model underneath — and his best-known is a model of team dysfunction that stacks: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results.
The chain matters more than the list. Teams that cannot disagree openly never truly commit, and people who never committed do not hold each other to anything. Fixing the top of the stack without the bottom does not work.
These problems arrive with your fourth or fifth employee, not at two hundred. The meeting where nobody says the obvious thing is the same failure at any size.
A meeting where everyone agrees pleasantly has either decided nothing or hidden the objection until the corridor afterwards. Make it explicitly safe to argue about the work, and separate that firmly from arguing about the person.
People will get behind a decision they disagree with if they genuinely believe they were heard. What they will not get behind is a decision that appeared without explanation. Say what was decided, and why the other option was not taken.
If the only person who ever chases anything is the owner, you do not have a team, you have spokes. The shift is people holding each other to what was agreed, which only happens once the first two are in place.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone who has just hired their first few people, or who runs a team where the real conversation happens after the meeting.
The fable style irritates some readers. If you would rather have the research, this is not the place to find it.
