Reviews and Comments

A short business fable (love 'em!) in which a newly appointed CEO is tasked with fixing a toxic leadership team at a mid-sized tech company. This is a not a tech company book. This is a leadership book. The fable goes over a fictional situation inside a for-profit company's execute team, but the learnings are entirely applicable to other places as well, be it a smaller team inside a company, a non-profit, a hobby club, a political party, or whatever. And by being realatively short (under 200 pages) the book is quite accessible.

Lencioni goes over five interlinked dysfunctions that they've seen in teams, and by power of story gives the reader an approachable overview of how they manifest and what can be done to fix things. At the end of the book Lencioni describes the five dysfunctions model in a practical way with actionables and questionnaires in addition to the fable.

The dysfunctions can be obvious to some people (especially if you're already familiar with things like psychological safety, continuous collaboration, and so on), but based on my personal experience, many more leaders should know about them and how to fix them. Lencioni describes how the dysfunctions feed into each other and for instance how lack of trust between team members can undermine any attempts of making positive outcomes no matter how hard you try.

This book was written by someone who seemingly has managerial experience solely at Facebook. Not a deal-breaker, but one should keep that in mind, as no two organizations are the same, and managers will deal with varying people and problems in varying contexts. Someone who has had a successful managerial career within a single company might make it seem like that kind of success is the default thing to expect on your career.

If you can look past that, you have to remember that this book was written with an USA audience in mind, meaning some guidance might even be bad for you, as some countries have labor laws in place to prevent certain styles of management for instance. Hiring and firing for instance can be very different between countries. Make sure to check local labor legislation and regulation when applying learnings from books like this one.

And if you can get past that, you will find a very okay book about how the author became and manager at Facebook and how their role and skills evolved over the years. Some of it is mainly making sure that you act like a human being towards others, some of it is about strategy-building, some of it is more about tactical choices as to how to manage specific situations, and some of it is how to nurture culture, and some of it is of course about handling negative situations, such as firing someone.

If you're a new manager, it is a good read.

I liked how they ended the book with a clear message that no matter where you are on your career, you are always on a journey that has not finished yet.

A good book based on the experiences of a dude who went observing and studying what constitutes a safe, strong, productive, and effective group. A group here might mean a company, a sports team, a classroom, or maybe a squad of SEALs.

The things Daniel finds out and how they laid out the book to describe how these things work at certain successful organizations is very helpful in terms of making concepts concrete such as building psychological safety, making people work as teams, measuring what matters, and making people aware of the environment they're working in and how it might effect results.

The book is very "leader-oriented", e.g. it mostly assumes that there is a strong and/or respected leader who has to make change happen. I somewhat disagree with this notion and I would suggest reading Humanocracy in addition to this book, while also taking the time to read up about workplace democracy (not just team autonomy) and unionization, and how it might effect results in addition to the things talked about in Culture Code.

If you're a so called "line worker" the things talked about in this book might be interesting to you, but the book really makes no effort towards giving non-leaders any tools or techniques for making bottom-up changes in one's organization to help the organizational culture change.