What does a genuinely cohesive team actually look like?

On teamwork, trust and why the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team produces some of the most significant change we see in our work..

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Hands up who hasn’t been part of, or worked with, a team that would describe themselves as reasonably functional. What we mean by this is that there are regular meetings, where decisions are made and actions get done. Generally, there is a positive energy to the team. Most people get on with each other although if you talk to people privately, there are certain frustrations with fellow members. But nothing that makes it toxic. But everyone knows, especially the leader, that the team could be doing so much better. The question is ‘why?’

The answer is almost always the same. Because functional and delivering is not the same as cohesive. A cohesive team does more than get things done. It does them in a way that makes the people on it more honest, more willing to challenge and be challenged, more genuinely committed to collective outcomes rather than individual ones. The difference, when you see it, is unmistakable.

Patrick Lencioni’s work on team cohesion, and the Five Behaviours framework that grew from it, is one of the most practically useful lenses we use in our team development work. It names something many teams already sense but haven’t quite articulated: that the reason they’re not performing as well as they could isn’t usually about capability or strategy. It’s about the quality of the relationships and behaviours underneath.

The five behaviours and why order matters

Lencioni’s model is built as a pyramid and the sequencing is intentional. Each behaviour depends on the one beneath it.

At the foundation is trust – but not trust in the conventional sense of reliability or predictability. Lencioni means something more specific and more demanding: vulnerability-based trust. The willingness to be genuinely transparent about weaknesses, mistakes and uncertainties. To say “I don’t know” or “I got that wrong” without fear of how it will land.

That kind of trust is harder to build than it sounds. Most leadership teams operate in environments where projecting confidence and competence is rewarded and where admitting uncertainty feels professionally risky. Which is precisely why it’s the foundation. Without it everything above it is built on performance rather than reality.

When vulnerability-based trust exists, the second behaviour becomes possible, productive conflict. Not the kind that avoids difficult conversations and not the kind that turns disagreement personal but genuine, unfiltered debate of ideas. The willingness to say “I think we’re getting this wrong” because the relationship is strong enough to hold it.

Commitment follows from conflict. When people have genuinely been heard – when their views have been properly debated rather than managed – they’re significantly more likely to commit to decisions, even ones they initially disagreed with. The absence of productive conflict is often the real reason teams struggle to commit – people haven’t actually said what they think, so they haven’t genuinely bought in. 

Accountability – the willingness to call peers on behaviour or performance that’s hurting the team – depends on commitment. Without clear, shared goals that people genuinely own, there’s nothing solid enough to hold one another to. Accountability without commitment feels punitive. Accountability with it feels like care.

And results – genuine collective outcomes rather than individual metrics, flow from everything beneath them. Teams with strong trust, healthy conflict, real commitment and genuine accountability don’t just achieve more. They achieve it in a way that sustains itself.

What we see in practice

We’ve been using the Five Behaviours framework with leadership teams for a number of years now and the patterns we observe are consistent enough to be worth sharing.

Trust is almost always the starting point and almost always the place where teams are more fragile than they’d like to admit. Not because people don’t like or respect each other but because the conditions of most leadership roles don’t naturally reward vulnerability. Leaders learn, often quite early, to project certainty. Undoing that habit takes time and deliberate practice.

Conflict is the behaviour that surprises teams most. The word itself carries baggage, and some leaders associate it with dysfunction rather than health. Reframing conflict as productive debate, as the mechanism through which good decisions get made, is often one of the most significant shifts a team can make. We regularly see teams who have been having the same unresolved conversation for months, not because they lack intelligence, but because no one has created the conditions for the real disagreement to surface. 

Accountability is typically the hardest. In our experience, it’s the behaviour that starts lowest and has the most room to grow, and the one that makes the most visible difference to team performance when it does. The reluctance to hold peers accountable is rarely about indifference. It’s usually about not wanting to damage relationships or not feeling confident that the commitment was clear enough to hold people to. Both of those are solvable. But they require the behaviours beneath accountability to be genuinely in place first. 

The progress we see when teams commit to this

We recently completed a Five Behaviours engagement with a leadership team that had taken the assessment twice, five months apart. 

Every single behaviour improved, not incrementally but substantially. Trust moved from medium to high. Accountability, the behaviour that had started lowest, showed the single biggest jump of the engagement. By the second assessment, the team’s scores placed them in the 97^th to 99^th percentile compared to all teams globally that have taken the assessment.

It’s worth being clear about what those scores actually mean in practice. A team in the 97th to 99th percentile for accountability isn’t just ticking a box on an assessment. It means peers are genuinely holding each other to commitments – not waiting for the leader to notice, not letting things slide because the relationship feels too important to risk. It means decisions are followed through, not just agreed to. It means the team is operating with a level of collective ownership that most leadership teams never quite reach. That kind of shift doesn’t stay contained within the team either. It changes the quality of decisions, the speed of execution and, critically, the culture that the rest of the organisation experiences from its leadership.

But the numbers, striking as they are, aren’t what meant the most to us.

What meant the most to us was what the team said about how it felt to come to work. All eight people said the team had functioned better since the first session. They all said they had become more productive. And when asked what had contributed most to their progress, the answers kept coming back to the same things: more honesty, more willingness to address difficult things directly, more genuine commitment to shared goals. 

That’s the change that sticks, a team that has learned to work differently with each other.

Why this matters for the work of change

At Sticky Change we talk a lot about the human side of change, about the fact that strategies and processes on their own don’t transform organisations, people do. And people share more openly, take more risks, commit more genuinely and perform better when they’re operating in a team with real cohesion.

The Five Behaviours framework matters to us not as a product but as a philosophy. It takes seriously the idea that team performance is built from the quality of human relationships – from trust, honesty, genuine commitment and the courage to hold one another to standards that matter. 

That’s not weak, it’s the foundation of everything else. 

Think about your own leadership team. Which of the five behaviours – trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results – is the one you’re most carefully avoiding? And what would it take to change that?

References

Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. Jossey-Bass.

Lencioni, P. (2012). The advantage: Why organisational health trumps everything else in business. Jossey-Bass.

Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. (The vulnerability-based trust Lencioni describes maps closely onto Edmondson’s psychological safety construct.)

Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation and growth. Wiley.

Duhigg, C. (2016). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016. (Google’s Project Aristotle research independently identified psychological safety – Lencioni’s vulnerability-based trust – as the single most important factor in team effectiveness.)

A quick note: the original version of this post, published in 2019, linked to a case study video produced by Wiley – the publisher of the Five Behaviours framework. We’ve rewritten it entirely, drawing on our own client work and observation, because that’s where the real insight lives.