Wow this was an interesting book on the dysfunctions in your team that can really hurt your performance and ruin your life. This book came up when I worked for X-CORP which is fictitious name of the company I worked for. Our department was highly dysfunctional we should have had our own reality TV show. It was so bad but on the flip side we were treated really well to kill each other. I was young and wanted to push the company in to modern technology. Some people there loved the idea and others hated it and fought change till the bitter end where I found my own death by meetings. The environment was ridiculous but I am a die hard believer people can change, situations can change and I was encouraged by the CTO and the President of the company. Who wouldn’t go for it! For me it was new I had never even heard of such thing to resist something new because it was different. How long could it take to convince everyone it was the right idea. It’s not like we were trying to implement topless Fridays.

This was one time I was dead wrong. We spent 3 years in meetings where Death by Meeting also came up. I calculated in payroll we spent thousands of dollars in meetings on decisions that should have been no brainers in just one month. The Death by meeting does offer a pretty good meeting structures. It will save you more time so you can be more dysfunctional as a team. After 3 years later our boss picked up the Dysfunction book for people in our department and it was floating around the company. It was interesting and brought up good points but there are a usually reasons people are dysfunctional. I think our situation was an extreme situation and it was summed up beautifully by a colleague of mine there. She said the issue is that members in the team had fundamental differences in values. It’s probably not fair that the author could solve such a core dilemma.

I brought in someone I considered a mentor to the company to do some consulting and to see if he could assist them with these issues between team members which included me. You know the big guns he was an author for Microsoft and really knew the material. He charged them his fee to the review our team and approach but even he could not make sense of it. He pulled me aside and warned me on the elevator ride down. He told me Calvin get out of here these people are not going to change. Come work for me he said and you don’t have to worry about this stuff. I was young and overly loyal oh how I wish I had  left! What was I thinking! On the way back up from the elevator one of the opposing developers pulled me aside and told me jokingly “what are you trying to do make us do real work around here?”. I got him back for that by changing his Solitaire card game short cut to open SQL Enterprise Manager which is where he should have been spending his time. Later this guy would just stop showing up for work at all after he got a bad review years after I left. He simply vaporized and no one heard from him again. I always wondered if he left because Solitaire wouldn’t work. After 5  years I can say no worries and I have no dysfunction in my team anymore. Did the book work I guess it depends on how you look at it. Do yourself a favor if your boss buys you one of these books it’s time to MOVE ON!