FAQ
The Five Behaviors® of a Cohesive Team FAQ
Top Questions About Team Development Training & The Five Behaviors® Team Assessment Products
Team Development Questions
Team development training helps teams work better together. It’s a structured way to improve how team members communicate, collaborate, solve problems, and build trust. The goal is to create a more connected, effective team that can tackle challenges and deliver results.
The Five Behaviors® team training offers a proven framework that helps teams build trust, navigate conflict, and stay focused on shared goals. Teams that embrace these behaviors often make decisions faster, work more efficiently, and enjoy a healthier team culture.
Team assessment products are research-backed tools that measure and evaluate how teams perform, communicate, and work together. They provide data-driven insights into team strengths, challenges, and areas for improvement.
The Five Behaviors team development assessment specifically measures how well teams practice The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. This assessment gives teams clear insights into their specific team dynamics plus actionable data to create targeted development plans.
Signs that a team may need development training include:
- Frequent conflicts or lack of trust between team members
- Missed deadlines and failure to meet goals
- Poor communication leading to confusion and misunderstandings
- Low morale, disengagement, or high employee turnover
- Unclear roles, responsibilities, and team objectives
Common topics include:
- Communication: Active listening, giving feedback, and navigating difficult conversations
- Conflict Resolution: Managing disagreements constructively and turning conflict into productive outcomes
- Collaboration: Building trust, creating psychological safety, and leveraging different perspectives
- Goal Setting and Accountability: Creating shared objectives and holding each other accountable for results
The best assessment depends on your team's specific needs and goals. Consider what you want to measure—communication styles, trust levels, or conflict patterns—along with your team size and budget. Look for tools that are scientifically validated, easy to administer, and provide clear, actionable insights rather than just data.
If you're looking for a proven, comprehensive approach, The Five Behaviors assessment helps teams build the core behaviors essential for lasting success. It’s engaging, easy to understand, and trusted by organizations worldwide.
The team leader plays a crucial role in successful team development. They must champion the training process, model the behaviors they want to see, and create a safe environment where team members feel comfortable being open and honest. Leaders are also responsible for reinforcing what the team learns and holding everyone accountable for applying new skills.
Yes, many team development programs are built for virtual or hybrid teams. Virtual training typically combines live facilitated sessions, self-paced learning modules, and online collaboration tools to keep participants engaged and help build connections even when working remotely.
The Five Behaviors offers flexible solutions that work just as well remotely, helping teams build trust and improve communication from anywhere.
Team assessments offer an objective way to surface communication styles and underlying issues that may be fueling tension. By helping team members understand each other’s perspectives, they create space for more productive conversations and healthier conflict resolution.
A tool like The Five Behaviors assessment is particularly effective for conflict resolution because it shows teams how to engage in healthy conflict, turning disagreements into the healthy debate of ideas.
While often used interchangeably, team building typically focuses on fun, morale-boosting activities like outings and games. Team development is more strategic; it’s a structured process designed to improve long-term team effectiveness by addressing specific behavioral and performance challenges.
The Five Behaviors approach focuses on sustainable team development rather than temporary team building, creating lasting changes in how teams work together.
A successful team development initiative can lead to:
- Improved trust and psychological safety
- More effective and productive meetings
- Clearer roles and responsibilities
- Better ability to handle and resolve conflict constructively
- Increased employee engagement, morale, and retention
- Stronger focus on achieving shared results
The Five Behaviors Team Development Assessment Questions
The Five Behaviors Team Assessment is a comprehensive development program and assessment tool based on Patrick Lencioni's best-selling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It helps teams understand and master five essential behaviors —trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results—that create cohesive, high-performing teams.
The assessment measures each team member's perspective on these behaviors and combines those insights with Everything DiSC® personality profiles to create personalized development plans. Teams receive detailed reports that identify strengths, challenges, and specific action steps for improvement, along with facilitated sessions to work through the results together.
The Five Behaviors are:
- Trust: The foundation of the model—being willing to be vulnerable with team members
- Conflict: Engaging in productive, unfiltered debate around ideas
- Commitment: The willingness to buy into decisions and commit fully, even without total consensus
- Accountability: Being ready to hold peers accountable for their performance and behaviors
- Results: Focusing on collective team outcomes over individual status or goals
The Five Behaviors assessment measures each team member’s perspective on The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team. It often includes a personality model like Everything DiSC®, offering personalized insights into how individual styles impact team dynamics.
Results are compiled into a clear, actionable report—giving individuals, teams and leaders a shared starting point for improving trust, communication, and collaboration.
Vulnerability-based trust is the foundation of any high-performing team. When team members can admit mistakes, ask for help, and be genuinely open with each other, it creates the psychological safety needed for honest communication and collaboration. Without this foundation, teams struggle with conflict avoidance, lack of commitment, and poor accountability.
Patrick Lencioni's Five Behaviors model shows that vulnerability-based trust is essential because it enables all the other behaviors.
The Five Behaviors assessment helps teams understand that healthy conflict is about ideas, not personal attacks. It provides a clear framework for identifying how team members currently approach conflict and where they fall on the conflict spectrum (e.g. whether they tend to avoid it or engage in unproductive tension) and shows the path toward more constructive discussions.
In high-performing teams, genuine commitment can't happen without healthy conflict first. When team members feel their ideas have been heard and thoroughly debated, they're much more likely to commit to decisions—even when it wasn't their first choice. This creates stronger buy-in and follow-through.
Patrick Lencioni's Five Behaviors model demonstrates this connection clearly: productive conflict leads to real commitment because everyone feels heard in the decision-making process.
Most teams struggle with accountability because they rely too heavily on the team leader to address performance issues. Effective teams learn to hold each other accountable directly and respectfully, creating a culture where peer-to-peer feedback becomes normal.
The Five Behaviors assessment reveals whether teams are avoiding accountability and provides specific strategies for peers to address underperformance and unproductive behaviors constructively.
Focusing on collective results means the team prioritizes shared goals above individual interests. The Five Behaviors assessment helps teams recognize if they are being distracted by individual egos, personal career goals, or departmental objectives, and provides a path to realign on a common purpose.
The Five Behaviors Team Development solution is designed for intact teams—groups that work together regularly and share responsibility for results. It’s not intended for short-term project teams or temporary committees.
For broader application, The Five Behaviors Personal Development solution helps individuals to better understand themselves and others so they can work effectively on any team, regardless of structure or duration.
The main takeaway from The Five Behaviors program is that teamwork is a skill that must be practiced and mastered—it doesn't happen by accident. The program gives teams Patrick Lencioni's proven framework and common language to transform how they work together, moving from dysfunctional patterns to behaviors that create truly cohesive, high-performing teams.
