Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni is the founder and president of The Table Group and the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the business fable that has shaped how a generation of managers talks about trust, conflict, and accountability inside a working group. He is a pioneer of what he calls the organizational health movement, built on the claim that health beats intelligence as a source of competitive advantage.

He has written thirteen books, including The Five Temptations of a CEO, The Advantage, The Ideal Team Player, and The Motive. They have sold more than eight million copies and been translated into over thirty languages. The fable format is a deliberate choice rather than a stylistic one: he argues that leaders retain a story about a fictional executive team far longer than they retain a framework, and that retention is the point.

Before founding The Table Group in 1997 he worked at Bain and Company, Oracle, and Sybase. That consulting and operating background is visible in the material, which tends to focus on the observable behavior of a leadership team in a room rather than on abstract culture work.

As a consultant and speaker he has worked with thousands of senior executives and their teams, in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to technology startups to universities and nonprofits. The through line across that range is that dysfunction looks remarkably similar regardless of sector, and that most of it is addressable by a leadership team willing to change how it behaves with one another.

His keynotes are most often booked for leadership offsites, executive retreats, and management conferences, where the audience has the authority to act on the material. Teams frequently arrive having already read one of the books, which changes the shape of the session from introduction to application.