Work it through: Fixing a Struggling Team
Four frameworks for a team that is not working: find the layer that is actually broken, judge whether you are watching a fault or a phase, check the team was built for the job in the first place, then have the one-to-one conversations that change things.
Seven steps, in the order the playbook gives them. Your work stays in this browser until you save it to a file.
Your ducks
Start with what the people believe, what the paperwork says and what actually happens. The issues where your ducks disagree are the ones to carry into the homework.
You have not filled in the ducks sheet yet.
The homework
What has to be found before any of the four frameworks is worth running. Put a name and a date against each one, and tick it when you have it in your hands.
The ducks
For The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
For Tuckman's Stages of Group Development
For Belbin Team Roles
For GROW Model
Step 1 of 4: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Start at the bottom of the pyramid rather than at the symptom that put the team on your agenda. Missed commitments and poor results sit at the top; the cause almost always sits lower, and the lowest layer is trust. Lencioni means the vulnerability kind, being able to admit weakness, rather than confidence in each other's competence. Teams score themselves well on the second while lacking the first entirely. Your output is short: which layer is the deepest broken one, because that is where the repair starts.
Watch forThe trap is marching in and exhorting everyone to focus on results, when the whole point of the pyramid is that the top cannot be fixed at the top.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A profile of the team against the five layers, an identification of the deepest broken layer, and a repair sequence that starts at that layer rather than at the most visible symptom.
- Read from the base upwards. Symptoms usually present at the top (poor results, missed commitments) while causes sit lower; the model's value is forcing the search downwards.
- Treat the cascade as a hypothesis to test, never as proof. The causal chain is Lencioni's assertion, and a team can plausibly lack commitment for reasons other than suppressed conflict.
- A clean bill of health on the questionnaire with poor results in reality means the diagnosis is wrong or the honesty is missing. Believe the behaviour.
Step 2 of 4: Tuckman's Stages of Group Development
Now put the friction in time. Tuckman's stages exist to make one claim worth keeping: conflict is a normal phase of development rather than proof the team is broken. A team that has just formed, or just changed leader, or just absorbed three new members, may simply be storming on its way to performing. Judge the stage by observed behaviour rather than elapsed time, and match your leadership to it. Diagnosing dysfunction in a team that is developing normally is how leaders create the dysfunction they feared.
Watch forStorming can become a euphemism that buys patience for bullying, structural conflict or a wrong hire, all of which need intervention rather than time.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A diagnosis of where the team currently sits, a leadership approach matched to that stage, and realistic expectations about the friction that precedes performance, plus a deliberate plan for endings on temporary teams.
- Use the stages as a vocabulary and a rough map, not a schedule. The claim worth keeping is that conflict is a normal developmental phase, not evidence the team is broken.
- Judge stage by observed conflict-handling and task behaviour, not by elapsed time; teams can stall, skip and regress.
- If a deadline-driven team shows long inertia then a midpoint jolt, read it through Gersick's punctuated equilibrium instead and use the midpoint as the intervention window.
Step 3 of 4: Belbin Team Roles
Some teams struggle because of how they were assembled, and no amount of trust work fixes a missing contribution. Belbin maps who genuinely covers the nine behavioural roles against the task in front of you. The gaps predict failure with useful precision: no Monitor Evaluator and bad ideas survive scrutiny, no Completer Finisher and the work ships at ninety per cent. The duplications predict friction, because two Shapers will fight for the wheel. I find this map most valuable when it exonerates people who were being blamed for a design fault.
Watch forRole labels harden into personality verdicts, and 'she is a Plant' said as identity closes down the very flexibility the model depends on.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A checklist map of the team against the nine roles: who genuinely covers each contribution, which roles are missing, which are duplicated, and a plan for covering the gaps that the task will expose.
- Read the map against the task, never in the abstract. A team with no Plant is fine executing a defined build and in trouble on an open problem.
- Gaps predict failure modes with useful specificity: no Monitor Evaluator and bad options survive scrutiny; no Completer Finisher and the work ships at ninety per cent; no Resource Investigator and the team turns inward.
- Duplications predict friction: two Shapers fight for the wheel, two Plants compete for airtime. The remedy is usually explicit division of territory rather than removal.
- Treat individual profiles as tendencies with error bars, especially where self-perception and observer views disagree. That disagreement is itself worth discussing.
Step 4 of 4: GROW Model
The diagnosis has to land somewhere, and it lands in conversations with individual people. GROW keeps those conversations honest. Your instinct, especially with a struggling team, will be to hand out answers, and handed-down answers do not stick. Agree the goal, spend proper time on reality, generate the options together, then secure a commitment with a date on it. The reality stage is where the value lives; most weak sessions spend two minutes there and twenty on solutions, then wonder why the solutions miss the real problem.
Watch forQuestions used as camouflage for instructions, the 'have you considered doing it my way?' variety, kill ownership quietly, and the coachee always notices.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A short, coachee-owned action plan with dates and a commitment level attached, plus, when the Reality stage has done its work, a changed understanding of the problem that outlasts the plan itself.
- Judge the session by the Will stage. Vague commitments at the end almost always trace back to a rushed Reality stage in the middle.
- Check whose content fills the plan. If the actions are really the coach's, delivered through leading questions, ownership will evaporate within the week.
- Expect the goal to move. A goal that survives contact with Reality unchanged is either very well chosen or a sign the examination stayed shallow.
The review date
Set the date you will come back and ask whether it worked. Put it in your diary; this site will not remind you.
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