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Confessions About a Real Case: Dysfunctional Teams



While preserving the necessary anonymity, please share the dysfunction you encountered. What were the difficulties and how did they impact the team?

This situation happened a few years ago. I was part of a team working on some high-profile projects for a Fortune 100 company through an LSP. The LSP's leadership - somewhat inexperienced and young - wanted to create high-functioning teams based on languages where team members help each other. The projects were assessed individually but the team’s collective quality score decided how well the LSP performed. 

How did you or your team leader (or anyone else in the team, for that matter) try to address the problem? What strategy(ies) did you or they use?

The problem is that while they had a theoretical idea about creating a positive team, they did not have any strategy in hand. Naturally, the team started out positively but after a while because of miscommunication, misunderstandings, lack of instructions, and training fear started to creep in. 

Were these strategies successful? If yes, in what way?

The organization created a platform for the team to enable communication and collaboration but their idea backfired just as the entire idea of team collaboration was slowly replaced by competition. The initial idea and theory did not work out.

I noticed that team members started to share only positive things on this supposedly helpful platform and when someone asked questions, they were labeled as incompetent, they were ridiculed and instinctively very quickly people understood that you only ask questions from your team members if you want to look stupid. I happened to be aware of this not only because I had my own personal perception but because other people started to reach out to me privately and expressed the same concerns.

When the organization started to receive not too good monthly or quarterly reports about the quality of the team’s performance as a whole, they switched to a reactive panicky mode. They appointed some higher-performing individuals within the team without telling others and they asked them to start evaluating the other individual's performances. In other words, they started to ask half of the team to start spying on the other members. Why am I saying this? Because the atmosphere was already not good. People were worried that they would lose their job if it was discovered that they underperform, whether it was true or not. And because people are different, what happened is that this void was filled by some negative attitude. People with more outgoing or ambitious features started to blame others while protecting their own image while others remained silent and hoped that the ax will not fall on the next. The situation started to become toxic. When the organization approached me asking to help the team get back on track “because I am such a good linguist”, at first I felt flattered but later on realized that they did exactly the same thing with other members. So, as a result, in secret, everyone was checking on others and reporting back to leadership if they thought they found something, an error, a mistake, and the organization simply removed the member from the team based on any negative reviews without further investigation or root cause analysis. That created even more fear among the team members.

If these strategies were not successful, what advice would you give the team lead about how to address the situation?

I think the main lesson learned here is that if team members don’t communicate, don’t trust each other, and feel they cannot share their thoughts, insecurities with each other, the team will quickly become dysfunctional at least. I think leadership had a lot of responsibilities in the situation partially due to lack of experience, partially because, as a reaction, they turned into a somewhat unethical or borderline strategy to quickly try to offer a remedy to the situation. It’s obvious that they did not want to invest in the individuals but they were certain that the reason the team is not working properly is that there are some individuals who should not be in the team. That might be true but I would add, in this case, the strategy to keep only the 2-3 highest performers and get rid of the somewhat questionable members justly or unjustly to replace them with completely new people won't solve their problem and more importantly, it does not create a high functioning, positive team for them automatically.


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