Five warning signs your team is struggling (and one quick way to start fixing it)
How is your team performing right now—really? And how would you know?
Good news: in five minutes or so (depending on your reading speed), you’re going to have a crisp, actionable answer. Let’s start with a quick snapshot of a team in trouble:
Jimmy’s team is holding the company back
Jimmy* will tell you that his team is what makes his company great. Jimmy will not tell you (or understand) that he is destroying his team.
Jimmy is the founder and CEO of a company that has been around for a few years. His business serves companies in a tough market. Its customers have been reacting to market conditions by cutting budgets, laying off staff, and putting transformation projects on hold. The company’s revenue is flat, profitability has been unexceptional, and it’s falling behind in a domain that’s transforming rapidly. There will be winners and losers as the industry shifts, and Jimmy’s company is falling into the latter bunch.
Jimmy has a small team of experienced, talented people. Each one is in charge of one of the typical functional areas: marketing, business development, product, customer delivery, operations, finance, people—probably very similar to your company. The team meets once a week (they use the EOS L10 format). That meeting is scheduled for 90 minutes and usually goes over by at least half an hour.
During the L10 meeting, Jimmy asks for opinions from the team but almost immediately talks over them with actions he’s already decided to take, criticisms of other approaches, and out-of-left-field ideas that deviate wildly from the company’s strategy and OKRs. Others on the team attempt to counter these interruptions or just go silent.
Both Jimmy and the team circle back to decisions from earlier meetings, often reopening the discussion and changing course, negating any progress since the decision was originally taken. The constant shifts and disruptions cause passive-aggressive behaviors and the occasional flare-up.
Team members (including Jimmy) have back channel chats during the meeting, and they usually have to talk 1:1 after the meetings to try to repair the disruption created during the meeting. Those couple of hours spawn several hours of off-line discussions to try to mitigate the damage.
Jimmy wonders why his team can’t get their act together. He talks about making changes to the team but never follows through. He questions his people’s competence and judgment in private and plays them against each other in public.
Jimmy projects his uncertainty, self-doubt, and insecurities onto his people, saying they aren’t up to his standards or that they have “bad judgment” (a euphemism that means “doesn’t agree with me” in Jimmy-speak).
He never once wonders how such a strong leader as himself can be surrounded by such a weak team.
There’s a lot going on here, but it boils down to this: Jimmy and his team are failing in the five most important areas of team performance.
And the company is paying for it in lost revenue, rework, and burnout.
This might sound like Jimmy’s problem more than the team’s, but think about it: if they’re great and Jimmy stinks, why are they there? Jimmy has plenty of bad behaviors, but the team tolerates them. The team has some of its own bad behaviors, and Jimmy tolerates those.
This is a team problem.
Teams–not founders–determine company outcomes
Fact: teams in early-stage companies are more important now than they were a year ago.
We’re in the middle of a tough market correction that puts huge new pressures on startup teams. They have to deliver new products and services to a demanding market, but these teams now have the added pressure of tightened funding markets and dire economic conditions. Teams have to execute crisply and effectively with little wasted time and effort. The bar for performance in early-stage teams is moving higher by the day.
Notice the specifics: teams are the focus here, not founders. Founders create teams, and teams create outcomes.
This isn’t hyperbole. Experienced investors like Mark Suster will tell you that 70% of the decision on an early-stage company is based on the team rather than the idea. Accelerators like Techstars will show that 65% of startups fail due to people problems—that is, team problems. Its founder, David Cohen, has noted that the two biggest startup killers are not having a market for the problem and team problems.
Your team is vitally important to the success of your company, and it’s key to your company’s performance as an investment. When markets make money harder to lock in, the fuse for your team gets shorter. Tensions grow, and there is less time to develop product and gain market traction. Fractures emerge faster.
We do very little to strengthen teams on a regular basis, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to failure during market corrections and less likely to yield return on investment. When they fail in tough financial times, teams fail much faster. In a startup, the failure of the founding team is analogous to the failure of the company. Your team fails, you fail.
We miss opportunities to act on team problems because they seem squishy or vague. We don’t recognize the signs, and we don’t know what to do once we see them. We double down on the things we can control—product development, lead generation, staffing—and we hope that the team problems clear up or don’t emerge in the first place.
That is, we hope for the problem to go away. It never does.
We treat team performance like the weather: it can get rough, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That couldn’t be more wrong.
How to rate your team in 5 minutes or less
Team problems aren’t squishy or vague—they’re tangible and observable. Your team’s in trouble when you see one or more of these five symptoms:
Unhealthy conflict
Meetings last too long or happen too often
You’re unable to resolve issues or even discuss them
Decisions get made, reopened, and made again
You fail to make necessary staff changes quickly and cleanly
You might think this stuff is innocuous or merely annoying, but what those five things indicate about your team’s performance is fundamental. These behaviors signal low trust, lagging execution, and an impaired ability to find and serve a market. They have a direct effect on the success of your company, and they have a direct cost in burn rate and investor confidence. Those five symptoms are leading indicators of your company’s performance in everything from gaining traction in the market to product quality.
They’re tangible, and they can be fixed.
Your team problems are neither squishy nor vague. You can diagnose them in a couple of minutes, and you can make progress on them with some very simple actions. These actions include optimizing for team size, building decision velocity, and cutting meeting time and frequency. The results of these straightforward actions are powerful and immediate—if you have the will and discipline to take them. In a tougher funding market, will and discipline are essential. Here’s how to take a quick snapshot of your team:
Get a piece of paper and a pen (don’t bother creating a note on your phone or computer—it’s better to write this by hand). Write these items down as a list: conflict, meetings, issues, decisions, people. Next to each of these items, rate them with a number (a whole number, please—don’t make this too complicated) between 1 and 5, where 1 means it’s not much of a problem and 5 means it’s a burning dumpster fire. Here’s how to think about each of these things:
Conflict: do people have informed discussions about facts and well-developed opinions, or do they disagree about opinions? Do they argue openly, or do they go quiet without defending their work? Silence is often the unhealthiest kind of conflict.
Meetings: do people complain about the number of meetings or dread going to them? Do meetings have an agenda with an objective (decisions, info briefing, etc.), or are they ad hoc and meandering? Do you document the outcomes and accountabilities from those meetings?
Issues: how long does a problem remain a problem? How often do people address an issue head-on and resolve it? Do the same issues persist from week to week with no resolution? How frequently do you associate an issue with a specific person?
Decisions: what’s your decision-making process? Do you document decisions when they’re made? Do you reopen decisions frequently? Once a decision is made, do you see action on it? How do people dissent? Do they “disagree and commit”, or do they undermine the decision?
People: are the right people on the team? Do you have doubts about the people around you? Do you blame them for poor performance? Do they blame each other? Do they gossip (highly toxic)? If you had to hire a team from scratch today, would you hire this one?
Is this scientific? No, of course not. But it’s quick and easy, and if you have to think more than a couple of minutes about this, you’re not paying enough attention to the people who execute your vision. You can get a lot more formal about it, but this is a fast, easy way to take a snapshot of your view of your team at this moment. You don’t have to wait for a coach or consultant—you can do this every day, and you can do it yourself.
I don’t even have a scale for you. If you add up the numbers, 5 would be the least amount of trouble (because no one is perfect on any of these things), and 25 would be a full and thorough goat rodeo. The number doesn’t matter, though—this is your subjective view of your team. You know what you want.
Once you have this down on paper, the next step is easy: fix it. If you don’t have the right people on the team—and you’re certain of that—help those people grow or make a change. If meetings are too long, too frequent, or too vague, stop accepting that. Is conflict (or lack of it) a problem? Set the example for how to address problems directly and constructively. This “back of the napkin” snapshot of your team isn’t just about the team—it’s a reflection of you. Take a good look and do something about it.
By the way, the picture at the top comes straight out of my notebook. I did this while observing Jimmy’s team. The “dysfunction” number is 16 out of a possible 25, but I hadn’t added that up until now. I just knew that tedious meetings and perpetual issues were holding the team back, and that Jimmy’s team wasn’t great with conflict and decisions, either. By my quick assessment, I know what Jimmy needs to do and how bad it is. I don’t need a statistician to tell me how bad it is nor how much time and money Jimmy and the gang are wasting.
When you do this sort of back of the napkin check in, you think just a little more clearly about the team around you. Your success (or failure) rests with that team. Not your intellect, not your experience, not your charisma—your team is how you win.
Teams with crisp execution and deep resilience are more likely to adapt to shifts in markets. Those without are more likely to fail. There’s your work.
The problem is clear, the symptoms are tangible, and the remedy is close at hand. As the news about tough funding markets focuses on early stage companies, take an honest look at your team. If you’re not happy with your scores on the team’s performance, you’re probably not happy with the company’s performance. Do this every day or every week, and both will improve.
* Jimmy is a pseudonym.
