How To Fix a Broken Team

Using Trust to Unlock High-Performance

Published in

The Startup

9 min readMay 17, 2018

Building teams from scratch is hard.You assess organizational needs, define roles, source talent, make sure the people you hire have the right skills, chemistry, are diverse enough to provide a varied perspective, and have the right energy to push, challenge and support each other to execute your vision and move the business forward. You can never do it fast enough — there’s so much to do, everyone’s learning at the same time, and yet week after week you see progress. You watch this collection of individuals develop a personality. They grow and mature with every new piece, they work out how they will be with each other, they work together to get things done. You guide, you plug holes, you give direction, you offer counsel… Provided you are good to them, and you give them what they need, your team is loyal to you. They are willing to jump, explore, take chances. You have selected every piece, and you are purposeful about what you are building, so the team shapes itself to your vision of who they should be.

Fixing broken teams is harder. Coming into a world where the people are already in place, patterns are set, there are established ways to do things, there is history you don’t understand — it’s a web you need to unravel before you can rely on your team to execute your mandate. And that’s where this story starts. I once joined a team as a leader and on my first day was told, by my boss “You are inheriting the Land [sic] of Misfit Toys. It’s your job to fix it”. After figuring it out, it turns out that these were not broken, unwanted “toys” — they were actually largely quite talented, but frustrated people just trying to do the right thing but not being given the support or direction they needed in order to succeed. This is the story of how I fixed it, and how you can take what I learned and make it work for you.

What’s Going On Here?

I needed to figure that out for myself. I had just started somewhere new. Everyone had their opinions about what was broken, about who needed to go, about what needed to change. Some of them may have been right, but I still wasn’t sure where everyone was coming from. I needed to get there on my own.

First, ask around. I needed the context within which to frame my problem. I interviewed all of my colleagues. I got very definite opinions about who I should fire, and what needed to change. I had one exec tell me that if I could finally explain to him what marketing did, he’d consider it a success. So that gave me a pretty clear picture of the perception of my team.

Next, talk to your team. What became apparent very quickly was that there was definitely something wrong. The team didn’t get along. They were very frustrated. They complained a lot. There was a lot of finger pointing — internally, and outward at the rest of the company. It seemed to take them way too long to get things accomplished. They didn’t know why they were doing things but were plodding along because they’d always done them. They were achieving targets, but they didn’t really know how.

What’s Really Going On Here?

It was pretty clear that the team wasn’t working. There seemed to be a few bad apples, but generally everyone was frustrated about everything — so figuring out where to start was a challenge.

Formalize your findings. Now that I had a foundation of information from a host of informal interviews, I got a little more formal. I created a survey for my team, and asked them to share specifically what was frustrating them. I also asked what was stopping them from doing their best work. And what they wished would change. I spent a lot of time with the “why” on the preamble. In other words, if things were going to change, they needed to take responsibility for that change. I gave the activity a name, “Operation Turn That Frown Upside Down” (gross I know, but I went cheesy on purpose so everyone could groan collectively — there were a lot of cynics in the group). And I chased people who didn’t respond — participation was not optional.

Once I got the results, I organized them into categories. Rather than solving each individual problem, I grouped them into overarching themes. In this case, here was what I found:

What Are You Going To Do About It?

Get the team to author their own solutions. After the survey, I got the team together for a quick brainstorm. I wanted to make sure that everyone heard how much consensus there was about what was actually wrong, and wanted to give them a chance to work together to figure out what might fix it.

Here’s what we worked through:

Individual Work (5 mins)
*Write down 1 idea to improve in each area
Split into 6 groups of 2 or 3 (10 mins)
*2 groups work independently on the same topic (so all 3 topics are covered by 2 groups each)
*Each group picks their favourite 2 ideas from the ideas above
IMPORTANT: this is not a discussion about how to execute the ideas, but about how much the potential solution would improve the problem if it could be successfully executed.
Presentation (10 minutes)
*Each group presents their selections to the larger group, and explains why they think they would work
Consolidate into 3 groups — work together based on topic (20 minutes)
*Each group now consolidates options so that each topic now has 2 top ideas.
*Each group picks one idea and begins to work on the HOW.

After the session, I took it one step further. We formalized the groups, got them each to elect a coordinator, and got them to commit to trying to fix the problem. They were to meet each week as needed, and meet with me every 3 weeks to show me their progress, and get my help with any roadblocks where needed.

How Do You Fix That?

I had consensus on what was wrong, and had the team working together to start fixing what was broken. I was able to champion their solutions for Alignment, get them necessary tools, create opportunities for them to more closely collaborate with other teams. I created processes to ensure communication was flowing within the team, and that key Information was not getting held up or stuck. But there was one area that was not progressing as fast as the others. It’s not surprising really — how do you fix Empathy/Understanding, when the group working on it doesn’t have much empathy or understanding for each other? And how do you make a plan for something so seemingly subjective?

Tackle Trust. At first, I didn’t think trust was the problem. I thought it had more to do with working through change, lack of role definition, lack of clarity of goals and objectives. And that those were the problems that were leading to our lack of understanding. I reached out to my friend Sean, who has a leadership development business. I thought we’d do a workshop to explore tactical ways we could work together better. And in fact, that is what we did. But he convinced me that the way through this was to build a Trust Model.

I was worried trust would be too squishy. I could just see the eye rolls when I brought this to my team. And to be honest I wasn’t sure it would work. But as we worked through our plans for the session, I started to get more and more confident. This wasn’t just about tactics to get the team to work together better. It was ultimately about creating a high performing team that would execute on their mandate to grow a company. I couldn’t manage every interaction — I needed a framework that my team could operate within.

Build a model. We did a day-long workshop to talk about our goal of being a high-performing team, and how trust factors into that. We DID NOT talk about why the team did not trust each other — it wouldn’t have been productive. We DID talk about what it would take for everyone on the team to trust each other. And we ultimately came up with the 4 most important characteristics we needed to see exhibited so that we could all come to trust that everyone was doing their jobs. This was our model:

Practice Accountability: Take responsibility for your actions. Own your role and understand your impact on others, and on outcomes.
Create Transparency: Allow everyone to see through you and your actions, without hidden agendas. Foster an open environment absent of judgement and negative consequences.
Deliver Results: Consistently execute against the agreed-upon expectations and priorities.
Honest Talk: Have deliberate, honest and thoughtful conversations, with the intent to improve and strengthen future interactions. If you have something to say to someone, say it to them.

So now what?

We were working to improve the obviously tangible things, and we made an intangible concept concrete. We had a plan for how to become more trusting, and improve our performance. I had to make sure that all the work we had done did not go to waste.

Follow-up. The key to making sure the trust model worked was in making sure we used it. Just like a mathematical model, you need inputs, you need to observe it in action, you need to recalibrate when necessary. So rather than having abstract concepts be things we would hope to follow, I worked with Sean to create a recognition system. Each month, we extended our 30 minute team meetings to 1 hour. And each month, everyone was responsible for bringing the following 3 things:

Give an award to someone in your direct functional area for exhibiting one of the Trust Model behaviours, and tell everyone about it. Then walk it over to that person and give it to them.
Do the same for someone on the marketing team at large.
Give yourself an award for exhibiting one of the behaviours, and tell everyone why.

Each person had to bring printouts of the awards that we created. And no one was allowed to phone it in on any of the points. Everyone had to display the awards in their work spaces after the meetings. And yes, predictably, no one liked the idea. But we did it anyway. And a funny thing happened. As dreaded as those meetings were to start, everyone felt fantastic once they left. People felt appreciated, heard, valued. They heard about positive things that people they were having trouble with were doing, and that started to change their perspective. Things actually started to change. I could feel a change after the first session. As the months went on, this only got more pronounced. People weren’t waiting for the monthly meetings to be supportive of each other. They’d send each other compliments, recognize each other in front of the team. Rather than waiting for each other to fail, they helped each other succeed, which in turn changed the entire fabric of the team.

This Worked

I built a high-performing team. Not everyone made it through, but those who did were better and stronger for it. We went from being one of the most disgruntled team in our HR surveys to being, quantifiably, the most fulfilled team. The team liked coming to work. They worked really well together. And they did great work. While the process was subjective to my experience at that particular company, and I did A LOT more in terms of organizational design and clarifying objectives, this process is repeatable — I’d use it again. The unchanging steps are:

Figure out what’s going on for yourself
Validate that with your team
Get them to own the problem and the solution
Get them to trust each other

Regardless of whatever else you do, trust has to be there. Without it, nothing will work. Processes won’t be as efficient. Things will take longer — people will not work as well together. Treat trust as a tangible, real thing that can be improved upon, that will be tracked and nurtured, that is integral to your team’s success.

I’d love to hear about your experiences turning teams around. Tweet me @theedanibee, or leave a comment!

Hubba is a global wholesale marketplace that powers the new retail economy. Using a combination of machine learning and personal curation, Hubba verifies and connects independent Brands and Retailers, making purchasing the right wholesale products easy. Hubba will become the driving force behind independent retail. By unifying independent Retailers, Hubba gives them the power they need to level the playing field. Hubba currently services 100,000 SMBs and counting.