Fix Your Team

INTRODUCTION Don’t worry! You can ‘fix your team’

Working in a dysfunctional team is frustrating and stressful. No one wants to show up every day to a team that is constantly distracted by in-fighting, dragging each other down, disrupting one another’s performance, performing poorly, or engaging in unethical behaviour. At Worklogic we hear story after story of employees who feel sick with dread when they arrive at work in the morning, who despair as the team’s productive efforts are undermined, and who feel like they spend more time working on the team’s issues than getting the real work done. This sort of dysfunction has an impact on team members, managers, leaders, and service functions such as human resources, risk, legal and compliance.

Team dysfunction quickly becomes visible to the broader organisation. Complaints, gossip, staff turnover and transfers out of the group are all signs that things are not going well. The team’s tangible results also suffer. This can reflect poorly on the manager of the team, whose reputation, fairly or unfairly, will inevitably be affected. This is not something the organisation can afford to ignore.

Team dysfunction can have a huge personal and psychological impact. Whatever your role, you may feel stressed, anxious and preoccupied, and confused about what is going on. You may be unsure how to go about fixing things and be worried that, even if you ‘do something’, team communication, behaviour and morale could keep getting worse.

If you’re ...