"How do you approach ‘fixing’ a broken team?"

A variation of this question came up in an interview I had recently.

The engineer wanted to leap in with the answer: “It depends”.

And it does.

But there is still a general approach I take, and way I think about these kinds of problems.

What people may term a ‘broken’ team, I would reframe as a team in need of change.

If there is nothing that is painful enough to provoke the desire for doing things in a meaningfully different way, then what we’re talking about is optimisation, tidying around the edges. There is a time and place for this, but probably not something you external help with.

The pain that drives the need and appetite for change is very rarely one single issue. Sure, there may be a ‘hair-on-fire’ problem that needs addressing, but that is a symptom, not a cause.

In my experience, it is a knot, rather than a big splinter, that we’re dealing with.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore how we untie it.