Dr. Neil's Notes
General > People
Improving How We Work Together
Introduction
The way a team works today should not be the way it works in twelve months. Teams that keep doing what they have always done, without stepping back to ask whether it is still working, tend to calcify. The habits that helped a small team move quickly become the friction that slows a larger one down. The norms that suited one set of people may not suit the team they have grown into.
Building the habit of reflection and improvement into the team's rhythm is one of the most valuable things a leader can do.
Team Health as a Practice
Retrospectives on project delivery are common. Conversations about how the team itself is working are less so. Both matter, and they are not the same thing. A team can deliver a project successfully while accumulating working habits that will cause problems later. Or it can maintain excellent working relationships while missing deliverables consistently. Separating the two gives a clearer picture of what actually needs to change.
Running a regular honest conversation about how the team is working together, what is getting in the way, what has quietly become harder than it needs to be, what would people change if they could, produces a different kind of insight than a delivery retrospective. It is worth building in deliberately.
Living Documents
A working agreement written down once and forgotten is worse than useless. It becomes a record of commitments that are no longer being kept, which normalises the gap between what the team says and what it does. Working agreements are only useful if they are revisited, updated when they stop serving the work, and genuinely held to.
The same applies to team charters, decision rights documentation, and onboarding guides. These are the artefacts that encode what the team has learned about how to work well together. Without them, every leadership change or new joiner resets the clock on what the team already knows.
Piloting Before Mandating
When introducing a new way of working, starting with a willing subset of the team before rolling it out broadly is almost always better than mandating adoption from the outset. It surfaces the problems that no amount of planning will reveal. It builds advocates within the team. And it produces the evidence needed to make the case for wider adoption, or to abandon the idea before the cost of a full rollout becomes sunk.
The failure mode I have seen most often is the opposite. A leader becomes convinced that a new approach is correct, introduces it everywhere at once, and discovers that it solves the problem they were thinking about while creating several they were not.
Asking for Feedback on Your Own Leadership
The best source of intelligence on how you are leading is the people experiencing it. This sounds obvious, but creating the conditions in which people will give honest feedback about a leader's behaviour is genuinely hard. It requires consistent, demonstrated openness to uncomfortable input over time. It requires responding to feedback in ways that make it safe to give more.
Asking the team what you should do differently is not a sign of weakness. It is the most direct way to keep improving, and it models the kind of openness you are trying to create throughout the team.
Course-Correcting Without Reclaiming Control
When someone consistently makes poor decisions within the agreed guardrails, or when autonomous decisions begin to diverge from strategic direction, the instinct can be to reclaim control. In most cases, that instinct is worth resisting.
The more useful response is to be specific. What decision, what outcome, what was the gap? Return to feedback and coaching first. If the boundary itself was unclear or set in the wrong place, re-clarify or adjust it. Command-and-control is available as a last resort and a temporary measure, but only with a named plan to restore autonomy, because the alternative is a team that learns to wait for instructions rather than act.