Betty

Moving Beyond Activities to Systems
The most sustainable team improvements come from designing better ways of working together, not from shared experiences that create temporary good feelings.
This means investing time in conversations about:
Decision-making authority: Who can make what kinds of decisions without consultation, and what requires group input?
Communication standards: What information needs to be shared with whom, through which channels, and with what frequency?
Conflict resolution processes: How will disagreements be surfaced and resolved before they become major issues?
Performance expectations: What does good work look like, and how will the team address situations where standards aren't being met?
Resource allocation: How will competing priorities be managed when everyone can't get everything they need?
These aren't exciting topics for workshop discussions, but they're the foundation of functional team relationships.
Sometimes the problem is structural - roles that are designed to conflict with each other, incentive systems that reward individual success at team expense, or resource constraints that make collaboration genuinely difficult.
Sometimes it's cultural - organisations that say they value teamwork while promoting competitive, territorial behaviour through their actual policies and leadership examples.
And sometimes it's personal - individuals who lack the basic professional skills or emotional maturity required for collaborative work, regardless of how many team building sessions they attend.
Effective team development requires honest assessment of these factors and willingness to make structural changes, not just interpersonal interventions.
Most team dysfunction stems from issues that everyone knows about but nobody wants to address directly. Uneven workload distribution, unclear role boundaries, conflicting priorities, personality conflicts, performance problems - the problems that fester because addressing them requires uncomfortable conversations.