There will come a time when your teams are struggling, they can’t find stability, they are spiraling and can’t pull themselves out. What do you do?
The first thing you might think to try is mixing things up. Try some new things, make some changes to process or team composition or meeting cadence…I caution you not to do that. The first thing you should do is deep dive into the data. Look at team channels, tickets, emails, one on one chats you are a part of, one on one notes, basically anything that you can get your hands on data wise, look at it. Use all that data to try and understand what is happening within the teams. Is it a lack of trust? Lack of clarity on the delivery? Lack of cohesiveness in the plan?
Once you have a clear picture on why the team is hurting, you take the biggest hurt and fix it. Then you start working your way down the list, solving as much pain as possible. Some may make zero impact, that’s ok, keep going. The more pain you solve without haven’t to lean on your people, the faster they will snap out of the spiral. It’s easy when you are in the spiral to think there is no choice, but there definitely is and you taking action will make your teams organically look at themselves to see if they are part of the problem or the solution.
Don’t jump into problem solving, take a step back and build as much context as possible. Then take focused action and keep moving.
I hope this is helpful, thanks for being here! Reach out for questions or comments!
