In the bestselling leadership book, The First 90 Days, author Michael D. Watkins provides a framework for new leaders stepping into an existing role. In the first thirty days, Watkins emphasizes team diagnostics, stating, “You must quickly determine whether your team has the capabilities necessary to execute your strategy.” I’ve seen leaders go through this process, but often only at a functional level—evaluating skills and talent. While this information is crucial—vital even—it only offers a fraction of the team's overall capabilities, understanding, capacity, and velocity. To get the full picture requires investigating what truly forms and holds the team together. Watkins knows this too and notes, “Diagnosing the team involves not only assessing individual competencies but also understanding the underlying dynamics—the norms, patterns of interaction, and informal networks.”
Having inherited many creative and product teams in the past, I know this to be true. It's relatively easy to assess the quality of work and outcomes, but far more challenging to understand what’s truly driving the team’s performance. The opacity around these dynamics often stems from the difficulty in recognizing, let alone harnessing, the soft-skill-based interactions between people, departments, and organizations. In my experience, poor communication and collaboration are often misinterpreted as one side being "difficult to work with." Sometimes, there are even colorful words thrown around to emphasize the frustration. Even with a framework like The First 90 Days in hand, it’s not easy to see the everyday dynamics that shape the culture. This is true when the team is in motion, but especially so when it’s not—like at a team offsite where we step away from our day-to-day work to focus on introspection, dialogue, and reflection. These activities, by the way, often make people anxious, nervous about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time (maybe offsites should be called "eggshells").
For most leaders, the odds are against successfully diagnosing all facets of a team, especially the subtle movements and back-and-forths that form the backbone of the team’s culture. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With just enough data, it’s possible for any team to identify where they’re misaligned, which often leads to previously unforeseen struggles. With just enough data, we can see that someone isn’t just difficult to work with—they may simply have a very different understanding, and that misalignment is the root cause of the friction in the relationship.
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This is why I developed Teamangle, our framework to effectively diagnose where a team is not aligned so we can dig in and address the root causes of problems.
In the introduction to our new Teamangle playbook, Your Team Work, Reimagined, I wrote, “Team success hinges on the consistent, mindful practice of three fundamental pillars: communication, collaboration, and culture. These foundational elements drive innovation, productivity, and retention, while fostering a nurturing environment where team members feel engaged, respected, aligned, and trusted. When any of these elements falter, teams quickly find themselves on a path to dysfunction—marked by misaligned objectives, confusion, low morale, and ultimately, failure. Often, teams don’t recognize the gravity of these issues and rarely take the time to truly investigate the root cause.”
In the playbook, you will find the core of our beliefs and our curriculum that drives Same Team Partners’ mission and goals for building champion teams. It includes a high-level overview, or what we call a “practice version” of our new Teamangle framework. All of this is built on years of hands-on experience, observing both leadership failures and successes. Teamangle helps teams uncover hidden problems they didn’t realize they had, while guiding them toward clear solutions through improved communication, collaboration, and culture. The wisdom and techniques in our program are field-tested and continue to evolve as we work with more teams through the Teamangle framework.
Our Teamangle system works. It’s an effective tool and activity that we know, from experience, helps leaders improve team morale, performance, work quality, relationships, outcomes, retention, and reputation.
Subscribe and download Your Team Work, Reimagined today.
