The Team That Wasn't the Problem

Most change initiatives are launched with confidence about what the problem is. That confidence may be the first mistake.

Keith Laplante

Thirty-five years leading inside organizations (TD Waterhouse, BMO, HomeEquity Bank) and advising alongside them (Accenture, ExperiencePoint, The Refinery Leadership Partners). Facilitated leadership programs at Harvard, Duke, and Stanford. Read more about Keith

"The team that went from third quartile to number one wasn't a story about better people. It was a story about better diagnosis, and about change designed by the people who had to live inside it."

Before you can lead a team through change, you have to understand what you're actually trying to change. That sounds obvious. In practice, it's one of the things leaders get wrong most often.

The reason is that symptoms and problems can look almost identical. And when you're under pressure to act, the temptation to move on what you can see, rather than take the time to understand what's underneath it, is powerful. So, you launch the change initiative aimed at the symptom, and six months later you're wondering why the results didn't come.

I want to tell you a story from earlier in my career that taught me this lesson in a way I've never forgotten.

What I was told when I arrived

I'd taken on responsibility for a team that was, by every measurable indicator, in trouble. Third quartile performance in a first quartile market. Results well below where the organization needed them to be. The message from leadership above me was direct and unambiguous. This was a people problem. The team wasn't performing. Personnel changes were probably going to be needed. My job was to sort it out.

The change initiative was, in effect, already scoped. Bring in fresh talent. Move people out. Reset the culture. The problem had been diagnosed, and the intervention had been decided. All that was left was execution.

I wasn't so sure. Before I made any moves, I decided to spend some time understanding what was actually happening.

What I found when I looked closely

I spent time with the team. I sat down with people individually. I watched how the work actually got done. I asked questions about what they were spending their time on, what was working, what wasn't, what was getting in the way.

What I found wasn't what I'd been told to expect.

Amongst a few other things, there was a long-serving member of the team who had been there for years. She was highly capable, well-regarded, and by any reasonable measure a genuine asset to the organization. Over the years, she had gravitated, entirely understandably, toward the parts of her role she found most valuable and most enjoyable. That's not a criticism. Most of us do exactly that if we're given the space to. We drift toward what we're good at and what we like. The parts of the job that are less rewarding, we quietly do less of.

The problem was that the parts she'd drifted away from hadn't disappeared. They'd migrated. Admin responsibilities that had originally been hers had gradually landed on the salespeople. It hadn't happened all at once. It had happened over years, one small handoff at a time, each one reasonable in isolation, none of them ever formally decided.

And by the time I arrived, the salespeople on the team were spending a meaningful portion of their day doing admin work that wasn't their job, wasn't what they were good at, and wasn't what they'd been hired to do. Which meant they weren't spending that time selling.

That was the core of the performance problem. Not effort. Not skill. Not motivation. Structural drift that had quietly eroded the team's ability to do what it existed to do.

If I'd gone in with the change initiative I'd been handed, I would have removed talented people, brought in new ones, and watched the same drift start over again. Because the drift was the actual problem. And the drift had nothing to do with who was on the team.

What we did

Here's the part of the story I think matters most. I didn't fix this on my own.

Once I'd done the analysis and understood what I thought was going on, I brought it back to the team. All of us together. I laid out what I'd found, walked through what I thought was happening, and then I did something the team wasn't necessarily expecting. I asked them what they thought.

Not because I was uncertain about the analysis. I was reasonably confident I'd identified the real problem. But I was much less certain about the right way to fix it, and I knew the people in that room understood their work better than I did. More importantly, if we were going to reset how the team functioned, they were the ones who were going to have to live inside the reset. It wasn't going to work unless they helped design it.

What followed was a real conversation. People saw themselves in what I'd described. They recognized the drift. Nobody was defensive, because nobody was being blamed. The long-serving team member acknowledged, straightforwardly, what had happened over the years, and volunteered to take back what had migrated. The salespeople were direct about what they needed in order to actually sell. Together, we worked out what the reset would look like.

That was the whole change initiative. A reset of who was doing what, designed by the people who were going to have to make it work.

It wasn't dramatic. We didn't fire anyone. We didn't bring in new talent. We didn't restructure the team in some sweeping way that would have made a good case study. We just put things back where they belonged, together.

What happened

Inside six months, that team went from third quartile to number one in the country.

I want to let that sit for a moment, because it still surprises people when I tell the story. Not first quartile. Not top three. Number one.

And it wasn't a temporary spike. We stayed number one for two years. The performance held, because it wasn't built on pressure, or fear, or a shake-up. It was built on people finally being able to spend their time on the work they were there to do.

What this taught me about leading change

There are two lessons from that experience that I've come back to in every change initiative I've been part of since.

The first is that symptoms are not problems. And when we mistake one for the other, we launch changes that don't fix anything.

An underperforming team looks like a personnel problem. Poor customer satisfaction looks like a service training problem. Slow decision-making looks like a governance problem. Lagging sales look like a sales team problem. Every one of these can be, and often is, a symptom of something else entirely. And every one of them, if diagnosed too quickly, produces a change initiative aimed at the wrong target.

The discipline of leading change well starts long before the initiative launches. It starts with the willingness to slow down at the diagnosis stage. To ask what's actually happening here, not just what does this look like. To resist the pressure to act until you've done the work of understanding.

The second lesson is about what happens next, once you understand the problem. If I'd come in and dealt with the personnel issues as they'd been outlined to me, that would have been change done to the team. It might have produced some result. It certainly would have produced a lot of disruption. And whatever result it produced would have been fragile, because none of it would have been owned by the people who had to live with it.

What we did instead was change done by the team. Once we all sat in a room and looked at the real problem together, we were all in the same boat. Everyone had a stake in solving it. Everyone helped shape the solution. And the solution held, for two full years and beyond, because it wasn't imposed. It was ours.

That's the part I want other leaders to hear. When you take the time to understand the actual problem, and then you bring your people into designing the solution, you get a different kind of result. A more durable one. A more sustainable one. And, in my experience, a more remarkable one.

That pressure to move fast and act decisively is real. In most organizations, taking time to understand a problem before acting on it can feel like weakness. Leaders are expected to move. To decide. To do something visible. And the leader who says wait, let me look more carefully, and then let me bring my people into figuring out what to do, may be seen as slow or indecisive.

But the cost of the alternative is enormous. Change initiatives launched at the wrong problem, or launched at the right problem but done to people rather than with them, consume budget, exhaust organizations, and produce disillusionment when they fail to deliver.

The uncomfortable question

If I could ask leaders about to launch a change initiative to consider one thing, it would be this. How confident are you that you actually understand the problem you're trying to solve? And once you do understand it, are you going to solve it alone, or are you going to bring the people who have to live with the solution into designing it?

Sometimes what you find will confirm what you thought. Sometimes the surface story is the real story. But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, the problem is a version of the drift I found on that team. Quiet. Structural. Invisible until someone slows down and looks.

And once you find it, you have a choice. You can fix it yourself, and hope the fix holds. Or you can bring your people into the room and let them help design something they'll actually own.

The team that went from third quartile to number one wasn't a story about better people. It was a story about better diagnosis, and about change designed by the people who had to live inside it.

The change we ended up making wasn't the one I'd been handed.

It was the one the team decided to make. Together.

And that's the difference between change that transforms an organization and change that just exhausts it.