When the old way no longer works: Building the perfect team post-COVID
How sudden change reveals the capability of a team.
When the UK, and much of the world, entered lockdown in early 2020, the way millions of people worked changed almost overnight.
Teams that had spent years working alongside one another were suddenly separated. Meetings became virtual. Informal conversations disappeared. Relationships were tested. Managers had to lead people they could no longer see.
The old way no longer worked.
At the time, we thought we were dealing with the challenges of working from home. Looking back, something more fundamental was happening.
Change was revealing the capability of our teams.
Fractured teamwork
During a conversation with one business owner at the time, he told me that because everything had gone virtual and nobody had physically been together for months, interpersonal problems were beginning to emerge between members of his team.
What had previously worked wasn’t working anymore.
That raises an interesting question.
How well do we really understand the people we work with?
Every team contains different characters. People communicate differently. They respond differently to pressure. They are motivated by different things. Some naturally work well together; others can find each other intensely frustrating.
When everybody is sitting in the same room, some of those differences can remain hidden.
Change exposes them.
By profiling the members of this particular team using Perfect Teams®, we were able to give them a framework for understanding their different characteristics, strengths and ways of communicating. We then brought everyone together in a virtual workshop to talk openly about those differences and how they could work together more effectively.
The objective wasn’t to make everybody the same.
Quite the opposite.
It was to help different people become more capable of working together.
Engagement suddenly mattered differently
Lockdown also demonstrated something else.
Although everybody was experiencing broadly the same external event, they weren’t experiencing it in the same way.
Some people relished working independently from home. Others desperately missed the energy, interaction and relationships of the workplace.
That matters.
Good leadership isn’t simply about deciding what people should do.
It requires understanding who is doing it.
What motivates them?
How do they communicate?
What happens to them under pressure?
What do they need from the people around them?
And what can they contribute that may be missing elsewhere in the team?
Understanding character gives leaders another lens through which to answer those questions.
Nobody is perfect. But your team can be.
Individually, we all have strengths and weaknesses.
That’s precisely why teams exist.
The purpose of a team isn’t to assemble a collection of identical high performers. It’s to bring together different people whose strengths compensate for one another’s weaknesses and whose combined capability is greater than anything they could achieve independently.
COVID provided an extraordinary example of what happens when familiar circumstances disappear.
But the lesson goes far beyond COVID.
Every team, business and organisation eventually reaches a moment when the old way no longer works.
Growth does it.
Technology does it.
New leadership does it.
Competition does it.
Economic shocks do it.
And sometimes the people themselves simply outgrow the system around them.
Those moments aren’t necessarily failure.
They’re transition.
And transition asks something new of us.
Greater capability.
Today, that idea sits at the heart of our work at Perfect Teams®: understanding character, building stronger relationships and developing the human capability that allows individuals, teams and organisations to adapt when circumstances change.
Because the strongest teams aren’t those that never encounter disruption.
They’re the ones capable enough to respond when they do.
You can’t download capability.™
When the old way no longer works, what’s next?
If your team is facing change, growth or simply isn’t working as effectively as it could, Perfect Teams® can help you understand the characters around the table, identify what’s missing and build greater team capability.
Or, if you’re a consultant looking to build your own capability practice using the Perfect Teams® methodology:
Explore the Licensee Journey →
Originally published September 2020. Updated August 2026.
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