And what can we do about it?
Why don’t teams work?
Why do intelligent, capable people who perform perfectly well individually sometimes become considerably less intelligent and capable when we put them together?
Why the poor communication?
The politics?
The disengagement?
The conflict?
The duplication?
The frustration?
Why does somebody eventually say:
“It would be quicker if I just did it myself”?
I’ve spent much of my working life observing teams.
And beneath all the complexity, I’ve come to believe there are three fundamental issues.
People. Communication. Leadership.
Fix those and an extraordinary amount becomes possible.
There are three issues…
FIRST:
People
People are different
Obvious, isn’t it?
Yet organisations continually behave as though they aren’t.
We employ different people precisely because we need them to do different things.
We want somebody who can sell.
Somebody who loves detail.
Somebody who can solve the technical problem.
Somebody who understands the customer.
Somebody who can see where we’re going.
Somebody who makes sure we actually get there.
Difference isn’t the problem.
It’s the reason the team exists.
The problem begins when we expect people who are different to think, communicate and behave like us.
You don’t have to like everybody you work with.
That’s asking rather a lot.
But you do have to find a way to work with them.
And that requires something more useful than liking.
Understanding.
Sometimes we have the wrong people
There’s another uncomfortable possibility.
Sometimes the team doesn’t work because we’ve recruited the wrong person.
Most managers don’t recruit very often.
Which means most managers don’t get enough practice to become exceptionally good at it.
If you drove a car six times a year, I wouldn’t particularly want a lift.
Yet somebody who recruits six times a year can make decisions worth tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds on the basis of:
“I’ll know the right person when I see them.”
Will you?
There’s an additional trap.
We tend to like people who are like us.
So we can inadvertently recruit them.
But another version of you may be precisely what the team doesn’t need.
The better question is:
What’s missing?
What capability does this team need that it doesn’t currently possess?
Now recruitment stops being about filling a vacancy.
It becomes part of building the team.
And sometimes, of course, you inherit the team you’ve got.
In which case:
How do we make this team work better?
That brings us to communication.
SECOND:
Communication
Good communication sounds easy until human beings become involved.
You say something perfectly clearly.
The other person hears something completely different.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But that’s what you said.”
Welcome to teamwork.
Communication isn’t simply about the message being transmitted.
It’s also about who is receiving it.
Imagine a detail-oriented introvert explaining a project to a fast-moving extrovert.
The first thinks:
“I’m giving you everything you need.”
The second thinks:
“Will you please get to the point?”
Now reverse it.
The extrovert gives the introvert the headline and disappears.
The introvert thinks:
“How on earth am I supposed to do anything with that?”
Neither is necessarily a poor communicator.
They’re simply communicating in the way they prefer to receive information.
That’s a very human mistake.
Communication isn’t what you send. It’s what the other person can receive.
And beneath the words sit questions people may never voice:
Do you understand me?
Are you actually listening?
Does what I do matter?
Where do I fit?
Why do you make everything so complicated?
Why don’t you ever give me enough information?
Why does talking to you sometimes feel like we’re speaking different languages?
Teams don’t necessarily need more communication.
They need more effective communication.
And that requires adaptation.
THIRD:
Leadership
Leadership is where the first two problems meet.
Different people.
Different motivations.
Different communication styles.
Different strengths.
Different ambitions.
Different levels of capability.
And somehow the leader has to turn all that difference into something coherent.
Nobody said this was going to be easy.
Yet something peculiar happens in organisations.
Someone performs well in their job.
So we promote them.
Congratulations.
You’re now responsible for other human beings.
Good luck.
Technical competence got them promoted.
Leadership capability is assumed to arrive with the new job title.
It doesn’t.
Leadership requires a different capability.
You need clarity.
Vision.
Communication.
Judgement.
Influence.
The ability to develop other people.
The confidence to delegate.
The ability to bring out strengths you don’t possess yourself.
And perhaps hardest of all:
The willingness to stop being the person who has to do everything.
Because if everybody remains dependent on the leader, you haven’t built a team.
You’ve built a queue.
SO WHAT’S THE ANSWER?
In the original version of this article, I wrote in enormous words:
CHANGE
IS THE ANSWER
I still agree.
But today I’d add something.
Change begins with awareness. Capability begins with application.
Because knowing something doesn’t change anything.
You have to do something differently.
And that starts with four questions:
What needs to change?
How am I different from the people around me?
How are they different from one another?
What do we need to do differently because we now understand those differences?
That’s where Perfect Teams® begins.
FIRST, SEE YOURSELF
We describe the underlying differences between people as character.
Perfect Teams® identifies twelve character types.
Not twelve boxes in which to imprison people.
Twelve different perspectives from which people tend naturally to see and approach the world.
Your character can give you clues about your natural strengths.
How you communicate.
What motivates you.
How you tend to lead.
What irritates you.
What others may find irritating about you.
And where your natural strengths might become blind spots.
The Perfect Teams® Indicator makes some of that visible.
Most people already know themselves reasonably well.
The interesting moments come when somebody says:
“I hadn’t realised I did that.”
Because awareness creates a possibility.
Now you can choose whether to keep doing it.
“Perfect Teams is ‘Simple, Clear, and Effective”
THEN, SEE THE TEAM
This is where individual profiling becomes much more interesting.
Put those individual characters together and you create a team map.
Now you’re no longer asking:
Who am I?
You’re asking:
Who are we?
Where are our strengths?
Where are they concentrated?
Which perspectives dominate?
Who naturally connects?
Where might friction occur?
What capability might be hidden?
And most importantly:
What’s missing?
Because a team can contain exceptionally talented individuals and still lack the collective capability required for its purpose.
Individual talent does not automatically create collective capability.
Two teams, two different mindsets.
Which one is match fit right now?
SEEKING
The map makes something normally invisible visible.
And once you can see it, you can talk about it.
“A very powerful model. It generated insights for our team to understand the dynamics of communication and their interaction with colleagues.”
THEN COMES THE HARD BIT
Understanding.
Talking.
Applying.
Knowing that somebody communicates differently from you is interesting.
Changing the way you communicate with them is capability.
Knowing somebody has a strength you lack is interesting.
Giving them responsibility for something you’d normally control is capability.
Knowing the team has a gap is interesting.
Developing or recruiting the missing capability is action.
That’s why I’ve become increasingly wary of profiling for profiling’s sake.
Insight without application is entertainment.
Useful profiling should change what people can do.
AND THAT BRINGS US BACK TO LEADERSHIP
The leader’s job isn’t to make everybody the same.
It isn’t to eliminate difference.
It certainly isn’t to become the best person at every job.
The leader’s job is to create the conditions in which different people can contribute what they do best and become capable of doing more.
That’s when independence begins becoming interdependence.
People stop asking:
“What do you want me to do?”
and begin asking:
“What can I contribute?”
The team becomes less dependent on the leader.
People understand each other.
Communication improves.
Responsibility spreads.
Capability grows.
And the organisation can do more than the individuals within it could do separately.
That’s a team.
WHY DON’T TEAMS WORK?
So, after all that, here’s my answer.
Teams don’t work because putting people together doesn’t automatically make them a team.
Difference needs understanding.
Understanding needs communication.
Communication needs adaptation.
Adaptation needs capability.
And capability needs leadership.
Get those things right and difference stops being the problem.
It becomes the advantage.
Because organisations don’t scale through individuals.
They scale through teams.
Personality Divides. Character Unites.
You can’t download capability.™
See what’s really happening in your team
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand individual character, see the collective team and identify the capability that’s missing.
Originally published 27 November 2023. Updated August 2026.
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