At The Center Consulting Group, we often get to help build, empower, and grow effective teams. An effective team is a key part of an organization’s health and movement forward. But, we also work with teams that are dysfunctional – that are struggling in terms of their role, how they relate to the mission of the organization, and how they execute together.

How do you know if your team is dysfunctional? It’s a lot like trying to diagnose an illness. We sometimes end up chasing symptoms – a fever, lethargy, or a cough. But if we don’t dig deeper and address their underlying cause, we will keep repeating that process.

Here are six symptoms to help you identify if your team is dysfunctional and if it is time to get help.

1. Working in Silos

A symptom we often see in dysfunctional teams is that the team members are working in silos. This means that while they may attend team meetings or appear together, they are actually working in separate pieces of the organization and they have not established the links of trust, connection, and collaboration to work together.

One example of this is something we see between sales and operations. Sometimes the sales team members are saying, "We’re selling, but operations isn’t delivering," or operations will say to sales, "You’re making promises we can’t keep." They start to begin to look at an “us versus them” way of working together. That is not a well-collaborated organization.

2. Workarounds of People and Processes

Another symptom is what we call ‘workarounds.’ This means that we don’t believe in either the people or the processes that we are using, so we start to create paths around individuals or tools in the organization. One example is if someone has established using spreadsheets that are outside of the accepted tools and processes to track their individual work. This tells us that they have separated themselves from the team in some way and begun to put their efforts ahead of the team.

3. Secrets and Sidebars

This next one is a little more painful. I like to call it secrets and sidebars. When a team is having a disruption in trust and that trust is eroding, they begin to talk apart from one another. They talk before or after meetings, but they are not addressing the hard facts and truths together as a team. They begin to talk more about each other than with each other.

4. Tolerating Bad Behavior

Digging deeper, let’s talk about teams that tolerate bad behavior. It can be tolerating someone who is a bully, someone who is chronically underperforming or underdelivering, someone who just doesn’t show up, or someone who is undermining the team through gossip or becoming increasingly difficult. Culture is often set in an organization by the worst behavior that we tolerate. A team needs the courage and the willingness to call that out and call each other to a higher level of accountability.

5. Inability to Resolve Conflict

One of the hallmarks of a team that trusts each other is the ability to have conflict, to disagree with one another, and to resolve those conflicts and move better together. But if a team can’t do that – if they fear conflict, if the thinking of “I have to win, you have to lose” dominates, or if they isolate from one another because they don’t want the conflict – all of those are warning signs that the team is growing dysfunctional.

6. Fear

And finally, a real hallmark of a team that is struggling and dysfunctional is fear. We begin to fear failure. We begin to fear each other. And frankly, we begin to fear risk. Risk is a hallmark of a healthy team – being willing to put ourselves, our organization, and our team at risk to achieve that higher goal. But if we don’t feel safe, if we don’t have trust, and if we don’t have that missional commitment to each other, we are not going to be willing to take those risks.

My Team Is Dysfunctional – What Next?

We have talked about six symptoms of a dysfunctional team. We could chase any one of those symptoms and still not be helping that team. The symptoms are truly a path to diagnosis. What it now takes as a team is the ability to say we see the symptoms, there is a diagnosis we need to make, and we need the courage to face those issues head-on. We recommend organizations do the following three things.

1. Demonstrate care.

Demonstrate care for one another. That’s not just expressing care through, "I really like you," but it’s caring enough to get involved in each other’s lives, to know each other more deeply, and to ask hard questions of one another. And that’s often rooted in me, as the leader, being vulnerable with my team members to say things that I see, feel, and am experiencing and creating a climate so that care can be shed.

2. Offer clarity.

The second piece is clarity. Can we clearly define roles, accountabilities, and expectations and then hold each other to that? That is where conflict work may have to happen because we are going to be holding one another accountable.

3. Communicate.

Good clarity always leads to great communication because we now know my role, I know what you are doing and how you are doing, and we can communicate back and forth together to be a more effective team.

What we’re really talking about here is a team’s willingness to face the facts – to look at those six symptoms and say, “we see some of that in our team, and we’re willing to take the courageous steps to go deeper” – to diagnose the problem, and, frankly, to ask for help. At The Center Consulting Group, that is help that we love to provide. We like to look at the symptoms together, learn about a team, and determine how we might be able to help them do a better job of both diagnosing and repairing those problems.

Paul Keisling is a Senior Consultant at The Center Consulting Group and has over 40 years of experience in building, leading, and operating organizations. His areas of interest and expertise are organizational health, leadership coaching, team development, conflict resolution, and succession planning. Paul serves on several nonprofit boards and was a founding board member of Chariots for Hope - an organization that oversees Children's Homes across the country of Kenya. He holds a Master of Social Work from Temple University, studied theology and counseling at Westminster Seminary, and is a Certified Psychiatric Rehabilitation Practitioner.