Why Does Your Team Keep Having the Same Conversation?

It was the third meeting about the launch date of this year’s new product.

Marketing had already built a campaign around it. Sales had begun talking to customers. Engineering still wasn’t convinced the product would be ready by mid-year.

Everyone remembered leaving the last meeting with a decision. The problem was, they didn’t remember the same decision.

Sound familiar?

Teams lose enormous amounts of time this way—not because people are incompetent or uncommitted, but because they are operating from different assumptions about their goals, what was decided, who is accountable for what, and what needs to happen next.

Every team develops habits. Some habits help people work together effectively. Others create repeated discussions, missed handoffs, and avoidable delays. The good news is that teams don’t have to keep working this way. They can make different choices about how they collaborate, align, and follow through.

When Good Teams Get Stuck

In our work with teams, we see certain patterns repeatedly. A decision comes back for discussion after everyone thought it was settled. Priorities for one team are different for another team. Team members complete their individual tasks yet miss the overall results and any specific goals those tasks were meant to produce.

These problems can persist even when team members are skilled, committed, and doing their best. Often, people are making perfectly reasonable choices based on different information or a different understanding of the overall goal.

Consider our product launch team. Marketing is working toward the announced launch date. Sales is making commitments to customers. Engineering is evaluating whether the product will actually be ready.

Each functional team has a legitimate concern. Each person is doing their job. However, unless the product launch team has a shared understanding of its common goals, people can make decisions that pull the team in different directions, resulting in all that individual effort being wasted.

The cost of ineffective teamwork can add up quickly. Every time team members have to handle a problem they thought they had already resolved, something else doesn’t get done. When people duplicate efforts because overall direction is not clear, frustration grows and productivity is lost.

So how does a team break the cycle? We’ve found three essential practices that can help: awareness, alignment, and focus.

Awareness: Why Do We Keep Having This Conversation?

Awareness begins with noticing our own patterns and how those patterns affect the team.

Who contributes to discussions? Which perspectives are missing? What happens when someone raises a concern? Where does confusion begin?

For our product launch team, the leader might start with a few deceptively simple questions:

“What do we believe we can accomplish together? What goals do we have in common? What decisions do we need to make based on these goals?”

The answers can be revealing. Because it has a goal of launching before an industry conference in four months, the marketing team believes the launch date is final. Because they have an ambitious financial goal, the sales team is already talking to customers. Because they have a priority list a mile wide, the engineering team believes the launch date is tentative.

By raising questions about common goals, the product launch team leader makes the misalignment visible.

A team can’t change a pattern it hasn’t recognized. Naming what is happening gives people something specific to address together.

Alignment: What Exactly Have We Agreed To?

Once the team sees the pattern, the next step is getting clear and aligned on the team’s common goals.

A general agreement, such as “we need to move faster,” isn’t enough. People can agree with that statement and still walk away with completely different ideas about what that means.

For the launch team in our example, alignment means agreeing on specifics. What is our common goal? What is on each functional team’s plate? Can priorities be shifted? What information justifies reconsidering the launch date? When does the decision need to be made? What is each functional team committing to do?

With those questions answered, marketing, sales, and engineering can begin working from the same understanding rather than multiple versions of it.

Alignment clarifies what is being agreed to and leads to a shared direction.

Focus: What Is Actually Required of the Team?

Teams also need to decide where their collective time and attention will create the most value. A common set of goals and clear commitments from each functional team can make it easier to see what requires the product launch team’s collective attention.

Not every issue requires everyone’s involvement. Not every update requires a meeting. Not every decision requires input from the entire team.

A focus on common goals means identifying which decisions need input from a single team, which decisions need input from a cross-functional team, and what individual members can do independently.

Our product launch team doesn’t need another hour-long meeting in which every functional team reports everything it knows. It needs the specific people, with key information, addressing targeted issues that require collective decisions.

Once those decisions are made and recorded along with the next steps, everyone can act from the same playbook. If circumstances change, the team has a clear process for future decision making.

Make Team Effectiveness a Leadership Priority

Teams rarely set out to create inefficient ways of working. People sometimes bring ineffective habits into the organization from their previous jobs. Two people unknowingly work on the same problem. A concern everyone discusses privately is never raised in the meeting. Another meeting is added because the last meeting didn’t resolve the issue. If inefficient patterns like these are not addressed, they will persist.

Every team has a choice about how it responds to a recurring difficulty. At your next team meeting, ask:

“What is one pattern in the way we work together that is making it harder for us to get the results we want?”

Then use awareness, alignment, and focus to agree on one change to make—and set a time to review whether it’s helping.

When you make team effectiveness a priority, the payoff is a team that spends less time untangling difficulties and more time accomplishing what it came together to do.

Alexander Caillet, Janice Caillet, and Lael Good lead the Blanchard Teams practice. Each brings more than 25 years of experience with teams around the world, from newly formed groups to senior leadership teams in complex organizations.