LeadTime#13 - Healing a Divided Team
How to rebuild trust in a team? What actions can break down historical grudges and improve delivery? How do you balance investigating the past with creating a new path forward?
Hi, this newsletter is a weekly challenge for engineers thinking about management. I'm Péter Szász, writing about my engineering leadership experience on my blog, and training aspiring and first-time Engineering Managers on this path. See more about what I can offer you at leadtime.tech.
In this newsletter, I pose a weekly EM challenge and leave it as a puzzle for you to think about before the next issue, where I share my thoughts on it.
Last Week's Challenge
Last week, we were assigned to lead a struggling team split into opposing factions. Read the details here if you missed it.
I'll approach this situation with my usual structure:
Goals to Achieve
Execution: Rebuild the team's ability to make decisions and deliver. Without establishing a functional decision-making process, delivery will continue to suffer regardless of other interventions. I must create clarity around how technical decisions get made, executed, and evaluated.
Team/Organization: Break down the factional identity that has formed. As long as people identify primarily with their "side," cooperation will remain superficial at best. The low level of psychological safety works against raising creative solutions to problems. My goal is to reset team norms and establish new patterns of interaction that discourage tribalism. (A Social Contract is a great tool to capture and display these norms and patterns.)
Personal: Build individual relationships based on trust and objectivity. Team members need to see that I'm not simply taking sides or arriving with preconceptions. Conversations should be kept fact-based and solution-oriented.
Risks to Avoid
Execution: Getting bogged down in historical grievances while missing immediate delivery expectations. While understanding the past matters, dwelling there too long risks missing the 3-month window I have to show improvement. The team also needs forward momentum, seeing the way they can work together can boost morale.
Team/Organization: Driving away good contributors by oversimplifying the conflict or dismissing their points by focusing on delivery only. A dysfunctional team can hide solid technical work. The whole team falling apart is a big risk, too. On the other hand, trying to change everyone to work better in the team is a risk too — if it’s obviously not a good fit for someone, I should work on making the separation easier for all.
Personal: Appearing to choose sides. If team members perceive me as having been "captured" by one faction, I'll lose any ability to influence the other group and likely deepen the divide rather than healing it.
5 Questions
What are the actual power dynamics behind the apparent conflict? Is there an imbalance in perceived influence, recognition, or access to information that's driving resentment? Understanding the underlying structures matters more than cataloging individual grievances. I need to observe who speaks first in meetings, whose opinions carry weight with leadership, and where information flows freely versus where it's guarded.
How do one-on-one conversations differ from group settings? Some can be open to spell out their opinions more comfortably in this setting than in front of the group. Often in divided teams, people express more nuanced views than they do publicly. Meeting each team member individually might reveal that positions aren't as hardened as they appear in group settings or might identify specific triggers that escalate tension.
What are the real business consequences of the team's dysfunction? Understanding the concrete impact on customers, other teams, and the business creates urgency beyond abstract notions of "team health." This helps frame the situation not as "let's all get along" but as "our dysfunction is harming our customers in these specific ways."
What decision-making approach would give everyone confidence in the process, even when they disagree with outcomes? A good process that everyone believes in can make even controversial decisions acceptable. This could involve clarifying what decisions are made by consensus versus authority, documenting the reasoning behind choices, or establishing clear criteria for technical decisions.
Is there a concrete project that could serve as a "clean slate" opportunity? Finding work that isn't tainted by previous battles could provide neutral ground for establishing new team norms and trying out the new decision-making process. The key is finding something where historical baggage is minimal and can create delivery discipline, helping the team see what success feels like.
Did I miss any important aspects of handling this team transformation challenge? What experiences do you have with unifying divided teams? Let me know in the comments!
This Week's Challenge
During your goal-setting session with Leon, a technically strong senior developer who's been with the team for three years, presents goals exclusively focused on technical areas: mastering a new framework, deepening his knowledge of distributed systems, and contributing to an open-source project. His enthusiasm about these topics is evident.
You know, however, that what's actually limiting Leon's impact and advancement aren’t his technical skills, which already exceed expectations, but rather his communication style, sometimes being dismissive or disrespectful. His code reviews can be abrasive, he struggles explaining complex concepts to junior team members, and he doesn’t respect the opinion of non-technical colleagues.
When you suggest adding soft skill development goals to his plan, Leon pushes back: "I'm an engineer, not a people person. I'd rather focus on what I'm good at." You value his contributions and see great potential, fear that without addressing these areas, he'll eventually hit a ceiling in both effectiveness and career growth.
Think about what you would do in this situation and how you’d approach finding the angle that can convince Leon to look into soft-skill development. I’ll share my points next week. Sign up to receive it when it’s live:
Until then, here's a small piece of inspiration to match last week's challenge, from Jason Fried’s article “Rescuing a project in progress”:
See you next week,
Péter