Dear HBR: · Harvard Business Review

Tough Teams

June 11, 2020·29 min·2 clips

A leadership coach reveals how contempt on a team unleashes the 'four horsemen of the apocalypse' that destroy collaboration.

Managing tough teams starts with a slower question. Melanie Parrish says difficult teams are harder than difficult individuals because the trouble comes from several moving parts. Leaders can also miss how they fit into the system. The conversation keeps coming back to what a manager should learn before deciding whether a team needs support, tighter roles, or something else. One letter focuses on a team that looks down on the wider organization and its processes. The advice is to get curious about workflow, ambitions, goals, and what the team believes about the organization around it. That curiosity helps the manager show warmth and competence while finding out which habits are actually working. Experimentation gives the manager a practical path. She can tell her boss she is testing an approach and ask to share what she learns weekly or biweekly. Managing up matters here. The manager needs to know whether her job is to help the team, corral it, or bring its useful habits back to the rest of the organization. Process control may still have a place. It just should not be the opening move. The episode then moves to another workplace. A leader at a U.S. tech company describes an Asia-Pacific office that grew from 25 employees to more than 100. Growth changed the problem. With more than a dozen managers and only about 30 direct reports, the old group approach to office decisions is harder to keep. Snacks, parking, space, HR, and IT become everyday points where newer managers want more say. Parrish closes with a practical leadership stance: ask better questions, test ideas, clarify the role, set expectations, and pay attention to the real blockers.

As heard by us

A practical framework for managing tough teams without turning the problem into one person.

This piece treats a difficult team less as a problem with one person than as a set of relationships and incentives that need attention. Melanie Parrish keeps the discussion grounded in curiosity and experimentation, with practical advice to ask sharper questions, confront…

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You want a clearer way to handle a tough team.

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