Why Teams Don’t Automatically Become Teams
If you’ve ever been through a merger, acquisition, departmental restructure or organisational redesign, you’ll probably recognise this: the new organisation chart is published, the reporting lines have changed, the launch meetings are over.
Everyone is now officially “one team”. Except… it doesn’t feel like it.
Instead, you hear things like: “That’s not how we do it.” “We never used to work like this.” “They’ve created another bottleneck.” “Head Office just doesn’t understand.”
The processes may have been aligned, the structure may have changed but relationships don’t change overnight. Trust doesn’t appear because someone updated an organisation chart. People still have different ways of working, different priorities, different experiences and different assumptions about what “good” looks like.
Until those differences are understood and worked through, organisations end up paying a hidden productivity tax through misunderstandings, duplicated effort, unnecessary conflict and slower decision-making.
In the video below, I explore why teams don’t automatically become teams—and what leaders can do to help people build the trust, understanding and shared ways of working that turn organisational change into organisational performance.
If you’ve ever wondered why a well-planned reorganisation still didn’t deliver the results you expected, then the video will give you some ideas!