Is your team stuck? Get them unstuck

The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, one of the first books to define the team phenomenon, still offers some of the best advice for managing them.

Here’s how to get a stalled team unstuck:

• Revisit the basics. Ask the team to rethink its purpose, approach and goals.

• Achieve some small wins. Even noncritical short-term wins can get a team moving forward again.

• Introduce fresh new approaches, ideas and information. Simply providing new customer case studies or front-line work measures can end the stalemate.

• Set up fresh training for the team. It could centre on key skills, teamwork or goal-setting.

• Juggle the team’s membership or change its leadership. Leaders who were appointed by upper management can seem irreplaceable to other team members. Don’t be afraid to intervene and mandate a change.

It’s great when the team applies some of these energising tactics from within, without being asked. But if that doesn’t happen, your job as a leader is to intervene and shake things up.