Your Team Probably Doesn't Have a People Problem

It happens all too often. A leader calls me because they are noticing tension between staff members. Sometimes it is two people. Sometimes it is a whole team.

So I go in and collect data. One on one interviews, sometimes a survey, whatever gets people talking honestly.

And what I usually find is that the conflict is not really between those people. It is not that person A does not like person B. What I am looking at is a symptom of something bigger.

Usually it is misalignment. You ask five people what the team is there to do and you get four different answers. Or people do not agree on who owns what, or on how the work is supposed to move. Left alone long enough, that wears on the relationships. So the problem starts with the goal, and where you finally see it is in how two people treat each other in a meeting.

That is why a leader asking for team building or conflict resolution is only getting half the story. You can run the session. It will not hold, because whatever is causing the friction is still sitting there.

To fix the relationships you have to go underneath them. Do we agree on what this team is here to do? Do we know who owns what? Does my work overlap with yours in a way that means some of it gets done twice and some of it not at all?

Those are the questions that change things.

There is a model that explains this

This pattern is old enough to have a literature.

In 1972, Richard Beckhard wrote a short paper on team building that named four things a team needs: goals, roles, processes, and relationships. In 1977, Irwin Rubin, Mark Plovnick, and Ronald Fry turned it into a pyramid and worked out how to use it to find problems.

The pyramid is not a ranking of what matters most. It says one thing causes the next. Unclear goals create confusion about who does what. Confusion about roles breaks the process. A broken process wears on the people.

So the problem you can see is usually the last one in the chain, and the least likely to be the cause.

That is the uncomfortable part, because the friction between people is what gets reported. Nobody calls a consultant to say the goal is unclear. They call to say two people cannot work together, or morale is low, or people are resisting the change. Those are all real. They are just rarely where the problem started.

Eighty, sixteen, three, one

There is a ratio that travels with this model, credited to Noel Tichy. It is worth sitting with, because of how lopsided it is.

About eighty percent of team conflict comes back to unclear goals. Of what is left, about eighty percent comes back to unclear roles. Of what is left after that, about eighty percent comes back to the process. That leaves roughly one percent that actually starts between two people.

Eighty. Sixteen. Three. One.

Now think about where organizations spend their team development money. Retreats. Personality tests. Communication workshops. Conflict resolution. Almost all of it aimed at the one percent.

I want to be straight about what this number is. It comes from one researcher's experience, not from a controlled study. Treat it as a direction to look in, not a measurement. The exact figures are not the point.

The size of the gap is the point. Even if the real split is much softer, it still runs the same way. The causes sit near the bottom. The attention goes to the top. That gap is where the money goes.

There is a reason it happens. Friction between people is visible and uncomfortable, so somebody has to respond to it. An unclear goal is none of those things. Everybody can keep working without ever saying out loud that they are not sure what they are working toward. One creates urgency. The other creates a slow drift you only notice looking back.

One model, two directions

Here is how we draw it.

A note on the orientation, because it will look wrong to anyone who knows the model. The published version puts goals at the narrow top. We flipped it and put goals at the base, for a practical reason. The same four levels get used two different ways, and only one of them works the original way up.

You build from the bottom. Starting a new team, launching a change, or repairing something that fell apart, you begin at the foundation and work up. Goals make roles possible. Roles make the process possible. A working process is what lets people trust each other. Skip a level and the one above it will not hold, no matter how much attention you give it.

You diagnose from the top. When something is already broken, you start where it is loudest, which is almost always the top, and keep going down until you find the level where things stopped being clear.

With goals at the base, you can see both in one picture. With goals at the top, only the diagnosis makes sense, because you cannot build upward toward a foundation.

The sizes match the numbers this way too. The widest level carries eighty percent of the causes. The narrowest carries one.

The four questions

"We have a people problem" is too blunt to be useful. It covers four different problems that need four different responses, and most teams are only stuck on one of them.

Do we mean the same thing?

Not whether a goal exists. Whether the people doing the work share it. Asking the leadership team will not tell you, because they were in the room when it was decided and they will report agreement. Ask four people at different levels, separately, then compare their answers to each other rather than to yours.

You can see this one in work that is on plan and somehow not adding up, in two teams both sure they are doing the right thing, and in a strategy document that keeps getting revised and that nobody outside the room can explain.

Is it clear who owns what?

Not the org chart. Who actually decides, who has to be asked, and who answers for it when it goes wrong. This usually falls apart where two teams meet, when each one thinks the other owns something, or when both think they do.

You can see it in decisions getting made twice, in work sitting while somebody waits on an approval nobody is sure they need, and in the phrase "I thought you had that."

Does the process match reality?

How work and decisions actually move, which is often not how the written process says they move. Most organizations have both, and the gap grows quietly because it is nobody's job to notice.

You can see it in meetings nobody can explain the point of, decisions that get reopened a month later because it was never clear they were final, and information showing up after it would have helped.

Can people say the hard thing?

Whether somebody can raise a problem, disagree with a senior leader, or say something true and inconvenient, without paying for it.

You can see it in problems that surface late and expensively, in meetings where the real conversation happens afterward in twos and threes, and in silence that gets read as agreement.

Why the order matters

If more than one level is weak, and usually more than one is, work on the lowest one.

That feels backwards, because the upper levels almost always score worse. Strain between people is the buildup of everything underneath it, so of course it looks the worst. Working on it directly is working on a symptom.

I want to be careful, because you can take this too far. The model tells you where to look first. It is right often enough to be worth following, and it is not a law. More on that below.

What it saves you from is expensive and common. An organization spends a year on culture work, communication training, and team building, sees nothing improve, and decides people are the problem. Meanwhile the goal was never clear, and everybody was making a reasonable decision inside a confusion nobody had named.

What to do if you are in it

What I keep coming back to is that the information is already in the building. Somebody knows the goal is unclear. Several people know exactly where the process breaks. They have decided, usually correctly, that saying so is not worth what it would cost them.

That is why my first move in a new engagement is not a framework or a workshop. It is talking to people one at a time, asking questions specific enough that the honest answer is easier to give than the polite one. The wisdom is in the system. The work is making it safe enough to come out.

If you are reading this because something is not working and you have been calling it a people problem, the useful question is not how to fix the relationships. It is one level down, and then one down from there, until you find where things stopped being clear.

That is usually closer to the bottom than anyone expects.

Sometimes it really is a people problem

Everything above says to look underneath the friction. But sometimes you look underneath and there is nothing there. The goal is clear. People know who owns what. The process works. And people still cannot work together.

When that happens, there are a few places to look.

Psychological safety, which is Amy Edmondson's term for whether people believe they can speak up, disagree, admit a mistake, or ask a question without paying for it. It is not about whether people are nice to each other. It is about whether speaking up feels worth the risk.

A power difference, where one person can affect the other's work, pay, or standing, and both of them know it.

Bias, where the real question is not what someone said but whose ideas get taken seriously in the first place.

And plenty of others. Each of these is its own article, and each will get one.

But here is the part I do not want to lose. It is rarely one thing or the other.

Say somebody on the team already had doubts about whether a colleague was competent. Then the goals get murky and the roles overlap. Work gets done twice. Deadlines slip. Things fall through the gaps. None of that is any one person's fault, but the person with the doubts now has evidence. Every dropped ball confirms what they already believed. The misalignment did not create the bias. It fed it.

Sort out the goals and the roles and you take the evidence away. That helps. It does not undo the belief. And if you only work on one of them, you will not get the result you were after.

So this is not a clean either or. It is usually a mix, and the mix is why so many team problems survive a single fix.

We will get into these another time. For now, GRPI is the better bet. More often than not, what you are calling a people problem starts a level or two below the people.

It is also the honest answer to why you would bring somebody in.

I do not walk in holding GRPI and go looking for places to use it. I talk to people, one at a time, and ask questions specific enough that the honest answer is easier to give than the polite one. Most of the time that surfaces a misalignment in goals, roles, or process. Sometimes it surfaces something else entirely. Often it surfaces both, tangled together the way I just described.

You do not have to know which one you have before you call. Working that out is the job. What comes after is something we design together, built for what is actually there, instead of the team building session you would have booked from the outside.

If any of this sounds familiar, or if you are sitting with something you want to work through, I am happy to hop on a call and talk it out.

Take The Foundation Check →