The Performance Gap: Issue 19

Last week I wrote about the high-functioning team that isn't - the pattern of cohesion that forecloses productive challenge and produces the appearance of performance rather than the reality of it. This week a different kind of disruption: what happens to team performance when the membership changes, and why the recovery period is almost always longer than leaders expect.

Senior teams are more fragile to membership change than most leaders acknowledge.

A departure, an arrival, a restructure that changes the composition of the group: each of these events is commonly treated as an operational matter. The person leaves, their successor joins, the team absorbs the change and continues. In practice, the picture is considerably more complicated.

The reason is that team performance does not live in individual capability. It lives in the relationships, norms, and shared understandings that the group has developed over time - the accumulated trust, the established ways of working, the unspoken agreements about how challenge is offered and received, how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled. When one member of the team changes, a significant portion of that accumulated infrastructure changes with them.

What the research shows about group development

Bruce Tuckman's model of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing) is one of the most widely known frameworks in organisational psychology and one of the most consistently misapplied. The error is treating it as a linear progression that a team completes once. In practice, teams cycle through it repeatedly, and membership change is one of the most reliable triggers for returning to an earlier stage.

A team that has reached genuine performing (with the trust, the clarity, and the productive challenge that characterises it) will often find itself back in the forming or storming stage after a significant membership change. Not because the remaining members have lost their capability, but because the conditions that enabled their performance were partly constituted by the relationships now altered.

The problem with new leaders

The specific case of a new leader joining an established team is among the highest-risk membership transitions. The new leader brings their own assumptions about how teams should work, their own norms around challenge and decision-making, their own history. The established team brings the accumulated patterns of a group that has already negotiated its way to a working arrangement.

The collision is almost always uncomfortable, and it is almost always under-discussed. The new leader assumes the team will adapt. The team assumes the new leader will learn. Neither assumption is entirely wrong, but neither is sufficient, and the gap between them is usually filled with low-grade friction that reduces performance for longer than it should.

Michael Watkins's research on leadership transitions identifies the first 90 days as the period in which the new leader's long-term effectiveness is largely determined. What is less often noted is that the same period is critical for the team - and that the team's ability to integrate the new leader depends heavily on whether the transition is treated as a relational process rather than an informational one.

What good transition management looks like

It requires the leader to be explicit about the transition - to name the fact that the team is in a period of change, that performance will temporarily dip, that the working through of differences is a necessary and productive phase rather than a failure. Most leaders avoid this conversation because it acknowledges vulnerability. The teams that recover fastest are the ones where it is named.

It also requires the outgoing member (where the departure is planned) to be invested in the handover of relational context, not just operational context. What the incoming person most needs to know is not the content of the role but the texture of the relationships: how decisions are actually made, where the sensitivities are, what the team has learned the hard way.

The question for this week

Think about the most significant membership change your team has experienced in the last two years. How long did it take to recover the level of performance you had before? And was that recovery period acknowledged and managed - or absorbed and endured?

Issue 20: The leader's relationship with the team - the distinctive challenge of leading a group you also belong to, and what genuine team membership means for the person at the top.

If something in this issue resonated and you'd like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com