Tiger Teams are not the answer.

The Tiger Team Trap: Why Special Teams Aren’t the Answer (and What to Do Instead)

Have you ever been in a situation where your organization suddenly faces an urgent, high-priority task? If so, you’ve probably heard someone suggest forming a “Tiger Team” to tackle it. It sounds great in theory, right? “A special team of top performers laser-focused on solving the big problem.” But here’s the thing – Tiger Teams often create more problems than they solve. Let’s dive into why this approach can be problematic and explore better alternatives.

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Addressing Complaints, Part 1: Taking Action

Addressing complaints is an essential part of a manager’s job. By keeping their finger on the pulse of what’s bothering people, managers can act as an early warning system for higher levels of management. By addressing their people’s concerns, managers can improve both productivity and morale. At the same time, facing an endless stream of criticism – often about things you can’t control – can be one of the most frustrating parts of being a manager. As a manager, you need the ability to listen to and learn from complaints without drowning in them.

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Performance Feedback Requires Clear Expectations

Addressing underperformance is a two-way street. Do you understand your part in it?

“One of the people I manage is underperforming. I need to give them feedback about how they aren’t meeting expectations.” 

I hear this often from managers, and I get curious whenever I do. The instinct behind it is good: Managers need to address underperformance. In my experience, however, giving performance feedback about unmet expectations is unlikely to help if you haven’t done your homework first. One of my teachers says, “80% of employee problems are due to manager neglect.” Whether you are a manager or not, when someone isn’t meeting your expectations, start by looking at what you’re doing – and what you’re not.

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A person standing at the entrance to a cave

How Deep Do You Ask People To Go?

A person standing at the entrance to a caveSome of my most spectacular failures working with teams have come from going deeper than I needed to. One particularly memorable retrospective ended with a product manager declaring, “I’m done talking about my feelings.” (It was not my finest moment.) Yes, organizations are made of people. And yes, work happens inside a container of relationships. But that doesn’t mean every attempt to address a team or organizational problem must be super deep. Choosing the depth at which to intervene is critical for every manager, consultant, and coach.

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Two cubes with faces drawn on them and thought bubbles over them. The left face is thinking of a clean spiral and smiling. The right face is thinking of a tangled line and is frowning.

Share Information, Not Anxiety

Two cubes with faces drawn on them and thought bubbles over them. The left face is thinking of a clean spiral and smiling. The right face is thinking of a tangled line and is frowning.“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss – the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup – told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job, he said, was to protect the engineers from things like this and to let them focus on building the product.

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Arrows pointing in different direction change to the point in the same direction

Getting Aligned Through Shared Understanding

“We want to know how aligned people are around the new product development strategy. How can we do that?”

Arrows pointing in different direction change to the point in the same directionA group of senior leaders at a software company asked me this question as I was helping them to prepare for their annual kickoff meeting. They’d just completed a challenging year of development on a new product initiative. While it had generated some impressive results, they recognized that they needed to approach the following year differently. They were bringing the core team of twenty-five or so key contributors – usually distributed across the United States – together for several days to roll out their plans for the new year. They’d brought me in to help plan and facilitate the event. I knew what I needed to do: help them create a shared understanding of the new strategy.

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