Reading the Room: How to Know When a Team Is in Trouble
The obvious signals that a team is in trouble — missed deadlines, attrition, escalating incidents — are obvious precisely because they’re lagging indicators. By the time they’re visible, whatever was causing them has been present for a while. You can respond to them, but you’re responding to a problem that’s already been compounding. The signals I’ve come to pay most attention to are earlier and quieter. They don’t show up in metrics. They don’t surface in project status updates. They surface in skip-level conversations, in the texture of how managers talk about their teams, in what I notice when I drop into a design review. If you’re not looking for them deliberately, it’s easy to walk right past them. ...