You show up to stand-up. Everyone’s cameras are off. Someone mentions a blocker, but nobody engages. You finish your update and there’s just… silence. Another meeting ends with that familiar hollow feeling.
You’re talented. You care about your work. So why does every team interaction feel like pulling teeth?
Here’s something that might change how you think about this: it’s probably not you. But understanding what’s actually broken – and what healthy teams look like – might help you navigate it better, or recognise when it’s time to find a team that actually works.
What Working Together Can Look Like
I recently spoke with Ann Gurnell about her experience leading a turnaround at Continuum Attractions. She stepped into leadership at a brutal moment – the company had just closed half its business and made painful redundancies. She needed to unite 400 remaining employees across six disconnected attractions that had never worked together. People were traumatised, wondering if their site would be next.
If that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, you’d be right. Except they turned it around over five years – doubling profit, tripling turnover, and expanding with new attractions like York’s Chocolate Story and Coronation Street tour.
What made the difference wasn’t a new tool or process. It was something most tech teams completely miss.
The Five Things Healthy Teams Have (That Yours Probably Doesn’t)
Think of this like layers. Your team needs all five working. Miss one, and the whole experience falls apart.
1. The Foundation: Real Connection and Purpose
Healthy teams have clear membership, enough stability to build trust, and genuine interdependence – people who actually need each other to succeed. They also have people with both technical skills AND interpersonal capability, pursuing work that feels meaningful.
Your team probably has smart people and clear technical goals. But here’s what might be missing:
Stability: Are people constantly leaving? Are team members temporary or contractors cycling through? Real teams need stability to build trust.
Ann’s company had just been through closures and redundancies. Stability was shattered. But they rebuilt it by being honest about the pain, bringing people together, and creating genuine connection.
Interdependence: Do you actually need each other, or could everyone just work in parallel? If you don’t need each other to succeed, you’re not a team – you’re a group of individuals with a shared Slack channel.
Interpersonal capability: Ann’s team hired tour guides through auditions – testing whether they could engage emotionally and solve problems creatively. When’s the last time your team hired for those qualities?
“Every single person will have problems to solve every day,” Ann emphasised. “That creative problem solving” was essential regardless of role.
Meaningful direction: You probably know your sprint goals. But do you understand why your work matters beyond shipping features? Ann’s team rallied around “engaging stories in memorable places.” Simple. Clear. Connected to purpose.
If your team doesn’t have these foundations, nothing else can fix the feeling you’re experiencing.
2. The Support: Structure and Resources You Need
Healthy teams have appropriate task design (autonomy with support, not just responsibility without authority), clear norms about how things work, recognition for contributions, information when needed, training opportunities, and necessary resources.
Ann’s company went from “head office that dictates” to a model where site managers wrote their own business plans. But they didn’t just hand over autonomy – they built capability first.
They invested in training budgets that didn’t exist before. HR spent time on-site supporting teams, not auditing them. They created development opportunities tailored to each location.
Does your team have:
- Autonomy with the tools and support to use it? Or just responsibility without authority?
- Clear norms about how work gets done? Or unspoken rules you violate without knowing?
- Recognition for your contributions? Or just tickets closed and story points completed?
- Training opportunities? Or “figure it out yourself”?
- The information you actually need? Or are you constantly guessing?
If you’re expected to perform without these supports, the problem isn’t you.
3. The Leadership: Coaching That Actually Helps
Healthy teams have leaders who are available when you need help, genuinely helpful (not just directive), emotionally mature enough to handle difficulty, and they enable team members to help each other.
Ann’s team didn’t micromanage. They focused on what wasn’t working: What problems are we facing? Where do you need help? What are we learning?
They also recognized something crucial: they needed leaders with “a fair degree of what we would call high EQ – emotionally mature as people.”
Not everyone on the leadership team started there. “Being compassionate about [the difficult parts] was easier for some than others,” Ann admitted.
But they understood that emotional maturity in leadership wasn’t optional.
Does your manager:
- Make time when you need help? Or are they always “too busy”?
- Help you grow? Or just assign tickets?
- Create safety for learning? Or make you feel dumb for asking questions?
- Encourage team members to help each other? Or is everyone on their own?
If your leadership doesn’t enable growth and connection, that’s not your failing. That’s a systemic problem.
4. The Flow: How Work Actually Happens
Healthy teams have real communication (not just status updates), genuine commitment (not just compliance), clear standards, good planning, meaningful knowledge sharing, and natural collaboration.
Ann’s team created multiple ways to actually connect:
- Pizza and beer nights at attractions
- Away days where teams visited competitors together
- Regular meetings focused on learning, not just reporting
- Knowledge sharing that felt natural, not forced
They also tried to normalise asking for help – though Ann admitted they struggled with the language. “Support function” implied asking for help meant failure.
The lesson: you can have all the right processes, but if your culture makes vulnerability feel dangerous, they’re useless.
Does your team have:
- Real communication? Or just Slack messages and standups where nobody actually connects?
- Passionate commitment? Or are people just doing the minimum?
- Knowledge flowing freely? Or does everyone guard their expertise?
- Natural collaboration? Or does every interaction feel transactional?
If processes exist but feel hollow, that’s a culture problem, not a you problem.
5. The Result: What You Experience
Healthy teams have good working relationships, positive team climate (the atmosphere and mood you feel every day), and strong performance.
When the first four layers are solid, this layer takes care of itself.
Ann’s teams became “passionate about the place they worked.” Students on zero-hour contracts worked unusual hours because they believed in the mission. Staff described feeling a “sense of belonging.”
Customers described teams as “wonderfully welcoming and so knowledgeable.”
Over five years with 400 people across six sites – after closing half the business and making painful redundancies – they achieved remarkable results: doubled profit, tripled turnover, expanded the portfolio.
That’s what good looks like. Not pretending to be someone you’re not. Not checking your personality at the door. But bringing your whole self and having that be valued, not tolerated.
Why Your Team Probably Doesn’t Feel Like This
Most tech teams optimise for efficiency, not humanity. We have standups where nobody connects. Sprint reviews where we report status but never share struggles. Retros where we identify problems but never address how we feel.
Here’s what Ann said that captures why this matters: “Decision-making processes for human beings… they gather information, but they decide with emotion.”
Your team might have great processes. But if people don’t feel safe, connected, or purposeful, they’re making decisions with negative emotions. That affects everything – code quality, collaboration, retention, innovation.
You can get to “good enough” performance with process alone. But exceptional performance requires positive team climate – the emotional atmosphere, the sense of safety, the quality of relationships.
Ann put it perfectly: “For all the strategy, for all the spreadsheets… it’s human to human everything.”
What You Can Actually Do
You don’t need to be a manager to recognise what’s missing or to influence what you can.
Diagnose which layer feels weakest:
If the foundation is broken, you’ll feel: unclear membership, constant turnover, working in silos, no meaningful purpose
If support is broken, you’ll feel: responsibility without authority, no help when struggling, no development, information blackholes
If leadership is broken, you’ll feel: managers unavailable or unhelpful, no peer support, emotionally immature responses to problems
If flow is broken, you’ll feel: hollow communication, compliance not commitment, no knowledge sharing, forced collaboration
If the result is suffering, you’ll feel: transactional relationships, Sunday night dread, results without fulfilment
Try small things within your sphere:
- Share something real in standup – not just “I’m blocked” but “I’m feeling stuck and not sure what I’m missing”
- Ask a colleague how they’re actually doing – real question, real curiosity
- Recognise when someone shows emotional maturity or creative problem-solving – that’s valuable
- Model that asking for help is strength, not weakness
Recognise your own value:
Ann’s team specifically looked for people with “emotional maturity.” If you’re reading this and relating to the dysfunction, you probably have more emotional intelligence than you realise.
That’s not oversensitivity. That’s awareness. High-performing teams need people like you.
The Hard Truth
Sometimes the team isn’t fixable. Sometimes leadership doesn’t have the emotional maturity. Sometimes the culture makes vulnerability dangerous.
Ann mentioned that during their turnaround, “there were people who struggled with it and there were people who therefore left, and that was fine.”
This was after closures and redundancies, when trust was already fragile. Some people couldn’t make the journey. And that’s okay.
If you’re in a place where the five layers are fundamentally broken and leadership isn’t addressing it, you don’t have to wait around for them to figure it out.
You deserve work that feels meaningful. You deserve relationships that energise rather than drain. You deserve leadership with emotional maturity.
Not eventually. Not after you prove yourself more. Now.
What Good Actually Looks Like
When Ann described the team climate they created, she talked about teams being “passionate about their work,” feeling a “sense of belonging,” having their “particular personal aspects valued.”
A Spanish woman joined the team. Someone researched and discovered there was actually a Spanish person documented as living on that historic street in the 17th century. So she brought her authentic self to the role in a way that enriched everyone.
That’s what good looks like.
Ann’s team succeeded because they never chose between process and people. They had risk registers AND emotional engagement. Performance data AND leadership development. Strategic planning AND making each other human.
“For all the strategy, for all the spreadsheets,” Ann explained, “it’s human to human everything.”
You already knew work could be better than this. Now you know what the five layers of better actually look like – and which ones your team is missing.
At CGA Management, we help technical leaders understand team dynamics using frameworks developed through over 20 years of research with Birkbeck University and real-world experience across organisations from XL Catlin and Capgemini to start-ups. Because exceptional performance requires both the spreadsheets and the stories.
Which layer is your team missing most?
This post is part of a three-part series exploring the same transformation story from different perspectives: executive leadership, technical management, and team experience.\nTo hear the original interview with Ann Gurnell, listen here.
