You got promoted because you were brilliant at your craft. Maybe the best developer, the sharpest engineer, the person who could solve problems others couldn’t touch.
Then suddenly you’re managing people, and nothing makes sense anymore.
The skills that made you excellent – logical thinking, systematic approaches, clear problem-solving – seem useless when your team won’t gel, when conflicts brew, when good people keep leaving.
Here’s what nobody tells you: you’re not failing. You just don’t have a mental model for this yet.
The Pattern That Repeats
I recently spoke with Ann Gurnell about a challenge that might sound familiar. She stepped into leadership at Continuum Attractions at a brutal moment – the company had just closed half its business, made painful redundancies, and needed to unite 400 remaining employees across six disconnected visitor attractions that had never worked together.
Fresh trauma. Broken trust. Teams wondering if their site would be next.
She helped turn it around over five years – doubling profit, tripling turnover, and expanding with new attractions.
What struck me wasn’t just the results. It was how she thought about the problem. Like you’d approach system architecture – understanding the layers, seeing how they depend on each other, recognising that you can’t skip the foundation and expect the structure to hold.
The Layers Nobody Explains
Think of high-performing teams like a stack. Each layer depends on the ones below it. Miss one, and the whole thing becomes unstable.
Layer 1: The Foundation
This is about three things: Do you have a real team? Do you have the right people? Do you have a compelling direction?
Real team isn’t just “people who report to you.” It means clear membership, enough stability to build trust, and genuine interdependence – people who actually need each other to succeed.
Ann’s sites started completely disconnected – and dealing with the aftermath of closures and redundancies. People were traumatised. The breakthrough came when they brought general managers together for the first time.
“We were doing our leadership development together,” Ann explained, “and making each other human to each other.”
Not a team-building exercise. Not trust falls. Real learning, side by side, making each other human after crisis.
Right people isn’t just about technical skills – it’s about interpersonal capability too. Ann’s team hired tour guides through auditions, testing whether they could engage emotionally and solve problems creatively under pressure.
‘Every single person will have problems to solve every day,’ Ann emphasised. ‘Having a positive and creative approach to problem solving’ was the key criterion regardless of role.
Compelling direction means everyone understands it, it stretches the team, and it matters beyond just hitting targets.
Ann’s team rallied around “engaging stories in memorable places.” Simple. Clear. Connected to purpose beyond profit.
If this layer is weak, nothing else you do will fix it. You’ve probably experienced this – trying to improve processes or communication when the foundation is cracked.
Layer 2: The Support System
This is about structure (how work is organised) and context (the environment you create).
Ann’s company evolved from ‘head office that dictates’ to a model where site managers wrote their own business plans. But watch this carefully – they didn’t just hand over autonomy. They built capability first.
They invested in training budgets that didn’t exist before. They sent HR to sit with site teams – not to audit, but to understand and support. They created apprenticeship schemes tailored to each location.
Structure means giving people appropriate task design (autonomy with support), clear norms (how we work together), and the right team size.
Context means providing recognition, information and data, training opportunities, and necessary resources.
You can’t skip this. Autonomy without capability creates chaos. Accountability without support creates burnout.
Layer 3: Your Actual Job
This is the part technical people resist because it sounds soft. But reframe it: coaching is debugging human systems in real-time.
Ann’s executive team “did a lot of miles” – visiting sites regularly, but not to micromanage. They focused on red flags: What’s not working? Where do you need help? What are we learning?
Good coaching requires being available when they need you, being helpful (not just directive), developing other leaders, and enabling team members to help each other.
Ann emphasised something crucial: they needed a fair degree of what we would call high EQ, or emotionally mature people, to take on this role.
Not everyone started there. ‘Being compassionate about (the difficult parts) was easier for some than others,’ Ann admitted.
But they recognised that emotional maturity wasn’t optional. It was the operating system for everything else.
Layer 4: How Work Flows
This is about communication, commitment, standards, planning, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.
Ann’s team created multiple channels for real connection:
- Pizza and beer nights at attractions
- Away days where teams visited competitors together
- Regular manager meetings to share knowledge
- Daily performance data flowing to those who needed it
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 people feel weak for using them, they’re worthless.
Layer 5: What You Actually Get
This is working relationships, team climate (the atmosphere), and task 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. Customers described staff as “wonderfully welcoming and so knowledgeable.”
Business results over five years with 400 people across six sites: doubled profit, tripled turnover, expanded with new attractions.
And this was after closing half the business and navigating painful redundancies.
The Insight That Changes Everything
Here’s what Ann said that reframed how I think about technical leadership: ‘Decision-making processes for human beings… they gather information, but they decide with emotion.’
You want logic. You want replicable processes. You want the people equivalent of version control.
But humans don’t work that way. And fighting that reality is exhausting you.
You can get to “good enough” performance with process alone. But exceptional performance requires addressing the emotional and relational dimension.
Ann put it perfectly: ‘For all the strategy, for all the spreadsheets… it’s human to human everything.’
What This Means for You Monday Morning
You don’t need to overhaul everything. Start with diagnosis – which layer feels weakest?
Layer 1 (Foundation) problems look like:
- Unclear who’s actually on the team
- Constant turnover or temporary members
- People working in silos, not needing each other
- Nobody understands the real goal beyond features
- You hired for skills but team chemistry is terrible
Layer 2 (Support) problems look like:
- People have responsibility without authority
- No clarity on how decisions get made
- Teams asking for help but getting nothing
- No training budget or development opportunities
- Information silos everywhere
Layer 3 (Coaching) problems look like:
- You’re never available when they need you
- You solve their problems instead of helping them learn
- Your peer leaders are technically great but interpersonally weak
- Team members never help each other
Layer 4 (Process) problems look like:
- Communication is just status updates
- People are compliant but not committed
- Standards are unclear or inconsistently applied
- No knowledge sharing between team members
- Collaboration feels forced, not natural
Layer 5 (Output) problems look like:
- Relationships are transactional
- Sunday night dread is real
- You’re hitting targets but losing good people
- Team feels like individuals, not a collective
The Reality Nobody Warns You About
Some people struggled with Ann’s transformation. Some left. “There were people who struggled with it,” Ann acknowledged. “There’s pain. There’s things that are difficult.”
This is reality – especially after restructuring when trust is already damaged. The question isn’t how to avoid it. It’s whether you have a mental model to navigate it with compassion while still moving forward.
You became a manager because you were good at technical work. But management is different work requiring different mental models.
The good news? You’re already good at learning systems. Team dynamics is just another system. You just need to admit you’re learning new architecture.
Over five years with 400 people across six sites after devastating restructuring, Ann’s team proved it’s possible.
What Good Actually Looks Like
When Ann described what they built, she talked about “making each other human to each other.” Teams that were “passionate about the place they worked.” A culture where ‘we were all learning and it was OK for things not to work.’
That’s not weakness. That’s the foundation of high performance.
They didn’t choose between spreadsheets and storytelling. They did both. Risk registers AND emotional engagement. Performance data AND leadership development. Strategic planning AND making each other human.
You can learn this. You just need to recognise it as a learnable system with its own architecture.
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 feels weakest in your team right now?
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.
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