Comfort is what kills a good team

Teams rarely fall apart. They settle.

Nobody quits, nobody blows up, the numbers just stop moving. Everyone is still pleasant. Meetings are fine. The board looks the same in July as it did in March, and if you asked anybody what changed they would say nothing did, which is the problem.

What happened is that a group of people found the number that is good enough and stopped going past it. Good enough to keep the job. Good enough not to get called out. That number becomes the ceiling, and ceilings spread, because a new rep learns what is acceptable by watching what the tenured guy gets away with.

Management is usually the reason it sets in, and not through neglect. Through relief. When somebody who used to be a problem becomes merely fine, you stop looking at them, because you have real fires. Fine is the safest place in the building.

I do not have a clean fix for this. What I have is a habit. Once a month I would look at the people I had not thought about in thirty days and ask myself why not. Sometimes steady meant reliable. Sometimes it meant they had stopped growing in February and nothing hurt enough for me to notice.

The conversation that follows is not a discipline conversation and it should not sound like one. It is closer to this. You have been at the same number since spring. I do not think that is your number. What do you think is in the way.

Half the time they have been waiting for somebody to ask.