Is Your Team... Fine?
October 17, 2026
Read Time - 6 minutes
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic (1928)
Like many of you reading this, I've been part of many different teams over my career. Some good, some bad, but most of them were… “fine.”
And by fine, I mean functional. We got the basics done, but often through people working on their own. It was less a leadership team than a group of capable leaders engaged in parallel play.
Fine sits between two extremes. On one side are dysfunctional teams, and on the other are extraordinary ones. Here's how I'd compare the three:
That middle column is what we know best. It's comfortable. And it’s also an easy place to get stuck, because it isn't terrible.
You may be on a team like this. You may even lead one. Fine can look like a lot of things, and it can come from a lot of places. Maybe one or two high performers carry the load for everyone else. Maybe several of your leaders are new and still getting up to speed, and you end up filling the gaps yourself. Maybe you inherited a team you didn't build, or a reorganization put people together who never chose to work together. Maybe the meeting runs smoothly, and the real conversations happen afterward, one-on-one, in your office. Or maybe a strategic plan is coming, and you're not sure this group is ready to do that kind of thinking together.
The cost of “fine” shows up in the time we spend re-explaining, defending, and following up, and in everything we quietly tolerate.
I've been lucky to serve on a few teams I’d call extraordinary. I'm talking about a group of people who energized each other and went beyond reporting to bringing new ideas and new ways to expand and develop. We didn't spend much time complaining about a person or a system that might be obstructing progress. We talked about ways to support each other, work around problems, and serve people well with the resources we had.
At the time, I didn't realize how rare a team like that was. There were things I did on purpose that helped build it, but I thought that's just what you were supposed to do.
Last month I was fortunate to spend a week at Stanford's d.school for their Design Thinking Bootcamp and was reminded of how intentional team building must be.
Why Teams Settle for Fine
Why do teams settle into fine? In my experience, the main culprit is simple: we're busy. When our week fills up and we're stretched thin, human nature is to reach for quick wins. Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee found that people tend to choose tasks with short deadlines over more important ones with bigger payoffs, even when the urgent task is worth less. Building a team never comes with a deadline. There's no checkbox for trust, and the hard conversation can usually wait. So we handle things ourselves, accept “I did my part,” and let our expectations of each other quietly slide. Building a better team is behavior change. It takes steady, consistent attention, and it's rarely as urgent as the other things competing for our focus.
There's a second reason, and it's more human. On the fine teams I've been part of, there was usually a low-grade tension underneath, from the deeper conversations we avoided: what was actually most important, how we disagreed and decided, who we could and couldn't depend on, and how we solved problems together. We liked our colleagues and wanted to keep working well with them, and those conversations felt vulnerable. We worried they'd put those professional relationships at risk. Conversations like that take a level of trust that fine teams haven't built yet. So we keep the conversations, and the relationships, on the surface. It feels safer, but it also keeps us from ever experiencing an extraordinary team.
One of my takeaways from the d.school was how quickly trust can be built in a room full of strangers. The way they framed the work, and the ground rules they set before anyone spoke, made it safe to share an idea before it was finished. In a week, that group did what I’d watched fine teams avoid for years. Dare I say, it was even fun.
The difference is that our teams aren’t strangers. They come with history, and sometimes baggage. That’s why the framing and ground rules matter even more for us. They give people permission to show up differently than they have before.
Four Small Ways Toward Extraordinary
These four ideas won't fix everything that keeps a team at fine. Trust, accountability, and clear ownership take longer to build. But they can start to shake a group free.
1. Say the ground rules out loud. The d.school used a few ground rules for brainstorming: defer judgment, build on the ideas of others, go for quantity, and encourage wild ideas. Offering an idea in front of colleagues is a vulnerable act, and no one wants to look stupid. Saying the rules out loud before your team goes into problem-solving mode tells everyone it's safe to take that risk. Amy Edmondson's research found that teams learn and improve when people believe it's safe to take interpersonal risks.
2. Make unfinished ideas normal. On a fine team, people share finished work. On an extraordinary one, people bring ideas while they're still rough, because they trust their colleagues to make them better. Needing to polish or clean up an idea isn't a failure. It's what the team is for. It helps when the leader goes first with something rough.
3. Take the expert off the table. Every team has an expert, the person whose title or track record makes their opinion the one everyone waits for. Sometimes it's you. Give everyone a few minutes to write down their own thinking before anyone talks, go around the room, and save the expert's view, including yours, for last. Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich found that groups who thought on their own first, then shared, came up with better ideas than groups who started together.
4. Practice together, not just in a crisis. Problem solving is a muscle, and when it's a team sport, the team has to build it together. That means practicing when the stakes are low, not only when a strategic plan is due or a crisis hits. The first session may feel a little forced. It gets easier each time. Read on for an example of what that could look like.
Try This Before Friday
At your next team meeting, try a fifteen-minute experiment. You can introduce it simply: “I picked up something at a workshop I want to try. It’ll take fifteen minutes, and we won’t decide anything today.” Then ask one open-ended question: “If a student could change one thing about how we work, what would it be?” Give everyone three minutes to write down as many ideas as they can. Then go around the room, and go last yourself. Name one or two ideas you’d like to come back to, thank the group, and tell them when you’ll bring those ideas back. Afterward, notice who spoke up who usually doesn’t, and which ideas you’d never heard before. Time spent thinking is not wasted time.
Bottom Line
Teams can make hard jobs infinitely easier if we take the time to develop them. That’s what they’re built for. When we bring people together, we should be able to tackle big challenges, so no one has to carry them alone. Teams should make each of us better and lead to ideas no one would have reached on their own. The work should even be enjoyable. But we don’t always treat our teams that way.
Some of us have never seen a team work that way. Some of us had it once and haven’t found our way back. And some of us settled into what we have because it was working well enough, and that’s okay. Still, a team in that extraordinary column doesn’t happen by accident. A retreat can start the conversation, but it’s built in small, steady choices: the ground rules we say out loud, the rough idea someone is willing to share, and the fifteen minutes we protect when nothing is due. Each of those choices builds a foundation that turns a group of capable leaders into a team that energizes each other.
Our teams deserve to know what that feels like. And so do we.
Put this to work on your campus.
🏛️ For Institutions: Strategic Planning and Leadership Development
Strategic plans often assume an execution capacity nobody built. They land on chairs, directors, deans, and the senior staff running every unit on campus, and few of them have been trained for the skills that move work forward: leading people and leading change. I work with campuses in three ways: coaching leadership teams into alignment, facilitating strategic planning from mission and values through execution, and running onboarding and cohort programs that develop leaders at every level. Campuses that do this equip the people they've asked to lead. Learn more.
💡 For Individual Leaders: Executive Coaching
You can be great at what you do and still be under-equipped for the role you're in. Very few campus leaders receive the development the role actually requires, so they learn it in real time, in front of the people they lead. Trial by fire is not a leadership development strategy. I work 1:1 with chairs, deans, and senior leaders who are sharpening how they lead, getting ready for the next role, or looking for one person outside the institution to work through complex issues with. They end up with a team that works in alignment. Decisions that don't all run through them. A leadership bench that's ready. A culture people want to stay in. A few spots open each quarter. Learn more.