Introduction
No leader likes to admit their team is in trouble. But dysfunction doesn’t always announce itself with chaos—it often creeps in quietly, disguised as busyness, politeness, or the hope that things will improve with time.
Years ago, I was brought in as General Manager for an American Express concierge business that Sodexo had acquired. The original leadership team had successfully built and scaled the company. However, after the acquisition, the new parent company installed leaders whose management style and strategic approach didn’t align with the unique high-end service culture. The decline was rapid—performance slipped almost immediately, and the business quickly shifted from a growth story to a liability.
That’s when I was brought in to lead the turnaround.
My role wasn’t to point fingers—it was to listen. To understand what the team needed, where decisions had gone off track, and how to rebuild alignment and trust. That meant working with the existing staff, collaborating with leadership, and helping Sodexo recognize that this business was never designed to run like a low-margin food service operation.
In the end, the most important insight wasn’t about blame—it was about clarity: knowing when a business model, culture, and strategy simply don’t belong under the same roof.
When you’re facing dysfunction, it’s tempting to look away or wait it out. But what if dysfunction isn’t a sign of failure? What if it’s an invitation to build something more honest—and far more resilient?
Dysfunction starts quietly before it becomes obvious
Most teams don’t fall apart overnight. The slide happens gradually, one unspoken frustration at a time. You see it in the missed commitments that get rationalized as exceptions. The meetings that end with no clear ownership or decisions. The culture of caution that emerges when people start to wonder if speaking up will cost them more than it helps.
In high-performing environments, the patterns are even more complex to detect. When talented people care about results, they’ll work around dysfunction for as long as they can, shouldering more than their share, cleaning up avoidable mistakes, absorbing ambiguity that should never have been theirs to solve. On the surface, everyone looks busy and engaged. Underneath, resentment and fatigue start to erode trust.
Eventually, these hidden fractures become too big to ignore—growth stalls. Promising initiatives lose momentum. The team becomes reactive instead of strategic, spending more energy managing perceptions than solving problems.
In the case of the concierge business, it was clear that the frontline team had been carrying the weight of leadership misalignment for too long, as evidenced by our missed service level agreements. They were skilled professionals who knew how to deliver an exceptional service experience. But without clear direction and with conflicting priorities coming from above, they were forced into survival mode.
Before any turnaround can begin, leaders have to acknowledge this truth: dysfunction takes root quietly, and the longer you pretend it’s not there, the deeper it grows.
The turnaround begins with radical clarity, not quick wins
It’s tempting to think the fastest way out of dysfunction is to act. Launch a new initiative, swap out a few team members, issue a rallying cry. But in my experience, real turnarounds don’t start with movement—they begin with clarity.
In that early phase at American Express under Sodexo, the priority wasn’t to reassure everyone that things would get better. It was to understand, in detail, why things had unraveled so quickly. That meant sitting down with employees and listening. What had changed after the acquisition? Where were decisions breaking down? What assumptions were still shaping how the work was managed?
We uncovered a consistent theme: the business model itself required a level of service customization, client engagement, and margin tolerance that would never align with Sodexo’s core operating model. No amount of pep talks or incremental fixes could solve that misalignment.
This is where many leaders stall out, hoping to patch over systemic issues with tactical wins. But clarity demands more courage. It requires surfacing the uncomfortable truth that sometimes a strategy was simply wrong, a process is no longer fit, or a structure has passed its useful life.
Without that radical clarity, any momentum you create will be temporary. Teams will sense that you’re avoiding the real issues, and trust—once lost—will be even harder to earn back.
Sustained momentum requires new agreements and new behaviors
Clarity alone doesn’t turn things around. Once you know what’s broken, the next step is to build new agreements about how the team will operate—and hold each other accountable to those commitments.
At the concierge business, we didn’t just name the misalignment and walk away. We began defining what success looked like in practical, day-to-day terms. The first step was to agree on what “great” looked like in action. Then, we assigned authority with intention: who leads, who executes. Finally, we identified the behaviors that would rebuild credibility, both internally and externally.
We established clear accountability structures, not to micromanage, but to provide everyone with a shared understanding of where authority and responsibility began and ended. In many ways, this is the foundation of an autonomous team: people can only own outcomes when expectations and resources are clearly defined and explicit.
Then came the most critical part—modeling those new behaviors consistently. I’ve seen countless leaders declare a “new era” only to revert to old habits the moment pressure mounts. Sustained momentum requires discipline. It means reinforcing standards in small ways every day and refusing to let setbacks become excuses to slide backward.
Within a few months, the business had stabilized. Performance rebounded, confidence returned, and the staff began to see themselves and each other differently. What had once felt like an irreversible decline became proof that with the right focus, even a team in crisis can find its footing again.
Conclusion
Dysfunction doesn’t mean your team is broken beyond repair. More often, it’s a sign that something foundational—such as strategy, clarity, or trust—needs to be rebuilt.
I’ve learned that team turnarounds aren’t defined by a single heroic act or a charismatic leader who saves the day. They’re the result of leaders willing to pause, get honest about what isn’t working, and create the discipline required to do things differently.
If you’re willing to look beneath the surface of missed goals or low morale. In that, you’ll often find that dysfunction is simply unspoken confusion waiting for clarity, and a group of capable people ready to rise to the occasion when the path forward is finally clear.
Where in your team are you tolerating patterns that no longer serve your mission? And what would change if you decided to address them—fully and without delay?
