Summary: In this article, Mark S. Kenny explains why the health of a team is shaped less by structure or team-building activities and more by the everyday behaviors people practice with one another.

Who wants to be on a team that feels fractured, full of friction, or just plain frustrating? No one.

And this is not a small problem. When it’s not solved, teams lose people, energy, engagement, and execution. When the executive leadership team is fractured, the effects spread through the organization.

Most of the time leaders reach for structural or team-building solutions. I think this is because structural fixes and team-building activities are easier to grasp. They feel tangible. But by themselves, they don’t actually solve the problem.

The real leverage is everyday behaviors.

A team usually doesn’t look fractured because of one dramatic event. It looks fractured because certain behaviors have become normal over time.

You can often see the fracture in behaviors like these:

• Hiding mistakes, avoiding asking for help, or pretending to know
• Holding back disagreement to keep the conversation comfortable
• Getting defensive, digging in, or overpowering others when challenged
• Talking about issues outside the room instead of addressing them directly
• Raising doubts after a decision instead of before it
• Withholding support for a team decision once the decision is made
• Avoiding calling out missed commitments or unclear ownership
• Protecting individual priorities, departments, or agendas at the expense of the team’s most important outcomes

So What Actually Fixes It?

I talk a lot about giving each other Presence, Truth, Grace, and Belief. Those aren’t abstract ideas. They show up in behavior.

Presence changes how we listen. Truth changes what we are willing to say. Grace changes how we respond to mistakes. Belief changes how much room we give others to own the work.

A team-building session can help. But only if it surfaces the behaviors that need to change and is followed by sustained work to practice those behaviors together.

Teams fracture behaviorally. And they have to be repaired behaviorally.

So ask yourself:

What behaviors have we allowed to become normal that are making it harder for us to work as one team?

Summary: What does it take for an organization to truly work as one team? In this article, Mark S. Kenny explains why strategy, structure, and process are not enough on their own, and why collaboration depends on what people give one another beneath the visible work: Presence, Truth, Grace, and Belief.

What does it take to build an organization that actually, truly works together as one team?

A lot depends on it: how we serve customers, how we execute across departments, how well we achieve our strategic objectives.

We almost always start with what’s visible: structure, processes, meetings, communication plans, and even strategy.

All of that matters.

But I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations in various capacities during my career. All of them focus on what’s visible. Only some of them actually worked together cohesively.

Those visible elements help coordinate people. But they don’t necessarily cause people to collaborate.

That’s why two organizations can have equally good systems and vastly different abilities to work as one team.

There is work to do beneath the work. Before people can execute the strategy together, they have to give one another what makes joint execution possible.

Collaboration isn’t what we do together. Collaboration is what we give each other.

What do we need to give?

• Presence: enough attention and curiosity to understand what the other person or team is carrying.
• Truth: enough honesty to put what is real into the room.
• Grace: enough room to recover from mistakes, friction, and history without letting the past keep controlling the future.
• Belief: enough confidence in one another to trust people to contribute, grow, and own their part.

Before people can execute together, they have to give one another the conditions that make execution possible. Those are not soft extras around the work. They are what turn coordination into collaboration.

Before asking “Do we have the right strategy, process, or meeting structure?” ask another question first:

“Are we giving one another what we need to make any of it work?”

Summary: This article from Mark S. Kenny explores how leaders can give grace without lowering standards, avoiding accountability, or immediately restoring trust. It offers three distinctions and three practical questions to help leaders keep the past from unnecessarily determining the future.

In my last article, I wrote about what I call the Grace Toll: the cost teams and organizations keep paying for something that has already happened.

But there is an obvious question: what if what happened actually matters?

What if someone made a decision that hurt the team? What if a leader handled something poorly? What if a department repeatedly failed to follow through?

Are we supposed to simply give grace and move on?

No. Grace is not a free pass.

Over the past week, I’ve wrestled more with this idea. Because I naturally lean towards giving grace. But I’ve also experienced plenty of times when guardrails, boundaries, and accountability were appropriate and needed.

So how should we think about this?

Here are three distinctions I’ve come up with to help:

1. Grace doesn’t eliminate accountability. It eliminates punishment beyond accountability.

We have to address the behavior: someone didn’t follow-through, a person acted inappropriately, or they didn’t meet the standard. We need to have the conversation, clarify the expectation, and establish consequences if necessary.

But once we’ve appropriately dealt with it, there is a difference between holding someone accountable and making them keep paying.

2. Grace does not require you to restore trust immediately. It allows someone the opportunity to rebuild it.

Someone who has repeatedly broken commitments may need to demonstrate reliability over time.

Grace says that I won’t pretend it didn’t happen or take appropriate measures, but I also won’t decide that what happened is all this person will ever be.

3. Grace doesn’t mean ignoring patterns. It means making sure we’re responding to new patterns instead of old ones.

An old story can become the lens through which everything someone does gets interpreted. They ask a question and we think “There they go again.” They disagree and we think “Typical.” They make a mistake and we think “See? I knew we couldn’t trust them.”

In this case, the past isn’t informing the future, it’s determining it.

With those distinctions in mind, here’s a simple three-question test to help us discern a situation:

1. Has this been appropriately addressed?
2. Is there a current pattern that requires accountability, or am I responding to an old one?
3. What would I do differently right now if I weren’t thinking about this person’s past?

Grace doesn’t ask us to lower the standard. It asks us to address what needs to be addressed without letting the past run the future.

We need to hold people accountable. Set appropriate boundaries. And require trust to be rebuilt when necessary.

But somewhere along the way, we also have to give people the opportunity for tomorrow to be different from yesterday.

And someday, we’ll need someone to give us that opportunity too.