Coaching practices for How to Improve a Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Improve a Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
• I’ve basically written my team off as weak
• My team only ever talks about how we’re working together after something has already blown up
• When someone on my team drops the ball, everyone just waits for me to be the one to say something
• Some people on my team never really seem to feel part of it

Practices that may help

1. Align around collective results, not individual status
   Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
2. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
   The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
3. Use regular team health checks to surface dysfunction early
   Teams that check in on how they’re working together catch dysfunction before it compounds.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
4. Create a culture of peer-to-peer accountability
   Teams that only hold each other accountable through the manager haven’t built real accountability at all.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
5. Establish inclusion safety — belonging without conditions
   Make every team member feel valued and accepted as a human being before expecting performance.
   The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
6. Map your team’s genius coverage
   Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
7. Diagnose which safety stage your team is currently in
   Before intervening, accurately assess whether the deficit is inclusion, learner, contributor, or challenger safety.
   The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
8. Build vulnerability-based trust
   Teams that can’t admit weakness, mistakes, or ignorance to each other cannot genuinely collaborate.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
9. Raise awareness and build responsibility simultaneously
   Help the person see their situation more clearly while also connecting them to their ownership of it.
   The GROW Model: Coaching Conversations That Actually Move People
10. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
    Patrick Lencioni’s model describes five compounding failures that undermine teams: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results — each built on the one below. It is a practitioner framework presented as a business fable, not an empirically tested model, but its five dimensions align well with decades of team effectiveness research, making it a useful diagnostic even without controlled-trial support.

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.