Leaders often blame teams for acting like individuals rather than collaborating, but the real cause is usually organizational structure: part-time staffing across multiple teams, individual utilization metrics, functional reporting lines that outweigh team goals, constant mid-sprint interruptions, assignment-focused questions, frequent team reshuffling, and reward systems that celebrate individual heroics over sustainable teamwork. Each dynamic is paired with concrete leadership changes, such as making shared staffing constraints visible, focusing on finishing work rather than individual busyness, aligning functional managers' incentives with team outcomes, making interruption tradeoffs explicit, asking team-level progress questions, treating team reshuffling as a real cost, and rewarding collaborative behaviors instead of last-minute heroics.
