3 proven tactics that turn chaotic teams into high-performing machines

"I've hired talented people, but they just don't work well together." This confession from a former colleague has stuck with me for years. James had built a tech startup with impressive individual contributors, but their development timelines were constantly slipping, and team members operated in silos rather than as a cohesive unit.

The symptoms he described were painfully familiar to anyone who's worked in dysfunctional teams. Duplicated efforts, crossed wires in communication, and growing frustration as team members stepped on each other's toes. "I'm not sure whether to blame the process or the people," he told me during one of our catch-ups, clearly at his wit's end.

When I reconnected with James several months later, the transformation was remarkable. His team now moved with coordination, spoke a common language about responsibilities, and had eliminated numerous inefficiencies in their workflow. What changed wasn't the people—it was their approach to teamwork.

Their secret? A structured approach to defining teams, clarifying roles, and optimising workflows. Through years of studying team dynamics and collecting stories from team leaders across industries, I've identified three powerful tactics that consistently transform how teams function, regardless of industry or company size.

Three Powerful Tactics to Build a Truly Effective Team

The following three tactics from Team Tactics by Pip Decks provide a framework for creating high-performing teams through better structure, clearer communication, and optimised workflows:

1. Team Circles: Creating smaller, focused teams to break down silos and improve conversations
2. Roles & Responsibilities: Establishing crystal-clear ownership of tasks and decisions
3. Productivity Blueprint: Identifying and eliminating time-wasting activities that drain team energy

Let's explore each tactic with practical examples from a recruitment agency that used these approaches to transform their team from a group of disconnected individuals into a cohesive, high-performing unit.

1. Team Circles: Break Down Silos for Better Conversations

Large, unwieldy teams struggle with communication overhead. The Team Circles tactic creates smaller, focused groups with clear communication protocols to ensure everyone stays informed without drowning in meetings.

Why it works

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. This wasn't just about saving on catering costs. Research shows that smaller teams spend less time coordinating and more time executing. They develop stronger bonds and have clearer accountability structures.

By creating concentric circles of involvement, you ensure the right people are in the right conversations—neither excluded from critical information nor dragged into irrelevant meetings.

How to create Team Circles

1. Gather the right people
   • Invite your immediate team and key stakeholders who help "connect the dots" in your organisation
   • Ensure representation from all disciplines that touch your work
2. Draw your circle framework
   • Create three concentric circles on a whiteboard or digital canvas
   • Label them: Core Team (inner circle), Involved (middle circle), and Informed (outer circle)
3. Define and populate each circle
   • Core Team (inner circle): Up to nine multidisciplinary members with a shared goal who communicate daily
   • Involved (middle circle): Up to 12 specialists who contribute expertise as needed and receive regular progress updates
   • Informed (outer circle): Up to 24 stakeholders who need awareness of directional changes and bi-weekly updates

Real-world example

I once heard about a recruitment agency that was struggling to build their new website. A friend who consulted with them told me their entire 15-person team was involved in every decision, creating endless meetings and slow progress. After introducing Team Circles, they identified a core team of five people—the marketing lead, senior recruiter, UX designer, developer, and content writer—who would drive the project forward.

They placed their industry specialists and finance team in the "Involved" circle, to be consulted on specific decisions but not required at every meeting. The remaining staff and external partners were in the "Informed" circle, receiving bi-weekly updates.

This restructuring reduced their meeting time by 60% while increasing the speed of decision-making dramatically. Within two weeks, they had made more progress than in the previous two months, and team members reported feeling more productive and less burned out.

2. Roles & Responsibilities: Eliminate Confusion About Who Does What

Even in well-structured teams, confusion about who makes decisions and handles specific tasks can create friction. The Roles & Responsibilities tactic creates crystal clarity about ownership and decision-making authority.

Why it works

Most team friction stems not from personality conflicts but from unclear expectations. When roles overlap or have gaps, team members either duplicate effort or assume someone else is handling critical tasks. The Roles & Responsibilities tactic creates a shared understanding that reduces tensions and improves efficiency.

Research from Gallup shows that teams with clearly defined roles are 11% more productive and have 28% higher customer ratings than those with ambiguous responsibilities.

How to clarify roles and responsibilities

1. Set up your framework
   • Create a grid with disciplines/roles as columns (e.g., Designer, Developer, Product Owner)
   • Add three rows labelled: Do, Discuss, Decide
2. Gather outside perspectives
   • Ask each team member to describe what they think the person to their left does
   • For each role, capture: core activities they do, what they discuss with others, and what decisions they own
   • Place these notes in the corresponding grid cells
3. Share and discuss perceptions
   • Have each person review how others perceive their role
   • Note any surprises or misunderstandings
4. Add self-perceptions
   • Have each person define their own role using the same categories
   • Compare these with the team's perceptions
   • Discuss and resolve any significant gaps or overlaps
5. Refine collaboratively
   • As a group, move and adjust the definitions until everyone agrees
   • Pay special attention to decision rights and areas where responsibilities might overlap

Real-world example

Continuing with the recruitment agency story I mentioned earlier, my friend explained how their website project was plagued by confusion about who made final decisions on design elements. The designer assumed the marketing lead had final approval, while the marketing lead thought the agency owner needed to sign off on major design choices.

Through the Roles & Responsibilities exercise, they discovered these misalignments and several others. The content writer was creating materials that the recruitment specialists later rewrote, doubling the work. The developer was making technical decisions that impacted the user experience without consulting the UX designer.

After clarifying these boundaries, they created a decision matrix where the marketing lead had final approval on visual design, recruitment specialists reviewed content before it was written, and the developer and UX designer had specific areas they owned versus collaborated on.

This clarity eliminated rework and significantly reduced the tension that had been building within the team. One team member remarked, "For the first time, I feel like I can focus on my job without constantly looking over my shoulder."

3. Productivity Blueprint: Eliminate Time-Wasting Activities

Even with clear team structures and well-defined roles, inefficient processes can drain productivity. The Productivity Blueprint tactic identifies these energy-sappers and creates focused improvements.

Why it works

Inefficiencies naturally creep into workflows over time. That "temporary workaround" becomes standard procedure; the extra approval step never gets removed; the tool that was once helpful becomes a burden as needs evolve.

By systematically mapping the actual workflow (not the idealised process that exists on paper), teams can identify these productivity drains and make targeted improvements. McKinsey research suggests that eliminating these inefficiencies can reclaim up to 20% of an organisation's productive capacity.

How to create a Productivity Blueprint

1. Select a common workflow
   • Choose a process your team performs regularly (e.g., creating a new feature, onboarding a client)
   • Focus on something that feels inefficient or causes frustration
2. Map the current process
   • Create a grid with three rows: Tasks, People, and Tools
   • For Tasks, list each step in the process sequentially
   • For People, note which roles are involved in each task
   • For Tools, record what software, templates, or resources are used
3. Identify improvement opportunities
   • Add a fourth row labelled "Ideas"
   • Review the map together, looking for redundancies, bottlenecks, or unnecessary steps
   • For each potential improvement, phrase it as a "What can we..." question
   • Consider automation, elimination, combination, or simplification
4. Prioritise and implement changes
   • Vote on which improvements would have the highest impact
   • Select 1-3 changes to implement immediately
   • Assign clear ownership for each change

Real-world example

The recruitment agency in our story eventually applied the Productivity Blueprint to their candidate screening process. According to my friend who worked with them, mapping out the workflow revealed several inefficiencies: each new CV was being reviewed by three different team members in sequence, interview notes were being manually typed and then transferred to their CRM system, and candidates were being asked for the same information multiple times.

Their improvement ideas included:

• "What can we do to review CVs in parallel rather than sequence?"
• "What can we create to capture interview notes directly in our CRM?"
• "What can we automate to collect candidate information once and share it across systems?"

Implementing just these three changes reduced their candidate processing time by 40% and dramatically improved the candidate experience. The time saved allowed their recruiters to have more meaningful conversations with both candidates and clients, improving placement quality and speed.

From Tactics to Transformation: Bringing It All Together

While each tactic delivers value independently, the real magic happens when you implement them as an integrated system:

1. Start with Team Circles to create the right team structure and communication flows
2. Define Roles & Responsibilities within those teams to clarify ownership and decision rights
3. Use the Productivity Blueprint to optimise the workflows between these well-structured, clearly-defined teams

This systematic approach addresses the three fundamental elements of team effectiveness: structure, clarity, and efficiency. When all three align, teams can achieve remarkable results with less friction and more satisfaction.

"We don't have time for this kind of team development"

Consider how much time your team already loses to confusion, rework, and unnecessary meetings. These three tactics require approximately 3 hours of focused work but save countless hours of wasted effort. The recruitment agency in our example estimated they reclaimed over 20 hours per week after implementing these changes—a 400% return on their initial time investment within the first month.

"Our work is too creative/complex/unique for this kind of structure"

The most innovative companies in the world—from Pixar to SpaceX—use clear team structures and processes to enhance creativity, not stifle it. Structure creates freedom by removing the cognitive load of constant coordination and clarification. When people know their roles and can trust efficient processes, they have more mental space for creative problem-solving.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

1. Creating structures and then forgetting them rather than referring to them regularly and updating as needed
2. Not involving the right people in developing these frameworks, leading to limited buy-in
3. Over-engineering processes with too much detail that creates bureaucracy rather than clarity
4. Confusing roles with individuals, making the system dependent on specific people rather than clearly defined functions
5. Failing to revisit and refine as the team and its work evolve

The most common pitfall is treating these as one-time exercises rather than living frameworks that guide daily work and evolve with your team's needs.

The Difference Between Functioning Teams and Exceptional Ones

Remember James, the tech startup founder I mentioned at the beginning? Six months after implementing these tactics, his team not only met their product release deadline but did so with fewer bugs and more innovative features than any previous release.

"The difference is night and day," he shared in an email that I still reference when teaching these concepts. "We're not just shipping code faster—we're doing better work because people understand how they fit together and where to focus their energy."

That's the difference between teams that merely function and those that truly excel: not just talented individuals, but a thoughtfully designed system that amplifies those talents through clarity, structure, and optimised workflows.

In today's fast-paced business environment, this kind of team effectiveness isn't just nice to have—it's a competitive advantage. These three tactics provide a proven framework for achieving it, one well-structured conversation at a time.

Take Your Team Leadership to the Next Level

Ready to transform your team from chaotic to coordinated? These tactics are just the beginning of what's possible when you approach team leadership with intention and structure.

For a complete toolkit of team leadership practices, Team Tactics by Pip Decks gives you 54 practical team leadership tools in a beautiful card deck, covering everything from building psychological safety to facilitating productive conflict. Each card provides clear instructions and examples you can apply immediately to your next team interaction.

Developed through work with hundreds of teams across industries, these tactics have helped thousands of leaders transform their teams from groups of individuals into cohesive, high-performing units.

Get Team Tactics →

The difference between being a manager and becoming a truly inspiring leader isn't about having more authority—it's about creating more alignment. Start your journey to exceptional team performance today.

Based on tactics from Team Tactics by Pip Decks.

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