How many meetings moved your team forward last week? Tom explores why most team rituals fail at building trust and alignment, sharing lessons from NASA JPL and startups on creating ceremonies that actually work.

Why Your Team Rituals Are Optimized for the Wrong Thing

Key Topics Covered

The Missing Middle Challenge

• Why mid-sized companies (200-1000 employees) face unique coordination challenges
• Too big for startup osmosis, too small for enterprise playbooks
• The need for distributed decision-making without dedicated alignment teams

Two Contrasting Standup Experiences

• NASA JPL: Nightly standups across three time zones that built trust and enabled handoffs
• Medical Startup: Transactional daily standups that created artificial harmony
• What made the difference: optimization for relationship building vs. status updates

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Framework

1. Absence of Trust - Vulnerability-based trust, not competence trust
2. Fear of Conflict - Artificial harmony vs. productive disagreement
3. Lack of Commitment - What happens when people don't feel heard
4. Avoidance of Accountability - When standards become suggestions
5. Inattention to Results - Individual ego over team success

Three Practical Shifts for Better Rituals

Shift 1: Surface Vulnerability

• Leadership modeling uncertainty first
• Structured moments for admitting what you don't know
• Moving from posturing to problem exploration

Shift 2: Practice Disagreement

• Red team rotations in roadmap reviews
• Making challenge a role, not a personality trait
• Ensuring friction happens constructively in the room

Shift 3: Build Shared Context (Not Just Information)

• The difference between "here's the roadmap" and "here's the trade-off I struggled with"
• Smaller cross-functional context sessions vs. large all-hands presentations
• Enabling distributed decision-making through understanding reasoning

Key Questions for Diagnosis

• How much time was spent on information transfer vs. relationship building?
• Did anyone admit uncertainty without it being a problem?
• Was there constructive disagreement that led to better outcomes?
• Do people understand the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves?

Resources Mentioned

• Patrick Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" (2002)
• Concept of vulnerability-based trust
• Red team methodology for productive conflict

Next Episode Preview

Episode 14: The Product Trio Model - Making it Actually Work in Engineering-Heavy Organizations

Chapters

• 0:00 - The Meeting Problem: Status Theater vs. Real Progress
• 2:20 - The Missing Middle: Mid-Sized Company Challenges
• 4:21 - Tale of Two Standups: NASA vs. Startup
• 11:15 - The Five Dysfunctions Framework
• 16:13 - Three Practical Shifts for Better Rituals
• 23:55 - The Compounding Effect of Trust
• 28:39 - Diagnostic Questions and Next Steps