When ‘Strong Culture’ Hides Weak Teams: A Practical System to Really Measure Teamwork

Claire Monroe

Welcome back to The Science of Leading. I’m Claire, and I’m here with Edwin Carrington. Today we’re talking about something I hear constantly from executives: “But this team has such a strong culture… why are they still missing their targets?”

Edwin Carrington

I’ve heard that line for about forty years. The pattern is almost predictable. Leaders rave about the culture… then quietly admit the deadlines slip, rework is high, and stakeholders are frustrated.

Claire Monroe

Yeah, or you see burnout. The team is “all in,” they like each other, they stay late… and yet operationally they’re always behind.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. That’s the trap. We confuse “it feels good to be on this team” with “this team is effective.” And those are not the same thing. Teamwork is not personality. It’s not vibes. It’s a set of observable behaviors plus outcomes, inside a very specific environment.

Claire Monroe

When you say “environment,” what are you pointing to? Because a lot of HR leaders listening have been told, “Hire for culture, the rest will follow.”

Edwin Carrington

Environment is: role expectations, workload, leadership style, meeting norms, incentives. You can hire warm, collaborative people and still create chaos if the structure is unclear. So if you want to know whether teamwork is working, you have to look through two lenses at the same time.

Claire Monroe

Okay, let’s name those, because I think this is the core idea.

Edwin Carrington

Lens one is outcome KPIs: what got done. Did this team reliably produce the business outcomes they actually own? Things like delivery reliability, quality metrics, stakeholder satisfaction, maybe throughput or financial impact if that’s credible for the role.

Claire Monroe

So, for example, percent of committed work delivered on time, defect rates, internal partner satisfaction scores… that kind of thing.

Edwin Carrington

Yes. Then lens two is process KPIs: how it got done. The drivers underneath. Coordination, meeting quality, handoff delays, decision cycle time, responsiveness, how often the same problems recur. Those tell you why the outcomes look the way they do.

Claire Monroe

Can we ground that with a mini-scenario? Because I know some people are thinking, “We have great camaraderie, so doesn’t that mean the process is fine?”

Edwin Carrington

Imagine a product team everyone loves being on. The Slack banter is great. People celebrate birthdays. Engagement survey comments are glowing. But… their outcome KPIs show only 60 percent of committed features ship on time, defect rates are creeping up, and customer escalations are rising.

Claire Monroe

I can picture that team. I’ve probably been on that team.

Edwin Carrington

Now look at process KPIs. Handoff delays are high, decision cycle time is long because no one wants to push for closure, and meeting notes rarely capture clear owners and deadlines. So the “strong culture” is real, but it’s not translating into clarity, coordination, and consistent execution.

Claire Monroe

So this is where leaders slip into opinions. “They’re just not accountable,” or “We need more A-players.”

Edwin Carrington

Right. Instead, you build a teamwork evaluation system that forces you to connect the dots: these outcome KPIs, plus these process KPIs, plus observable behaviors. Tools like the OAD Survey can sit underneath that, to help you understand personality tendencies without confusing them with performance—but the starting point is always, “What actually happened, and how did we get there?”

Claire Monroe

And holding those lenses together is what keeps “strong culture” from becoming a story we tell ourselves instead of evidence we can act on.

Claire Monroe

So let’s say a CHRO listening is bought in. They’re thinking, “Okay, we need to stop grading vibes.” How do they translate that into something concrete for the next, say, six to twelve months?

Edwin Carrington

You start with the organization’s priorities. Not generic “be collaborative,” but the actual goals. Faster delivery, higher quality, better customer experience, innovation, lower risk—whatever’s on the real agenda.

Claire Monroe

So you’re basically asking, “What does the business care about this year?” and then mapping teamwork to that.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. If the priority is faster delivery, team-level expectations might be: fewer handoff delays, clearer task ownership, quicker decisions. If it’s higher quality: better peer review habits, stronger root-cause analysis, fewer rework cycles. Once you do that translation, teamwork stops being abstract and becomes “how this team will hit its goals.”

Claire Monroe

And stakeholders matter here too, right? Because executives, peer teams, and customers all judge “good teamwork” differently.

Edwin Carrington

They do. Executives focus on business outcomes; peer teams care about handoffs and responsiveness; customers care about consistency and follow-through. A solid framework picks two to four stakeholder lenses and keeps them stable over time, so you’re not chasing politics.

Claire Monroe

Okay, once we’ve got goals and stakeholders, what are the actual dimensions you recommend leaders score?

Edwin Carrington

Most organizations can cover 80 to 90 percent of teamwork with six dimensions: communication, collaboration and coordination, problem solving and judgment, time management and execution, role clarity, and constructive feedback.

Claire Monroe

Can we hit each of those in fast passes?

Edwin Carrington

Sure. Communication: message clarity, listening, responsiveness, sharing relevant information early. Collaboration and coordination: how people manage dependencies, support each other, integrate perspectives, and hand off work. Problem solving and judgment: diagnosing root causes, prioritizing effectively, making decisions with incomplete data.

Claire Monroe

Then time management and execution is things like deadline adherence, prioritization, meeting hygiene, and how they handle blockers.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. Role clarity is: do people actually know what they own, what decisions they can make, and how to escalate? And constructive feedback is: do they give and receive feedback in a way that changes behavior, or do issues just fester?

Claire Monroe

The big concern I hear is, “Won’t this just become another five-point rating scale where everyone’s a four?” How do you prevent that?

Edwin Carrington

You anchor the scores in behaviors. Let me give a simple example for communication clarity. Suppose you have a one-to-five scale. A low score, a one, might be: “Messages are often confusing, missing context, and cause delays because people have to chase clarification.” A three: “Usually clear, some context missing, occasional clarification but it doesn’t derail delivery.” A five: “Messages are consistently clear and structured. Context, ask, and deadline are explicit, and others can execute without guessing.”

Claire Monroe

So managers aren’t grading who they like; they’re asking, “Do I actually see this behavior, repeatedly, especially under pressure?”

Edwin Carrington

Precisely. Take conflict handling. A one might look like: “Conflict is avoided or goes underground. Issues resurface, and decisions get revisited because no one really aligned.” A five: “People raise disagreements directly and respectfully. Different viewpoints are explored, conflicts are resolved, and once a decision is made, the team commits and moves forward.”

Claire Monroe

That’s such a different conversation in a calibration meeting. Instead of “I just feel like she’s not a team player,” you’re saying, “She regularly shuts down alternative viewpoints in meetings, and we see the same conflict reappearing.”

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. And this is where science-based tools like OAD can support you. They don’t replace behavioral data, but they help you understand the personality patterns behind it. For instance, if someone is naturally very forceful, OAD can help a manager coach them toward more inclusive conflict behavior, instead of simply labeling them “difficult.”

Claire Monroe

So we tighten the link between organizational goals, these core dimensions, and observable anchors. That’s how “be better at teamwork” turns into something you can actually evaluate and develop.

Claire Monroe

Alright, so now we’ve got dimensions and behavioral anchors. The next question is, “Where does the data come from?” Because if it’s just manager opinion, we’re back to the popularity contest.

Edwin Carrington

You want multiple lenses, without drowning in process. Manager input is one source, but you combine it with peer feedback, short anonymous surveys, objective KPIs, and where it makes sense, stakeholder input from outside the team.

Claire Monroe

Let’s unpack that just a bit. Peer feedback—where do you see that working well, and where does it go off the rails?

Edwin Carrington

It works well when peers rate behaviors they directly experience: responsiveness, collaboration on shared work, sharing relevant information, constructive feedback. It goes off the rails when you ask them to rate things they can’t see, like long-term strategy or private stakeholder management.

Claire Monroe

And short surveys—those are more about patterns than precise scores, right?

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. Ten to twenty behavior-based items, plus a question like, “What one change would most improve this team’s effectiveness?” You’re looking for themes, not ammunition against one person.

Claire Monroe

Then you tie that back to the objective side: delivery reliability, cycle time, quality, escalation volume, stakeholder satisfaction trends…

Edwin Carrington

Right. Those are your reality check. They tell you what happened. The qualitative inputs help explain why. And remember, you also have tools like OAD in the mix—not as a rating device, but to separate “this is who this person tends to be under pressure” from “this is what we actually observed this quarter.” That distinction reduces bias.

Claire Monroe

Once you have all that, now you’ve got a mountain of information. How do you turn it into something a busy HRBP or founder can act on?

Edwin Carrington

You distill. Start by scoring each teamwork dimension using your behavioral anchors, calibrated across managers. Then, look for three things: top strengths that are clearly helping outcomes, top blockers that are clearly hurting outcomes, and at least one system issue—like unclear roles or broken handoffs—that no individual can solve alone.

Claire Monroe

So an example might be: strength in problem solving, blocker in time management, and system issue in role clarity because no one owns certain recurring tasks.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. Then you run a decision session with the leader, a few team members, maybe HR, sometimes a key stakeholder. You confirm those strengths and blockers, pick one or two improvement actions per blocker, assign an owner, define success, and set a check-in cadence.

Claire Monroe

And the actions themselves stay very practical—like, “Implement a simple ownership map for recurring work,” or “Redesign weekly meetings so they end with documented decisions, owners, and deadlines.”

Edwin Carrington

Yes. Treat those actions like any other project work. They have owners, dates, and observable definitions of done. And you revisit the outcome and process KPIs monthly to see if things are improving, instead of waiting for the next annual review to be surprised again.

Claire Monroe

Where I’ve seen OAD be really useful in this loop is coaching. You might see that someone struggles with constructive feedback. Their OAD profile helps you understand their natural tendencies—maybe they’re highly conflict-averse—and now your development plan can be very targeted instead of generic “communication training.”

Edwin Carrington

That’s right. The assessments help decode why certain behaviors persist, but you’re always bringing it back to observable behavior and business impact. That’s what keeps the system fair and repeatable instead of personal and political.

Claire Monroe

Alright, let’s land this. If you’re listening and you’re tired of “strong culture” teams that still miss their numbers, the move is: define your outcome and process KPIs, translate organizational goals into clear teamwork dimensions and behavioral anchors, collect data from multiple sources, and then turn the results into specific actions and development plans. And if you want help connecting the dots between who people are and how they show up in teamwork, I’d really encourage you to test OAD for free at OAD.ai. It’s a simple way to connect personality tendencies to teamwork behaviors, so your evaluations are more consistent, less political, and more useful for coaching. Edwin, thanks for walking us through this.

Edwin Carrington

My pleasure, Claire. Always good to turn good intentions about culture into something that actually improves performance.

Claire Monroe

We’ll keep digging into the science side of leadership in future episodes. For now, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Edwin Carrington

Take care, everyone.