When Your Teams Aren’t Working Like Teams
- Russell Kern
- Sep 28
- 3 min read
The Silent Meeting That Cost Millions
Walk into most team meetings today, and you’ll notice something odd. Everyone’s there—physically, anyway. Laptops open, phones face down (mostly), the right people in the right seats.
But when you ask for ideas, what do you get? Crickets and awkward glances at shoes.
Sound familiar?
Here’s what keeps me up at night: we’ve spent decades perfecting the org chart, investing in talent acquisition, and putting the “right people in the right roles.” Yet 75% of cross-functional teams still struggle with basic dysfunction.
That’s not a rounding error—that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how teams actually work.
The Three Falsehoods Nobody Talks About
Falsehood #1: The Right People = The Right Team
Gino Wickman’s Traction taught us to get the right people in the right seats. Good advice, but incomplete.
I’ve watched brilliant teams—engineers who’ve shipped products, marketers who’ve built brands—sit together in complete paralysis when faced with a new challenge.
Why? Because our 3-pound brains aren’t machines. We’re walking contradictions of 170 billion cells, evolved survival instincts, and unconscious biases.
Put five brilliant minds in a room and you don’t automatically get brilliance—you get five different threat-response systems trying not to look stupid.
Sports teams prove this every season. Billions spent assembling star players, only to watch them fail because ego, insecurity, and pride get in the way. Championship teams aren’t built on talent alone. They’re built on something harder to measure—and harder to buy.
Falsehood #2: Great Talent Adapts Quickly to Technology
We’ve been through this before—mainframes, PCs, email, cloud computing. Each time, we told ourselves people would adapt. And eventually, they did.
But AI is different.
Our brains evolved on flat plains over hundreds of thousands of years. We’re wired for linear change, not exponential transformation.
When 50% of your workforce fears losing their job to AI, that’s not resistance to training—that’s the amygdala doing exactly what it evolved to do.
Leaders need compassion here, not just patience. The shift from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles happened in 13 years. AI transformation is happening 10 times faster.
Your best people aren’t being difficult. They’re being human.
Falsehood #3: AI Will Quickly Boost Productivity
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: knowing how to write prompts in ChatGPT won’t magically transform your business.
Deloitte found that 68% of organizations can’t move even 30% of their AI experiments into production.
The bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s collaboration.
Before AI can deliver value, your teams need to master working together. They need to map workflows, identify where repetitive work lives, and have honest conversations about what changes and what stays.
That requires trust. It requires psychological safety. It requires the kind of team dynamics most organizations have never deliberately cultivated.
What Actually Works
If you’re a CEO watching your teams sit in silence during strategy sessions, you’re not alone. But you also can’t wait for this to fix itself.
Start with the fundamentals:
Create genuine psychological safety. Not the lip-service kind where you say “all ideas are welcome” and then shoot down the first one. The real kind, where people can challenge your assumptions without fear.
Build trust through practice. Trust isn’t built in off-site rope courses. It’s built through repeated, low-stakes collaboration on actual work problems.
Develop AI literacy across the organization. Not just in IT. Everyone needs to understand what AI can and can’t do, where it adds value, and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.
Map your workflows. You can’t improve what you don’t understand. Before implementing AI, understand how work actually flows through your organization.
The Path Forward
Transformation starts with relationships.
When team members trust each other enough to challenge ideas, admit uncertainty, and experiment without fear—that’s when AI becomes a multiplier, not just another underutilized tool.
The business world doesn’t need more teams. It needs better teamwork.
And that starts with leaders who understand that the future belongs to those who can blend human wisdom with machine capability—not replace one with the other.
Your competitors are figuring this out.
The question is: Will you?
Russell M. Kern is the CEO of Kern and Partners. A workforce consultancy expert in Human+AI Collaboration skill development. Russell is the author of TRANSFORM or DIE: How to build teams that outthink, outpace, and outprofit the competition in the AI Age. He can be reached at russell@kernandpartners.com.
