Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Today’s route passes through several different states of a team. Flight time depends on the destination, the crew, management decisions, and the weather inside the company.
There may be turbulence along the way: conflict, overtime, loss of direction, uncomfortable conversations, and the sudden realization that perhaps the aircraft is flying perfectly well in the wrong direction.
Some observations may feel obvious. Some situations may feel suspiciously familiar. Any resemblance to your projects, managers, rituals, dashboards, or steering committees is, as usual, entirely coincidental.
Over the course of this flight, I want to look at six states a team can move through: from people who have merely been placed together to the point where a shared route ends. The useful part is not the labels. It is learning to notice what is actually happening before the dashboard does.
Takeoff
I once boarded a plane after a holiday with two laptops, too many cables, and a book I had failed to finish. Somewhere near my seat, another passenger was staring at a spreadsheet painted in every color Excel had ever invented.
He noticed me looking and closed the laptop.
“A report showing that we are not delivering anything on time,” he said.
“At least it is colorful.”
“Color is one of the great achievements of modern management.”
That was enough to start a conversation.
We were strangers sharing a metal tube for several hours, with the same destination but no reason to trust each other. Which, I thought, is not the worst metaphor for how many teams begin.
State 1. The Fuselage: People Are Assembled, the Team Is Delayed
Early teams often behave like people sharing an elevator. They are together because the organization put them in the same box. There is a common destination somewhere on paper, but everyone has their own task, their own calendar, their own dependencies, and their own mental model of what is going on.
I remember one project where the manager opened the first call with the sentence: “From today, you are one team.”
That sounded efficient.
Some people turned on cameras. Some did not. Almost nobody introduced themselves properly. We knew ticket numbers better than names. I was not Anton. I was “the person with task 42.”
A week later production went down.
Someone wrote in the common chat: “Who knows this component?”
Silence.
I replied: “I can take a look.”
A minute later someone asked: “Sorry, who are you?”
That is a useful moment. Not because the incident is good, but because it reveals the actual system.
At this stage, people may have a shared Slack channel, backlog, team name, and delivery target. What they do not yet have is a shared reality. They do not understand how the pieces connect, where responsibility starts and ends, what risks matter, how decisions are made, or who will respond when something breaks.
The management mistake is to demand “team behavior” before people have had time to understand the aircraft they are sitting in.
The captain’s job here is basic and unglamorous: create a common map. Explain the destination, roles, ownership, constraints, risks, and communication rules. People do not become a team because the org chart says so. First they need to know who is actually on board.
State 2. Fuel: What Is Really Moving the Team Forward?
Once people know each other, something that looks like a team begins to appear. There are routines. People start saying “we.” They do not want to let one another down.
But that is not always trust.
Sometimes it is fear that has learned to look like responsibility.
People stay online because they do not want to be seen as unreliable. They explain delays before anyone asks. They apologize for risks that have not happened yet. They keep saying “all good” while quietly absorbing more work.
I remember a colleague who was almost permanently online. Her updates were exceptionally complete: what had been done, what had not, why, what would happen next, and an apology somewhere in almost every message.
At first everyone thought this was professionalism.
Then others started doing the same thing.
Soon we had a team that looked extremely responsible from the outside and increasingly exhausted from the inside.
This is a dangerous phase because fear can produce impressive short-term performance. People rescue deadlines. They hide bad news until they have also prepared a solution. They work evenings. The strongest people compensate for structural problems.
From a distance, the engines sound powerful.
Up close, they are overheating.
The key signal is not overtime by itself. It is what happens around bad news. Can someone say “I will not make it” without first writing a defense? Can a red status exist without becoming a search for the guilty? Can a person ask for help before the problem becomes an incident?
If the answer is no, adding more control may temporarily increase speed. It will also increase wear.
Fear is a fuel. It is simply a terrible one for long-haul flights.
State 3. Decompression: The Moment People Start Telling the Truth
One of the most important transitions in a team happens when someone says the thing everyone has been avoiding.
Not a carefully formatted risk. Not a green-yellow-red status. Something real.
I remember a daily meeting that was going exactly as daily meetings usually do. Yesterday I did this. Today I will do that. No blockers. No blockers. No blockers.
Then one engineer paused.
He looked at the camera and said: “I do not understand why we are doing this. I work until nine in the evening, and I cannot explain to people I care about what we are actually building.”
The meeting stopped.
Normally somebody would have rescued the process with a sentence like: “Let’s not go into emotions now, we can discuss this separately.”
That time nobody did.
After a few seconds, another person said: “I do not understand either. I have just been moving through tickets for two weeks.”
Then people started talking about fatigue, decisions that appeared from somewhere above, priorities that changed without explanation, and the fact that they had stopped challenging things because explaining the same concern again felt pointless.
It was uncomfortable.
It was also the first moment in months when the group felt like a team.
A mature team is not one where everything is calm. It is one where bad news can arrive before the incident.
The first person who says “I do not understand,” “I cannot handle this,” or “I am thinking of leaving” is not creating the problem. They may be the sensor that finally started working.
Do not punish the smoke detector for reporting smoke.
State 4. Autopilot: When Maturity Turns into Inertia
Eventually a good team becomes easier to operate. People know each other. Responsibilities are clear. Releases become more predictable. Meetings get shorter. A short message carries a lot of shared context.
This feels like victory because, for a while, it is.
The problem begins when predictability becomes more important than checking whether the route is still correct.
One of the strongest teams I worked with reached a period where everything looked excellent. Delivery was stable. Metrics were green. Risks were under control.
Then it became quiet.
Too quiet.
There were fewer arguments, fewer strange ideas, fewer uncomfortable questions. Nobody wanted to disturb a system that was finally working.
That is how maturity can turn into inertia.
A team may become very good at executing a plan after the plan has stopped being the right one.
This state is difficult for managers because almost every conventional signal is positive. The team is not in crisis. Nobody is shouting. Delivery may be excellent.
The useful questions change.
What are we no longer challenging? Which assumptions have not been revisited for months? When did we last change direction because somebody from inside the team brought a better idea? Are we optimizing the route, or only flying the old one more efficiently?
Autopilot is useful. It just should not decide the destination.
State 5. The Frames: What Actually Holds a Team Together
When people talk about strong teams, they often start with process: rituals, roles, tools, planning, retrospectives.
I usually remember people.
Years ago I was part of a volunteer project built in evenings and weekends. Nobody was paid. Nobody was promised a promotion. Sometimes everyone opened their laptops already tired.
And yet people kept returning because they did not want to leave the others alone with the work.
At one point I wrote in the chat that I had no energy left and needed to stop for a while.
The answer was short: “Rest. We will pick it up.”
No motivational speech. No guilt. No hidden invoice sent later.
That is one of the clearest signs of a real team: temporary weakness does not automatically become someone’s permanent reputation.
People can carry each other for a while without turning mutual support into a system for hiding chronic planning failures.
A resilient team has several structural properties. The route is understood by more than the manager. Responsibility is clear. The aircraft is not overloaded beyond capacity. People can report fatigue, risk, or lack of resources without being labelled weak. If one person disappears, somebody else can temporarily hold the area. Metrics are used to understand the system, not to watch every movement of the crew.
Most importantly, if continuing the route permanently requires sacrificing people, the route is questioned.
Not the people.
State 6. Metal Fatigue: When the Shared Route Ends
Teams do not always end with a dramatic meeting.
Often they end gradually, then suddenly.
A project moves elsewhere. Someone leaves. Another person transfers. Priorities change. The shared chat becomes quieter. The last message says, “Let’s sync next week.” Nobody does.
For a while the team name may remain in the organization chart after the team itself has already disappeared.
This is not necessarily failure.
A team is a temporary system built around a shared route. Sometimes the destination is reached. Sometimes the destination changes. Sometimes people should continue in different directions.
The mistake is to treat preservation of the team as the objective.
Good teams are valuable, so leaders naturally want to keep them together. But keeping a team alive after its shared purpose has ended can produce exactly the same kind of inertia as keeping a product alive because everyone has invested years in it.
The useful question is not “How do we preserve this team?”
It is “Do these people still have a meaningful route that should be traveled together?”
If the answer is no, separation may be healthier than another round of alignment.
Landing
Teams are often discussed as if there were one ideal state called “high performing” and management’s job were to move everybody there and keep them there forever.
Reality is less tidy.
A team can be newly assembled, driven by fear, learning to tell the truth, mature but becoming inert, strongly connected, or already approaching the end of its shared route. Sometimes several of these states exist at once.
The practical job of a leader is not to force the team into a fashionable model. It is to understand which state exists now.
If people are strangers, build a common map.
If fear is providing the fuel, reduce the cost of bad news.
If people start telling the truth, do not immediately push the truth back into a separate meeting.
If everything is running smoothly, check whether the route is still correct.
If trust is strong, protect it from becoming an excuse for chronic overload.
If the route has ended, allow the team to end with it.
When the plane landed, my neighbor and I stood up with everyone else even though the doors were still closed. A strange ritual: after spending hours together, everybody suddenly needs to get away from the same aircraft as quickly as possible.
We said goodbye and walked in different directions.
The plane remained outside the terminal: large, tired, almost empty. Soon another crew would prepare it for another route. It would fill again with people, plans, silence, nervous jokes, unread books, and somebody’s colorful spreadsheet explaining why nothing was on time.
But it would be a different flight.