3 Signs You’re Managing a Group of Individuals (Not a Team)

Have you ever sat in a team meeting and had the strange feeling that you’re not actually in a team at all? You look around the room, or at the faces on the screen, and you see a collection of talented, hardworking people. They’re all employed by the same company, they all report to you, but the connection just isn’t there. It feels more like a loose collection of freelancers who happen to share a building and a Wi-Fi password.

Let’s be honest, it’s a common feeling. We use the word ‘team’ so often it’s almost lost its meaning. The people on the shop floor are a team. The sales department is a team. The folks in accounts, they’re a team too. But are they really? Or are they just a group of individuals who have been assigned to the same department?

The distinction is more than just semantics. In the world of manufacturing, where every second of downtime, every rejected batch, and every missed deadline hits the bottom line, the difference is everything. A group of individuals can get a job done, sure. But a true team, a cohesive unit that trusts each other and moves with a shared purpose, can achieve phenomenal things. They solve problems faster, they innovate, they hold each other to a higher standard, and critically, they make the workplace a place people actually want to be. Their morale is higher, and your staff turnover is lower.

We’ve spent years working with businesses just like yours, from precision engineering firms to large scale food production plants, and we’ve seen this play out time and time again. The difference between a high performing operation and one that’s constantly firefighting often comes down to the health of its teams. That’s why we built our entire workshop around what we call the five pillars of team health. Things like having a genuine Shared Purpose, fostering Psychological Safety, and ensuring absolute Clarity in decisions.

So, how do you know which side of the line you’re on? How can you tell if your ‘team’ is just a group in disguise? It’s not always obvious, but there are telltale signs. Today, I want to walk you through three of the most common ones I see out in the field. Think of this as a quick health check for your team.

Sign 1: The Invisible Walls of Siloed Work

You know what we’re talking about. It’s the classic ‘us and them’ mentality. The office versus the shop floor. Engineering versus production. Day shift versus night shift. Sales versus, well, pretty much everyone else. This is siloed work in its purest form. It’s when individuals or subgroups operate within their own little bubbles, guarding their information and focusing only on their specific tasks, with little to no thought for how their work impacts anyone else down the line.

We remember visiting a factory a while back that made bespoke metal components. The sales team were brilliant at their jobs. They were hitting their targets, bringing in huge orders. The problem? They were promising clients ridiculously tight turnaround times without ever stepping onto the production floor to see what the actual capacity was. The production team, in turn, saw the sales team as clueless suits who just threw impossible jobs over the wall. They wouldn’t proactively share updates on machine maintenance or supply chain delays because, in their minds, “sales wouldn’t understand anyway.”

The result was chaos. Constant emergencies, stressed out operators, furious customers, and a blame game that was frankly exhausting to watch. Each group was doing their job, but they weren’t working together. They were a group of individuals, not a team.

So why does this happen? To be honest, it’s often a natural side effect of growth. As you add more people and create departments, specialisation is necessary. But without a strong, unifying force, that specialisation curdles into isolation. The root cause is almost always a lack of a clear, compelling, and constantly communicated Shared Purpose. When the sales team’s primary goal is just ‘hit the sales target’ and the production team’s goal is just ‘minimise defects’, their objectives can actually end up in direct conflict. A true shared purpose, something like ‘To be the UK’s most reliable supplier of high-quality components’, forces them to work together. The sales team can’t sell reliability if the production team can’t deliver it.

Symptoms to watch for:

• Fragmented Communication: Important information is shared via long, confusing email chains instead of quick conversations. You hear “I sent them an email” used as a defence, not as a form of collaboration.
• Knowledge Hoarding: People become gatekeepers of information. An experienced engineer might not share a clever workaround they’ve discovered because that knowledge gives them a sense of job security or power.
• Duplicated Effort: You find out that two different people or departments were working on solving the same problem, completely unaware of each other’s efforts. It’s a colossal waste of time and resources.

The consequences are severe. Productivity plummets due to rework and inefficiency. Morale takes a nosedive because nobody feels like they’re on the same side. Innovation dies, because new ideas can’t survive the journey across departmental walls.

Quick Diagnostic Questions:

• Does my sales team truly understand the current pressures and constraints on the production floor?
• When a problem arises, is the first instinct to pick up the phone and talk to the relevant person, or to write a formal email to cover one’s back?
• Can every single person in your team articulate the company’s number one priority for this quarter in the same way?

If the answers to these make you a bit uncomfortable, you might have some invisible walls that need knocking down. It starts with establishing and over communicating that shared purpose.

Sign 2: The Toxic Air of a Blame Culture

Picture this. A batch of products has failed a quality control check. You call a meeting to figure out what went wrong. What’s the mood in the room? Is it a collective, curious, “Okay, let’s break this down and see what we can learn?” Or is it a tense, defensive affair where everyone is subtly, or not so subtly, trying to prove it wasn’t their fault?

If it’s the latter, you’re dealing with a blame culture. This is perhaps the most destructive sign that your team is just a group of individuals looking out for themselves. In a blame culture, mistakes are not seen as learning opportunities; they are seen as indictments of competence. Finger pointing becomes a survival skill. People spend more energy on deflecting blame than on finding solutions.

This behaviour is a direct result of a lack of Psychological Safety. That’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s actually very simple. It’s the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the feeling that you can speak up, ask a ‘stupid’ question, admit a mistake, or challenge an idea without fear of being punished, humiliated, or shamed.

When that safety is absent, people don’t raise their hands to say, “I think I might have mis calibrated that machine,” or “I was feeling rushed and I skipped a step.” Why would they? Admitting a mistake feels like painting a target on your own back. Instead, you get a lot of, “Well, the raw materials we’ve been getting lately haven’t been up to scratch,” or “The night shift must have left the settings like that.”

The operational impact is terrifying, especially in manufacturing. Small issues that could be fixed easily if caught early are hidden or ignored until they become massive, expensive problems. A machine that’s making a funny noise, a process that seems inefficient, a safety concern… all of it gets swept under the carpet because nobody wants to be the messenger who gets shot. Communication grinds to a halt. People only tell you what they think you want to hear.

And the emotional impact? It’s draining. It creates an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust. People stop helping each other because helping someone could mean becoming associated with their mistakes. Your best people, the ones who are proactive and want to solve problems, will be the first to leave. They’ll go somewhere they can actually make a difference without constantly watching their back.

Recognising and Addressing Blame Culture:

• Listen to the language: Pay attention to how people talk about problems. Is it “we have an issue” or “they made a mistake”? Do people use phrases like “to be clear, my part of the process was fine”?
• Watch your own reactions: How do you, as a manager, react when someone brings you bad news or admits a mistake? If you show even a hint of frustration or jump to conclusions, you are reinforcing the idea that it’s not safe to be honest. Your first words should always be something like, “Okay, thank you for telling me. Let’s figure this out together.”
• Reframe mistakes as data: Actively separate the person from the problem. Run post mortems on issues that are genuinely blameless. Focus entirely on the process. What can we learn? What can we change in the system to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Building psychological safety is the only antidote to a blame culture. It’s the foundation of trust, and without trust, you don’t have a team. You just have a room full of people waiting for someone else to mess up.

Sign 3: The Whiplash of Inconsistent Decision Making

The third sign is a bit more subtle, but just as damaging. It’s when the team feels like they’re constantly changing direction, with decisions being made in an erratic or unclear way. One week, the absolute top priority is reducing waste. The next, it’s all about hitting a specific production number, even if it means waste goes up. One manager approves a certain type of overtime; another rejects the exact same request a week later.

This inconsistency creates a kind of strategic whiplash. It’s confusing, it’s frustrating, and it kills momentum stone dead. Teams thrive on clarity and predictability. They need to understand the rules of the game and trust that those rules aren’t going to change without warning. When decisions feel random or contradictory, it erodes trust in leadership and makes it impossible for the team to align their efforts.

What are the root causes? It’s rarely because managers are deliberately trying to be confusing. More often, it stems from a lack of Clarity and Alignment at a fundamental level.

• Unclear Roles: Who is actually responsible for making which decisions? When it’s not clearly defined, you either get decision paralysis where no one wants to make a call, or you get multiple people making conflicting decisions. Who has the final say on shipping a product that’s borderline on quality? The shift supervisor? The quality manager? You? If the team doesn’t know, the answer will change depending on who is on shift.
• No Decision Framework: Decisions are made based on gut feeling, or who shouted the loudest in the meeting. There’s no consistent process for evaluating options, weighing trade offs, or communicating the final decision and the ‘why’ behind it.
• Fluctuating Priorities: This is a big one. Of course, business priorities have to shift sometimes. But when they seem to change every week based on the latest crisis, the team stops taking any of them seriously. They adopt a ‘this too shall pass’ mentality and stop investing their energy in new initiatives, because they assume the goalposts will just move again.

You can spot this pattern in your meetings. Do you find yourself re-litigating the same decisions over and over again? Do people leave a meeting with different interpretations of what was actually decided? Does the team often execute a plan, only to be told later that it wasn’t what leadership wanted? These are all symptoms of inconsistent decision making.

The effect is that your team becomes passive. They stop taking initiative because they’re afraid of doing the ‘wrong’ thing. They wait to be told exactly what to do, which slows everything down and kills any sense of ownership or engagement.

To fix this, you need to bring clarity. Define who owns which decisions (a simple RACI chart can work wonders). Establish a basic framework for how key decisions are made. And most importantly, when you set a priority, stick with it long enough for it to gain traction. Make sure everyone, from the newest apprentice to the most senior operator, understands not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.

From a Group to a Team

So there you have it. Siloed work, a blame culture, and inconsistent decision making. If you’re nodding along and recognising some of these signs in your own workplace, don’t panic. The first step is always awareness. Seeing these things for what they are, symptoms of a weak team foundation, is a huge part of the battle.

These three signs are not isolated issues. They are deeply interconnected. A lack of Shared Purpose leads to silos. Those silos, combined with a lack of Psychological Safety, create the perfect breeding ground for a Blame Culture. And all of this is made worse by a lack of Clarity, which results in inconsistent decisions that leave everyone feeling confused and disengaged.

The good news is, none of this is permanent. You can absolutely transform a disconnected group of individuals into a high performing, resilient, and engaged team. It’s not about finding a magic bullet or doing a one off ‘team building’ day. It’s about intentionally building the foundations, the pillars of genuine team health. It’s about creating an environment where people want to collaborate, feel safe to be honest, and are clear on the direction of travel.

If you’re ready to stop firefighting the symptoms and start building a truly healthy team from the ground up, we can help. Our High Performing Teams Training is designed specifically for the challenges of the manufacturing sector. We go deep into the five pillars of team health and give you practical, no nonsense tools to build a culture of trust, clarity, and shared purpose.

Take a look at what we offer. It might just be the most important decision you make for your team, and your business, this year. – Click Here

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