What are the right team dynamics for business success in 2025? 

A large part of my business as a leadership coach involves team facilitation and advising leaders on team dynamics. 

As we approach the next year, hopefully with a sense of enthusiasm as the beginning of a fresh calendar year always gives us the chance to reset, restart or reinvent our teams. 

So, now is the time to do some work and thinking about what needs to be done to address the team’s dynamics you are involved in. 

Whether you are a leader or a member of a team, we all know when the team dynamics are off; and that they can range from being slightly counterproductive to downright toxic! 

Team dynamics are the invisible forces that either propel your team to success or hold you back.

In my book, Make Work Work for You I talk at length about how to enhance team dynamics and effectiveness.  How to achieve performance, and growth and wellbeing

(You can pick up a copy and read more here)

Top Tips for Enhancing Team Dynamics

1. Play Team Tetris: Play Team Tetris:

Rotate and move team tasks for ultimate team wellbeing.

Team Tetris is about intentionally reconfiguring and balancing team workloads, not just as a reactive move, but as a proactive step to support performance, growth and wellbeing.

By making small, strategic changes, teams can ensure each member is doing work that suits their strengths and interests, preventing both overload and underload. This enhances job satisfaction, reduces burnout, and aligns individual contributions with team goals.

It’s about making deliberate choices to get everyone in their optimal “lane” so the entire team can flow smoothly and thrive.

I’ve included the 7 steps for playing Team Tetris at the end of this blog post.

2. Improve Meeting Quality: 

Makeover your meetings—give your meetings an extreme makeover by decluttering the agenda and adding elements that boost engagement and wellbeing. 

Meetings are all about direction, discovery and dynamics. 

Giving your meetings a ‘makeover’ can significantly improve how your team collaborates. Set clear objectives, respect everyone’s time, and ensure that every voice is heard. 

3. Foster Great Relationships: 

A heart can’t pump blood if it’s broken. Relationships are everything – they’re the foundation of any effective team. 

It’s about building trust, showing empathy, and understanding each other’s ‘stress languages’—how different people show they’re struggling and how best to support them.

One of the key practices from the book is understanding and leveraging ‘stress languages’ within your team. 

Each person reacts differently under pressure, and by recognizing these signals, you can create an environment where support is proactive and personalized, enhancing overall team wellbeing.

4. Clarify Roles and Purposes: 

“Shift your role, shift the pattern.” In Make Work Work for You, I emphasize the importance of gaining role clarity to shift the patterns shaping your team and to improve dynamics for performance. 

When roles are unclear, tasks are often duplicated or neglected, leading to inefficiencies. 

By co-creating clarity around roles, including understanding the roles people unconsciously step into—like “fixer” or “helper”—teams can reduce friction and increase collaboration. 

When everyone knows their role and its purpose, the team can run smoothly, like a horse staying confidently in its lane.

Ready to Give Team Tetris a Go?

Here are the seven steps for playing Team Tetris:

1. Start Game. Set the context and clearly and honestly explain why you want to work with the team to play a little Team Tetris. Top tip: to maintain psychological safety, make the rules explicit. Call out that this is not about restructuring; this is an opportunity to balance workloads, play to your strengths, align work to wellbeing and support growth and career objectives, and so on – whatever is relevant for your team. Also note that changes should only be made when necessary – there might be a lot to do, or there might be a little.
2. Prepare moves. Before the workshop, everyone should, individually as a pre-work reflection: a) identify their values, strengths, motivators and interests, b) look at how they currently spend their time and energy at work and c) reflect on what insights this exercise brought out for them.
3. Understand the board. Meet 1:1 with everyone to go through their insights. The purpose is just to listen and understand and, if needed, coach and support people to stretch further with their pre-work and insights. N.B. Depending on your team members, you may choose to skip this step, or you may only need to do this the first time you play Team Tetris.
4. Exchange ideas. Get everyone together, form small groups and have people share their pre-workshop reflections.
5. Strategise moves. As a group, brainstorm small plays and moves to experiment with to rotate and tweak how the work is done.
6. Place pieces. Create a plan, some small commitments and experiments to try. Avoid the temptation to come up with a laundry list of changes. This is about small moves.
7. Tally the score. After about three weeks, get the team back together and evaluate against the goals that were set at the start. Keep what worked and discard what didn’t. Then play again.

Remember that Team Tetris is not set-and-forget. It’s something that should become a practice, a play that you make on an ongoing basis. In my experience, teams appreciate this from their leaders and it really boosts engagement.

Get in touch if you want to be intentional with your team.

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