Diagnose your team’s problems with the Waterline Model

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A few years ago, the CEO of a company asked me to temporarily take over their marketing team. He was frustrated because the team was pretty big, spending a lot of money, and wasn't producing the results that he cared about, or honestly, maybe any results at all. As I dove into the work and the team, I saw a lot of different things happening. I saw a lot of effort. People were working hard. They were complaining about feeling overloaded, and they were pushing on things that felt important to them. But I also saw a lot of confusion. People on the team were not sure why the CEO was asking certain questions. They weren't sure how to prioritize or what mattered most, and they were frustrated, both with each other and with the situation. Now, it's easy to look at a team like this and think, I just need to start over. New people will fix all these problems. Our default is to think of all problems at work as people problems. But I've taken over a lot of messy teams in my work life, so I know that what may seem like a people problem at first glance is actually a symptom of something else. When things aren't working on a team, or when everything feels harder than it needs to be, how do you know what the real problem is? And where do you start to fix it? I'm Molly Graham, and this is WorkLife, where we untangle the messy human side of work. If a team isn't working well, everybody feels it. If you're on the team, it just feels like confusion or whiplash: changing expectations, changing goals, changing messages. It feels murky and unclear what you're supposed to do every day, or why you're doing what you're doing, or who owns what. And because of the murkiness, you keep bumping into other people, like everyone is wandering around in the dark. If you're a leader, what you see and feel is that everything is harder than it feels like it should be. You've set a goal, or so you think. Your team's bought in, or so they say. Yet timelines keep slipping, execution is messy, and you're having the same conversations over and over. When that happens, it's tempting to jump straight to people-based explanations. This team just doesn't work well together. That person isn't strong enough. Or, We just need better execution. I've learned to slow down in these moments and use a simple diagnostic tool I picked up early in my career. The Waterline Model. I've mentioned this a couple of times on this show, but my first job out of college was leading 75-day wilderness expeditions in Patagonia, Alaska, for the National Outdoor Leadership School, also known as NOLS. NOLS uses the wilderness to teach students leadership skills. How do you get a group of people from point A to point B? What does being a good leader actually look like? What about a good follower? Out there, when a team isn't working, things fall apart fast. People get cold, hungry, tired, scared. Nature is an excellent teacher. Many of the frameworks I learned on NOLS are ones I still use today as a manager and as a leader because they were so practical and the lessons and applications were so visceral. NOLS is where I first learned the Waterline Model. It's actually a pretty old framework developed by organizational psychologist Roger Harrison in 1970, but I have now used it, I swear, more than any leader on Earth. At its core, the Waterline Model is a way to diagnose where a problem is actually coming from before you decide what to do about it. Here is the basic picture. I want you to imagine a boat moving across the water, and that boat is your team. The boat's destination is your goals: hitting a KPI, winning a major new customer, shipping a product, whatever makes sense for you and your team. Sometimes the water is calm, the skies are blue, the sun is out, and the boat is moving smoothly forward. Other times, it feels like you are rowing through a hurricane and no one knows why. When the water is choppy, when things are harder than it feels like they should be, the Waterline Model tells you to ask one question. What's going on below the surface, under the water, that's making things harder than they should be? This model gives you four layers to look at, in order, and it comes with a memorable rule of thumb, my favorite: you snorkel before you scuba. The point of the tagline is to remind you that problems in the top layers can cause problems at every layer below it. The four layers are structure, dynamics, interpersonal, and individual. As I said at the start, our instinct is often to jump to blaming the people, to assume that if the water is choppy, it's because someone is underperforming or two people aren't getting along. But the point of this model is that it really pushes you to take a step back and ask what the root cause of the problem is. I'll go through each layer in depth and give you some examples to make this all make sense. This episode is sponsored by Upwork. The way we work is changing fast. It's exciting, but it also means real expertise matters more than ever. That's why businesses should know about Upwork. Upwork is a one-stop platform trusted by thousands of growing businesses to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers. So you're not just hiring fast, you're hiring right. With access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories, businesses can fill skill gaps, move faster, and scale support up or down without adding a full-time headcount. And Upwork Business Plus makes it even easier. AI-powered shortlisting connects you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. You'll have everything you need to hire with confidence. Sign up for free, browse profiles, review past work, and even get help scoping the role. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. 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Okay, so at the top of the waterline, just below the surface, is the layer we call structure. This is the stuff that helps people know what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how success is defined. It's stuff like vision, goals, role clarity, clear expectations. These are the structures that you put in place on a team that affect every single person on that team's job. If you have them all in place and people understand them, congrats, you have structural clarity. If you're wondering if you have it, see if everyone on your team can answer these questions consistently. Why are we doing what we're doing? How are we going to get where we're going? What is my role and everyone else's on this boat? And what does good look like for my job? In a lot of ways, the structural level is you describing the purpose of the boat to everyone and their role in it. Here's where we're going. Here's why. Here's what your team is doing, and here's how you can help. If you're clear, you've got everyone rowing in sync in the same direction. And if you're unclear, you're probably going in circles. In my experience, this is where a huge percentage of issues on teams actually show up. Let me give you a little more of a picture of why this matters. Let's imagine you have a company and two senior leaders are showing up every day telling completely different stories about what you're building and why. Your CEO is talking about building a tiger. He's talking about how fast it is, what a great carnivore it is, its pretty stripes, its super long tail. He's evangelizing this tiger and why it will be great and why it matters. Your head of product, or another leader, is showing up every day describing a giraffe. She's talking about how tall it is, what great spots it has, how long its neck is, and how good it is at eating leaves. The best herbivore on the planet. What do you get if you have two leaders who are evangelizing such different visions and plans? You get a giraffe. You get a Jiger. Whatever you get, it is an animal that is not very good at anything. Is it an herbivore or a carnivore? Can it run fast or is it tall? In a team setting, what you actually get is a whole lot of wasted energy. You get teams building a giraffe and trying to make it compatible with a tiger. You get people thinking it's a tiger for a while and then getting whiplashed into the fact that maybe it's a giraffe. One of the most frustrating feelings at work is feeling like your time isn't valuable or like no one is paying attention. And that's what lack of clarity and alignment at a structural level can feel like. As a leader, you have to realize that every day people show up at their desks and make decisions about what to work on. They decide what is most important to use their precious time and skills toward. So either you are very clear with them about what is most important and the best use of their time, or they will choose randomly from a list. Either you prioritize for people or they will prioritize for you. If you are not a leader, it is really easy to think that this isn't your problem, that you're a victim of lack of clarity and the people up there, they must know. I've felt that a lot in my career. Surely someone must know how bad this feels or what a mess it is. It can feel intentional. Let me tell you, after years of leadership, it almost never is. It is surprisingly hard as a leader to know what isn't clear, or what messages have sunk in and what hasn't. What you can do to help your leaders is provide a mirror, ask questions, point out when you see a lack of clarity or a lack of alignment. Some leaders won't care, but the good ones will thank you. If you come back to that story that I told at the beginning of the episode, where I was trying to understand what wasn't working on the marketing team that was underperforming, I essentially went and did a structure diagnostic. I went to each member of the team and asked them, Do you know why we're doing what we're doing? Do you know what our company and team goals are. How would you define your role on this team? And what do you think success looks like for you? The answers I got back to those questions were wild. Most people had no idea what the team or company goals were. Their definitions of their roles were all over the place. Some were much bigger than what I imagined they'd say, and some were so small that I was like, You think that's a whole job at a company this size? None of them had a clear definition of success tied to their role. What became clear by asking those questions was that the team had no structural clarity, no clear vision, no clear goals. Roles were murky and expectations were all over the place. It is impossible for people to do good work, let alone their best work, in conditions like that. This sounds like a mess, and it was, but it is a shockingly common problem on many teams. So many. When I work with leaders, I always say that if you can create structural clarity on a team and maintain it, you are better than 90% of the managers out there. In this case, on that marketing team, it was impossible to determine whether the individuals were the right fit because they were operating inside a deeply broken structure. If I had automatically assumed people were the problem, I probably would have fired the whole team and started over again, and then I likely would have ended up with all the same issues all over again. But once I realized that this was a structural problem, the fix was clear. I started by reclarifying the team's mandate, the goals the team actually owned, individual role definitions, and what success looked like for each role. Doing this almost immediately improved the performance for most of the team, simply because people finally knew what their job was and what was expected of them. People are often smart and motivated, but if the structure isn't working, it will leave them rowing in different directions. Structural clarity alone often resolves more issues than you'd expect. Structural clarity is simple in principle: clear vision, clear goals, clear roles, and clear expectations. One of the most challenging parts of it is that as things change, you often have to reset expectations or roles or goals. So this isn't like a one-time thing. It's something you do over and over again as the company and the world changes around you. And like I said, if you can create consistent structural clarity as a manager, you are ahead of most of the leaders in the world. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or the Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. This episode is brought to you by Founders Mentality, a podcast in partnership with Bain & Company. If you listen to WorkLife for conversations about leadership, navigating change, and unlocking innovation, I have another show for your rotation. It's called Founders Mentality: The CEO Sessions. It gets into the real decisions behind some of today's leading executives and companies, not just what a CEO should do, but who a CEO has to become to do it. In their recent episode with Lara Borow, Group CEO of The Economist Group, you hear how she walked into a divided organization and a transformation project that had already cost the company millions and made the call to scrap it. Instead, she pushed for a new approach, one that could fund itself and bring the business back together. She and host Jimmy Allen break down that choice, how customer data reshaped the company's priorities, and how The Economist is thinking about transformation now in the age of AI. Follow Founders Mentality: The CEO Sessions from Bain & Company wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Okay, so let's say you get crystal clear on structure and the water still feels really choppy, to go back to the boat metaphor. The team still feels dysfunctional. According to the Waterline model, it's time to go one level deeper. That means looking at team dynamics. Dynamics are basically the cultural norms that you've built for how the team actually works together day to day. What's experienced, not what's written down. You can have clear goals and roles and still find yourself with decisions bottlenecked at the top, endless debate with no resolution, or constant confusion about who has input versus who actually decides things. As an example, a little while ago, a member of Glue Club, the community for leaders that I helped create, came to us with a familiar story. They said, My CEO is constantly frustrated that the team is moving more slowly than they want. But when people try to move quickly or ship things or make decisions, the CEO swoops in and unmakes decisions at the last minute or second guesses people's judgment. It doesn't actually feel safe to move quickly. Right off the bat, I knew this wasn't a structural problem. Goals were clear, roles were defined, and on paper, people had decision rights. But in practice, decisions weren't stable. Work would move forward and then get reversed later. Context would change after the fact. People learned that even if they did what was asked, they could still be wrong. The team adapted in a very rational way. They slowed down. They escalated decisions that didn't technically need to be escalated. They optimized for not being wrong instead of for progress. The dynamics of this team taught people that speed is risky, and that caused the behavior that frustrated the CEO. People adapt quickly to what's rewarded, punished, tolerated, or ignored. Over time, a team learns to survive inside the system a leader creates, whether implicit or explicit. Dynamics problems often show up as process issues, but they are rarely solved by process alone. They usually trace back to the signals leaders send through their own behavior: what gets rewarded, what gets second-guessed, and what happens when things go wrong. That's why dynamics issues can feel harder than structural ones. Fixing them doesn't require a reorg or a new doc. It requires leaders to be consistent about how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled, and when they intervene. It requires a hard look in the mirror at how your behavior or the behavior of those above you is causing people to respond. In the case of that CEO, the fix is to examine how decisions are made and ask what is causing the CEO to swoop in at the last minute. How can the process be better designed to incorporate their feedback earlier? Or what part of their psychology do they have to manage in order to not swoop in at the last minute, if they are open to having that second conversation? The good news is that when those signals change, behavior tends to change really quickly. Teams adapt fast to new rules, especially when they're enforced through action, not words. That's the leverage at the dynamics level. Change the rules of interaction and people will respond. Okay, so now we've addressed two out of the four layers of the Waterline model: structure and dynamics. It's time to put on our scuba gear. We are diving all the way down to layer three, the interpersonal. When something feels off on a team, leaders almost always leap to this layer first. These two people hate each other. That's why things are hard. To be fair, a lot of times that instinct isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. Very often, what looks like interpersonal conflict is actually being caused by something higher up in the Waterline. Bad org structure or lack of clear ownership and roles can basically set people up to constantly clash. But interpersonal dynamics can absolutely destroy teams all on their own. You can have clear goals, clear roles, solid decision-making, and still have two people who fundamentally don't trust or like each other. And when that's true, it's important to address. Dysfunction at an interpersonal level almost always shows up in the business results eventually. There's this really famous saying in the technology industry, Don't ship the org chart, which means sometimes companies make stupid decisions in building their products because two people don't like each other. The most famous example of this is actually Microsoft, which used to ship incompatible software because their executives wouldn't talk to each other. Interpersonal issues matter and need to be addressed. This is the more familiar work of team leadership and management. At this level, the fix isn't redesigning the system, but rather addressing the relationship itself. That usually means having a conversation with each person and naming the tension explicitly. It's important to ground the conversation in how it's affecting the work and be clear about what needs to change for the relationship to function. As a manager, you can make an interpersonal relationship an expectation of someone's role. If it's important to the business, then I need you to figure out how to work more productively with this person is absolutely part of how you will evaluate their performance, and that is something they need to understand. Sometimes that work leads to repair. Sometimes it becomes clear that trust won't be rebuilt in a reasonable time frame, and a change of some kind has to be made. I'll give you a tricky one that we had to debug recently with a company that my team works with. A leader came to a group coaching session feeling frustrated and stuck. He reported to one leader, but had a lot of work that depended on another leader, someone who was a peer to his manager. Very often, his boss would get frustrated that he wasn't implementing decisions quickly enough. Like they would decide to use a new tool, and his boss was frustrated that he hadn't switched the whole team over to it. But this person kept finding that the other leader strongly disagreed with the decisions that his boss was making. And when he tried to implement those decisions, he immediately ran into disagreement and obstinance, walls from this other leader that made it almost impossible to implement them. So what kind of a problem is this? This person is completely stuck and wasting immense amounts of time dealing with unresolved conflict and lack of decision-making between those two senior leaders. We asked him if it was clear who the ultimate decision-maker was. He said it wasn't, since both leaders had equal power and the decisions affected both of their organizations. We asked if he knew if those two leaders got along and trusted each other. He said it was pretty clear that they didn't. We asked if he'd pointed out the issue to his manager or to the other leader, helped them see how much of his and his team's time was being wasted on these issues. He said that he hadn't yet. This is a tricky one. My first question is whether there is a structural issue here. Are the roles between these two leaders clear, or is lack of role clarity causing a sort of endless loop in decision-making, and probably also exacerbating the fact that they don't like or trust each other? Honestly, this issue is so messy that it sounds to me like there has to be a fundamental structural issue at play. But for the person working for them, this is manifesting as a dynamic issue. Diagnosing issues like this can be tricky, particularly when you don't have power. But if you can use the waterline model to get to a theory about the root cause, it can help you decide on a next step. What's a conversation you can have with your manager or someone else to attempt to fix the problem, or to attempt to diagnose it? In the case of this person, we helped him create a next step to go talk to his direct manager with a bunch of examples about how much time he was wasting on this dynamic and to ask for help. For interpersonal issues in general, there is often a root cause that comes down to a lack of trust between the two people. Lack of trust can be caused by a bunch of different stuff: current experiences, past baggage, all that. So the question is fundamentally, can these two people find a way to trust each other? Can they build a productive working relationship, or does something else need to change? To get to a clear sense of the conversation you need to have with each of them, it's helpful to have a theory about what the root cause is, and the waterline model can help you get there. Now, if your goals are clear, the role is cleaned up, the dynamics are working well, and someone is still not performing, then you're likely looking at an actual individual issue. Individual issues can be personal. Someone going through a tough time outside of work may not be able to meet the expectations of the role right now. If someone joined a company five years ago and the company has changed a ton, that person might have been a high performer, but they might not be a fit for the shape of the role today. Your job as a manager is to decide whether the person can successfully fill the role given the current circumstances. In the case of that marketing team I took over, once I got clear goals and clear roles in order, like I said, for a lot of them, that was all that they needed: structural clarity. And suddenly, their performance took off. But for a couple people, it pretty quickly became clear that they were not a fit. What the company needed wasn't what they were good at. That is an individual issue. But you can only make that decision once you know you have a clear structure and that the dynamics aren't working against these people. Once you know it's an individual issue, the work is no longer diagnostic. It's about making a decision. Evaluate the person against the role as it exists today. Decide whether the gap is coachable in a time frame the business can afford. If it is, invest and be explicit about what needs to change. If it's not, change the role or make a clean exit. What doesn't work is lingering in ambiguity. That is the leverage at the individual level. Once the system is sound, clarity and decisiveness are kinder than dragging things out. Just to make one additional point here, structural issues can genuinely masquerade as individual issues. It looks like someone is a low performer, but actually they're suffering from a lack of clarity. Your definition of their job or what good looks like isn't the same as theirs. Often, the manager blames the person, fires them. names the person, fires them, hires someone new, and ends up with all the same issues again. If you've been a leader for a long time, you've either done this or seen this. That is a clear sign that you have a structural issue, not an individual one. The data, two failed hires, tells you the role itself isn't set up for success. When you're a new manager, it's really easy to feel like your job is to make the people on your team successful, that it's your failure if they fail. I see this a lot in my work. Managers acting like it's their personal job to help people succeed and turning themselves into pretzels, draining themselves in the process of trying to help. The job of a manager is to create the conditions that give people the highest possible chance of success. It is not to make people successful. It is to create the conditions. In the world of the waterline model, the most important work you can do is the work at the top. Create structural clarity for your team and be conscious of how your own behavior creates a culture, a set of dynamics for how people operate. As the waterline model says, start at the top, always. Snorkel before you scuba. If you do nothing else, clear vision, clear goals, clear roles, clear expectations. That will get you ahead of 90% of managers out there. And for everyone, if your team isn't working well, here's what the waterline model tells you to do. First, assess the structure. Are you and the other members of your team telling a clear, consistent story about why you're doing what you're doing, what your goals are, and what each of your roles are, and what success means? If not, stop and fix. Second, assess the dynamics. Are there behaviors or cultural issues on your team that are causing constant thrash and wasted time and energy? Do you know where those issues are coming from? Can you help point out the root cause or fix it if you have the power? Third, if structure and dynamics are clear, do you have two people on the team who just don't get along? If so, do you know why? What is causing them not to trust each other or work well together? Can you address it directly with each of them and help them figure out how to get to a healthy place, or does something need to change? Finally, if all of these other layers are clear, is your issue being caused by one individual who simply isn't performing? If so, what makes sense in terms of addressing that issue? Do you think the issue can be turned around with coaching, or does the person need to leave? Okay, we did it. That was the waterline model. Like I said, it's been so helpful to me in my career. I hope it helps you. Give it a try, leave a comment, let me know how it goes or where you're stuck. And if you're a subscriber to my Substack Lessons, we're launching a tool along with this episode to help you diagnose issues using the waterline model. So head over there and check it out. All right, I'll talk to you all next week. Thanks for listening to WorkLife. If you like the show and want more, hit that follow or subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. And share any episodes you love with a friend or leave a review wherever you're listening to this. WorkLife is a production of TED and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our video editor is Connor Titzworth. Ban Ban Cheng is our story editor. Mixing by Hansdale She. TED's executive producer is Daniela Ballarezo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Highlash, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy. I'm your host, Molly Graham. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com slash bank. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC. State Fair food is getting smaller and pricier. We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal? What’s his deal? He went to Metro and got $450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A35 5G for free and no activation fees. 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