Northgate Care: A matrix team that will not gel
Northgate Care runs 11 residential care homes and is replacing a paper rota with a rostering and time-recording system, starting with three pilot sites. The implementation team of nine was formed six weeks ago: two care home managers, two senior carers, an HR officer, a payroll supervisor, an IT analyst, a finance analyst and a project lead. The project lead is a former senior carer who was promoted for her technical knowledge of rostering and has had no formal people-management training. Three team members are based at a site 200 miles away and join only by video link. None of the operational members has been released from their day jobs. Two milestones have slipped, meeting attendance has fallen, the payroll supervisor and IT analyst have begun emailing each other without copying the lead, and one care home manager dominates every discussion.
1. Diagnose the team's position using a recognised model of group development, giving evidence from the case.
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Stage: storming, with elements of forming still unresolved. Six weeks in, the team has not established shared ways of working.
Evidence mapped to the model:
- Unclear purpose and roles (forming not completed). Members were pulled from operational jobs with no release, so most still see themselves primarily as care home managers or payroll staff rather than team members.
- Conflict and counter-dependence (storming). Two milestones have slipped and attendance is falling, indicating resistance to the lead's authority. The payroll supervisor and IT analyst emailing privately is a classic coalition forming outside the formal structure.
- Dominance. One care home manager controlling discussion is the team negotiating status, not yet norming.
- Sub-grouping. The 200-mile site split creates an in-group and an out-group before any shared norms exist, and video-only attendance strips the remote members of informal influence.
Important caveat. Do not treat the model as a timetable that will resolve itself. Tuckman is descriptive, not causal. This is a matrix team whose members report elsewhere, so role ambiguity is structural and will re-trigger conflict every time a day job competes with the project. The lead should be told the team is behaving normally for its stage, but that the structural faults are what is keeping it there.
2. The project lead asks whether she should adopt a firmer, more directive style. Advise her.
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Partly yes, but not as a personality change. Contingency thinking says style should follow the situation, and the situation here has two distinct features: a new team with unclear tasks, and a delivery that is already slipping.
Where directive is right. With a team in storming and milestones missed, vagueness is read as weakness. She should be explicit about decisions she owns, deadlines, and what 'done' looks like; publish a decision log so that agreements are visible and not relitigated; and confront the private emailing directly as a breach of agreed process rather than a personality clash.
Where directive will backfire. The bypassing and the dominance are relationship and role problems, not task problems. Being firmer will not make the payroll supervisor feel heard; it will make the private channel more attractive. Applying Adair's three circles, she is over-weighting the task circle and under-serving the team and individual circles.
Practical blend. High direction on scope, deadlines and decision rights, paired with high support on how people work together: short one-to-ones with each member, ground rules agreed by the team, a named buddy on site for each remote member, and a private conversation with the dominant manager that gives her a defined sub-workstream to lead so the energy is channelled.
Blunt point for her. She was promoted for technical knowledge that no one else has, which makes her the default decision-maker on everything and is teaching the team to wait. Deliberately delegating defined areas is both a style fix and a capacity fix.
3. Recommend practical actions, distinguishing what the project lead can fix herself from what requires the director.
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What the lead can fix alone:
- Meeting design: circulate pre-reads and an agenda, rotate the chair, time-box items, and move the slot to a time that works across all three sites.
- A shared action log with a named owner and date for every action, visible to all including remote members.
- Short weekly stand-ups by video so the remote site is inside the rhythm rather than dialling into a monthly set piece.
- Give the remote members defined roles and outputs, not just attendance, and pair each with an on-site colleague.
- One-to-ones with every member, starting with the dominant manager and the two who are bypassing her.
What needs the director, and why she cannot solve it:
- Time. Attendance is falling because members have not been released from operational duties. No amount of meeting discipline fixes a rota clash. The director must authorise backfill and protected hours.
- Authority. She has accountability for delivery but no line authority over people who report to care home managers. The director must confirm in writing that project work takes priority, name an executive sponsor, and agree an escalation route.
- Capability. She needs mentoring or a short course in people management; technical promotion is not preparation for leading a matrix team.
- Scope. Two milestones have slipped. The director must decide whether the pilot phases, rather than pushing an unchanged plan with unchanged resources - which will simply produce a third slip and further loss of credibility.