Runs on PeoplePlaybooks / Cadence · 3 min read
How to reset a team
A reset isn't a restructure. It's stopping, telling the truth about where you are, and agreeing a fresh start together.
In 30 seconds
- Reset when small fixes have stopped working: trust is low, delivery is slipping, and everyone knows it.
- A reset has three parts: the honest truth, a short list of changes, and new agreements the team owns.
- The reset is the easy bit. The 30 days after it are where it either sticks or fades.
When you need one
- Delivery has slipped for months and the plan nobody believes keeps getting re-dated.
- Good people are leaving, or have gone quiet.
- After a big failure, a reorganisation or a change of manager.
- The team has started describing itself in the past tense: "we used to be good".
What's really going on
Teams drift slowly, through a hundred small compromises: a meeting that stopped being useful, a standard that quietly dropped, a conflict that was never resolved. No single fix reverses it, because the problem isn't any one thing. It's that nobody has stopped to look at the whole.
The two-week reset
Before: listen (days 1 to 5)
- Run the team scan, anonymously, and look at the weakest dimensions.
- Have a short 1:1 with everyone. Three questions: What's working? What isn't? What would you change first?
- Write down what you heard, in their words, and the three themes that keep coming up.
The reset session: half a day (day 6 or 7)
- Tell the truth. Share what you heard, unedited. Name your own part in it first.
- Agree what to stop. Start with what to stop, not what to add. Meetings, reports, habits.
- Pick three changes. No more. Each with an owner and a date.
- Write new team agreements. How we plan, how we raise problems, how we decide, what "done" means. In the team's words.
After: make it stick (days 8 to 14, then 30 days)
- Send the summary the same day: what we agreed, who owns what, when we'll check.
- Visibly do your part first. If the team agreed you'd stop overriding priorities, stop that week.
- Check in weekly for a month: "Are we doing what we agreed?"
- Re-run the scan at 30 days, and share the change.
What bad looks like
- A reset that's really a speech from the manager.
- Twelve actions, no owners.
- New agreements written by the manager and handed out.
- Nobody mentions it again after the session.
How you'll know it's working
- Follow-through: all three changes delivered, or honestly dropped, within 30 days.
- The scan moves: the weakest dimension improves at the 30-day re-scan.
- Agreements in use: people quote them back to each other.
- Care check: people say the team feels different, not just busier.
In the frameworks
- SAFe: a reset works like a team-level Inspect and Adapt: measure, reflect, fix the system.
- Scrum: a reset is a retrospective with the courage turned up. Revisit the Definition of Done as part of it.
- Disciplined Agile: a reset is the moment to choose your WoW again, deliberately.
- Shape Up: run it in a cool-down, so it isn't squeezed against delivery.
In other industries
- Healthcare a ward reset after a serious incident, run with the staff, not done to them.
- Accountancy a post-busy-season reset before the next one starts, with the trainees in the room.
- Manufacturing a shift reset after a safety near miss, starting with the people on the line.
- Small business a reset when the team has grown past the way the founder used to run it.
What to say
To open the reset session:
"I've listened to all of you, and I'm going to share what you told me, unedited. Some of it is about me, and I'll start there. Then I'd like us to agree what to stop, three things to change, and how we want to work from now on."
Want help running it?
A reset is easier with someone outside the team in the room. See Work with us.
Try this week
Ask each person on your team the three questions, and write down the answers word for word.
Think about it
What has your team quietly stopped doing that it used to do well?