Everything Deserves Diagnosis
Why everything at work deserves diagnosis (not just stress)
If you’ve been around for a little while you've probably heard me bang on about stress deserving diagnosis rather than a generic "top 10 tips" approach. But it isn’t just stress.
Everything going on behind your team's behaviour deserves proper diagnosis. Diagnose each team problem before you train, and you stop pouring money into programmes that never stick.
That "difficult" employee who keeps resisting change? There's something backstage driving that behaviour.
The team that can't seem to implement the new system you've explained three times? Something's happening behind the scenes.
The person who's suddenly gone from high performer to bare minimum? Yeah, there's something going on there too.
What's really going on backstage?
Most of us only see what's happening onstage. The behaviour, the resistance, the mistakes, the conflict. That's just the performance.
The real story is happening backstage. Treat only what you can see onstage and waste everyone's time and money.
I've won work where clients have asked me to upskill their team. Get them trained. Get them performing. Then I start working with that team and it’s clear pretty quickly that they're not ready for training because they can' hear us right now. There's too much stuff happening backstage that we need to understand first.
And it isn’t that they’re being difficult. Remember, we diagnose, we don’t judge.
Most people are motivated, or not motivated by secondary gain. That’s what they perceive they’re losing or gaining from a situation.
If someone resists change, what might they be protecting? What do they think they will lose? When a team works in silos. what’s the perceived benefit of staying separate? What is the person who “just wants to do their hours and go home” gaining from that position?
Training doesn’t stick if the team isn’t ready
A classic example is a team stuck feeling like the victims. You know the one. "It's been done to us", "They're the baddies, we're the goodies", "Management don't understand."
Invest in training people sitting in that mindset and you're throwing money down the drain. They won't hear half of what's said. They'll be too busy grappling with the competing narrative already running in their heads.
And sometimes what looks like a skills gap is nothing of the sort. Sometimes the problem isn't skills, it's stress, and no amount of training will touch it.
So before you move your team forward, you need to understand where they are. Not where you want them to be. Not where they should be.
Where they are.
To do that you have to get to know them. Really know them. Not their CV and job title. Get curious about what's happening backstage that you simply haven't seen.
You can’t fix what people won’t show you
When I work with teams like this, we take a proper look behind the scenes. The mental stuff, the dynamics at play. It's the same outside-in diagnosis I walk through in my case study on being stuck firefighting. Then, and only then, can we assess readiness for training and development.
Without looking behind, we're just making assumptions:
"I just need them to..."
"What's stopping them is..."
"They can't..." or "They won't..."
I always ask leaders one thing. What assumptions are you making? Assumptions aren't diagnosis. Treating them as facts is how you end up with training that doesn't land and change that fizzles out. Costly, and ineffective.
But people won't show you what's really going on unless they trust you. And trust doesn't come from a tick-box exercise or a quick team-building day.
So I create the space for people to talk about what's happening behind the scenes. I ask the questions that help them surface what they've been holding back. Getting to that honesty isn't about being their mate. It's about showing you're curious about their experience, not just judging their output.
Sometimes that means uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes it means sitting with the messy truth. But you can't fix what you can't see, and you can't see it if people don't trust you enough to show you.
Get curious, not furious
So how do you get to the truth? By asking better questions and caring about the answers.
What's really behind this behaviour?
What might they perceive they're gaining or losing here?
What's happening backstage that I can't see?
Where are they at right now, not where I need or want them to be?
What assumptions am I making?
Only when you've done that can you work out what actually needs to change.
Sometimes it's trust that needs building. Sometimes it's the secondary gain that's keeping people stuck. And sometimes the team needs to rebuild first, before any training has a hope of sticking.
So what now then?
Stop treating symptoms. Stop rolling out training programmes and wondering why nothing changes. Start with diagnosis. Get curious about what's really going on backstage.
Everything deserves diagnosis. Not just stress.
If you're ready to find out what's really driving your team's behaviour, that's exactly what a Team Diagnostic is for. An outside-in look behind the scenes, before you spend a penny on training. Fancy taking a proper look together? Book a call and we'll do just that.