Your team is talking past each other and you don't know why
You can feel it happening. Meetings happen but nothing changes. People aren't on the same page even though you've talked through priorities. Someone does work that doesn't align with what you thought was decided. You step in to clarify, it feels better for a week, then the same thing happens again.
And yeah, work is supposed to be hard. That's why it's called work, right? But this isn't hard in a way that's getting you anywhere. This is the kind of hard that makes your best people quietly start looking around.
It's not that people aren't trying. It's that clarity isn't sticking — and the longer it goes, the more it costs you. Decisions get relitigated. Good people get frustrated. The work slows down in ways that are hard to explain but impossible to ignore.
We help teams figure out what's actually breaking down, and work it out themselves so it stays fixed. That's coaching and team development done the hard way, the human way, which turns out to be the only way that actually sticks.
Let's figure out what's blocking your team. Book a 25-min call.
How we work with you
Every engagement starts with understanding your specific situation — no standard prescription. Some teams need help with how leaders create clarity without defaulting to micromanagement. Others are struggling with communication across functions, time zones, or seniority levels. Sometimes it's about how decisions get made, and whether the right people feel heard. Or it's the rituals — what's helping versus quietly getting in the way.
We figure that out together first, then shape the work around it. This isn't an instant cake mix — just add butter, an egg, and some framework du jour.
Structured individual coaching runs about $2K per month, typically in three-month increments (three weeks on, one week off). Team packages are also available. We'll be straight during the discovery call about what makes sense — and equally straight if we're not the right fit.
What this looks like in practice
When I joined SoftServe as design director in Jan 2021, I inherited a team of 135 designers spread across Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, and a handful of other locations — with 84% of clients in U.S. or Americas time zones. Communication was strained. Handoffs were rough. Then in early 2022, the war in Ukraine accelerated everything, and the team needed to reorganize fast, adding delivery centers in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile.
What followed wasn't just a logistics problem. It was a team dynamics problem. Different cultures, different norms, different expectations about work and trust. The first instinct was more structure — better processes, cleaner career ladders, tighter DesignOps. Those mattered. But the real shift came from something simpler: creating space for the non-work stuff.
Weekly calls that had been focused on project updates got restructured so that the updates moved async (posted monthly to Teams), and the live time became personal — no agenda, no deliverable. Two team members opened up about the isolation of remote work. One shared a lifelong health condition that had shaped how they saw everything. Another used the group as test subjects for a video game they were building on the side.
The team didn't just get more efficient. We actually trusted each other — and that changed everything about how the work got done.
— From Skipper's time at SoftServe, Jan 2021–Jul 2024
READY TO WORK TOGETHER?
See if our approach fits your needs
Book a 25-min call to talk through your situation. We'll be straight about whether our approach makes sense — and what working together might look like (if we work in tandem).
Phone: +1 917-720-6388
Email: heythere@howthisworks.co
Book a call: howthisworks.co/start
Based in San Francisco, CA, working globally
How This Works show, our podcast
Subscribe to our newsletter, How Might We...
Weekly-ish dispatches on customer discovery and product strategy — sensemaking from inside the work and from home, with AI in the mix
© 2017-2026 How This Works, Inc. All rights reserved.
