Employee Disengagement: When Good Teams Stop Believing

One hard week does not weaken a system. Neither does two. Over time, when the bad weeks outnumber the good ones, the maths starts working in the wrong direction.

I used to run big projects. I was often the glue guy: the person who could bring different teams together, get them aligned and keep a difficult piece of work moving. I enjoyed that role. It meant working with good people who cared about what we were trying to build.

Then the business was purchased, and the direction began to change. Projects that had taken months of collective effort could be cancelled close to the finish line because the holding company had shifted its strategy. I would be the person pushing everyone towards the deadline, then the person gathering them together to explain that the work was no longer going ahead.

Once is disappointing. By the third time, I was asking people to trust a deadline they had good reason to doubt. That was when I began to see employee disengagement take shape in a team that was still doing its job.

What employee disengagement looked like in our team

I told them I was sorry and grateful for what they had put into it. We would see whether any of the work could be repurposed. Delivering that news was hard, but the real problem was that this was the third project in a row I had asked some of those people to work on and then had to cancel.

I went from being someone people loved working with to someone they were reluctant to work with professionally. They did not suddenly dislike me. They had learned that putting their best effort into one of my projects offered no guarantee that the work would ever see the light of day. I could still bring them together and give them direction, but I could no longer give them much confidence in what would happen at the end.

The team remained capable. People turned up, did their jobs and met the demands in front of them. What faded was the enthusiasm they used to bring to the work. I’ve written about the psychology of disengagement during change; this was what it looked like from inside the team. Nobody had to announce that they had stopped believing. You could feel it in how much of themselves they were willing to put into the next project.

It would be tempting to call that a motivation problem. I think it was a reasonable response to the pattern they had experienced. If an organisation repeatedly asks for commitment and repeatedly cancels the result, people start protecting themselves from the next disappointment.

Where the alignment began to drift

Before the purchase, the business had a purpose people understood and cared about. They could see how their work contributed to it. That shared sense of purpose made difficult projects worth carrying.

After the purchase, the emphasis shifted towards revenue. A business has to make money, and a change in strategy may have been necessary. The strain came from what people were still being asked to believe about their work while the decisions around them began signalling something different. They were being encouraged to deliver against a purpose that no longer seemed to guide what got approved or protected.

The cancellations made that shift visible. Each project had its own explanation, but together they told the team a story about what mattered. People could see the work being done and the work being discarded, even if they could not see every decision being made above them.

This is one reason business-wide averages can be reassuring at precisely the wrong moment. As Dan Heath puts it in Reset: “Averages are great for monitoring but terrible for diagnosis.” The organisation may still be delivering while particular teams absorb repeated reversals. Employee disengagement can develop within one of those teams long before a company-wide measure makes the problem obvious.

Information has to move through the organisation. Leaders need to know where teams are losing confidence, where priorities keep changing and where effort is being spent on work that may no longer serve the direction of the business. A dashboard showing that the company is broadly on track will not tell them what it feels like to be on the third cancelled project.

What leaders can do before the next cancellation

Go and see what the decision cost. Once a project has been cancelled, speak to the people who worked on it. Ask what happened to their time, their other priorities and their confidence in the next piece of work. Listening is more useful than reassuring everyone that they are valued while immediately handing them another deadline. Reset helped me think about the difference between seeing an overall result and getting close enough to understand what produced it.

Test the goal behind the deadline. Before committing people to months of work, ask what the work is meant to achieve and whether that goal is likely to hold. One useful question in a changing business would have been: “Will this work still be relevant in six months?” Nobody can promise that a strategy will never change. Leaders can, however, challenge a large commitment when the direction above it is uncertain, and change the scope before a team invests heavily in it.

Make changes in direction visible early. People can work with uncertainty more honestly when they are told what is known, what is still undecided and what might change. When that information does not move, teams fill the gap themselves, often through rumours and guesses. The systems thinking in Think in Systems and the leadership work in Scaling Leadership both point towards the value of information and trust moving through an organisation. In practice, that means listening to the teams doing the work and telling them when the direction starts to shift, rather than waiting for a final cancellation.

These actions will not save every project. They can help leaders recognise employee disengagement before continued delivery convinces them that the team is fine.

After a few rounds, the work my team had been doing ended entirely and my role moved to another function. I cannot say exactly when every decision above us was made. I know what it was like to keep asking good people for their best work while becoming less certain that the organisation would use it.

That loss of belief did not arrive all at once. It accumulated, project by project, in a team that continued to show up. Leaders needed to hear that change before asking them, yet again, to believe in the deadline.