# Teamwork Challenges: The 9 Most Common Ones, and Which Part Is Yours to Fix Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-challenges/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-challenges.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving teamwork at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The nine most common teamwork challenges, why several are downstream of just one or two root causes, and what you can do about each without any authority. ## Key facts - Title: Teamwork Challenges: The 9 Most Common Ones, and Which Part Is Yours to Fix - Category: Teamwork - Primary skill: Teamwork - Related skills: Communication, Influence - Primary keyword: teamwork challenges - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-challenges/ ## What this page covers - The nine most common teamwork challenges, why several are downstream of just one or two root causes, and what you can do about each without any authority. - Practical guidance for teamwork challenges - How this topic connects to Teamwork ## Detailed explanation People do not look up teamwork challenges to build a better team in the abstract. They look them up because something is going wrong in the team they are already in, usually with a specific person or a specific meeting in mind. The most common teamwork challenges are unclear roles, unequal contribution, low trust, disagreement that never gets voiced, siloed information, decisions nobody genuinely commits to, missed commitments left unmentioned, credit landing on the wrong person, and pressures that originate outside the team altogether. What the published lists rarely say is that these are not nine independent problems. ## Nine teamwork challenges, and which link each one sits on Patrick Lencioni's model, still the most-taught account of how teams fail, arranges the same symptoms as a chain rather than a list: absence of trust produces fear of conflict, which produces lack of commitment, which produces avoidance of accountability, which produces inattention to results. That ordering is the most useful thing on this page. It means several of the challenges below are consequences, and attacking them directly is work spent two links downstream of the actual breakage. The second thing worth naming up front: almost every remedy you will find published is addressed to a manager. Clarify roles in the job descriptions. Establish honesty in the team. If none of that is [within your authority](/knowledge/influence/influence-without-authority/), the advice describes a lever you cannot reach. So each entry below ends with the part that stays available from an ordinary seat. ### 1. Nobody is quite sure who owns what Role ambiguity is the single most-cited challenge across the sources, and Indeed's breakdown traces it to something specific: the absence of clear role definition produces overlapping responsibilities and missed deliverables at the same time. Two people build the same thing while a third thing goes unbuilt, from one root cause. Teams usually respond by adding status meetings, which is a fix aimed at effort when the defect is in allocation. The move that stays yours is smaller than a role-definition exercise: when a new piece of work appears in a thread or a meeting, ask out loud who is taking it, before the conversation moves on. Allocation is cheap to fix at the moment work is created and expensive to fix three weeks later. ### 2. One or two people carry the load This has a precise name in the research. Social loafing is the tendency of individuals in a group to put in less effort than they would alone; free riding is the specific case where someone eases off because they expect others to absorb it. A case subject in one study of Lencioni's model described feeling like "the sucker" for doing 95 percent of the work, which is probably closer to how this actually feels than any tidier phrasing. The research is unusually practical about what reduces it. Task visibility, distributive justice, and intrinsic task involvement are all negatively associated with social loafing — meaning that when individual contribution becomes visible and the split feels fair, effort recovers. Making one specific piece of work visibly one person's is often the whole intervention, and it requires no confrontation. ### 3. Low trust, which is usually the real problem Sources describe [lack of trust](/knowledge/teamwork/building-trust-in-a-team/) as the challenge that causes the others rather than sitting beside them: it shuts down communication, suppresses collaboration, raises conflict, and drains motivation. In the chain, it is the first link. There is a counterintuitive finding here worth acting on. High cognitive trust reduces the felt need to monitor teammates, and that reduction itself lowers loafing, because people respond to being trusted with a sense of professional obligation. The implication runs against instinct: chasing and checking up on an underperforming colleague can deepen the problem it is trying to solve. What works in the other direction is unglamorous and entirely within your control — doing what you said you would do, when you said you would, visibly enough that people stop wondering. ### 4. The disagreement nobody will have Most of the popular lists treat conflict as the problem and harmony as the goal. The research inverts this. What Lencioni identifies as the dysfunction is fear of conflict — teams that never have the argument they actually need to have, and then carry the unresolved objection into everything that follows. This matters because it changes what a quiet team means. A team where people argue about the work and then go to lunch is in better shape than one where nobody objects and the real conversation happens afterward in private messages. The distinguishing test is not volume but target: disagreement that stays on the topic is functional, and disagreement that becomes about the person is not. Being the one who says the private-message sentence out loud, once, on something small, tells you which kind of room you are in. ### 5. Information stops at the edge of each person's job Siloed work is listed separately from poor communication for a good reason: it is not a failure of information flow or of tooling, but of identification. As Engagedly's account of collaboration problems puts it, members have to recognize that they are a team and direct their effort at a common goal rather than at their own adjacent piece of it. Sharing what you know before someone has to come and ask for it is the smallest version of "we" beating "me," and it is one of the few things on this list that works immediately regardless of what anyone else does. ### 6. Decisions get made, then quietly ignored A decision is reached, nobody objects, and implementation does not happen. This gets diagnosed as a follow-through problem, and it is not — it is the third link in the chain, sitting directly downstream of the disagreement in point four. People who never voiced their objection do not implement the decision, because privately they never agreed to it. The resolving principle is "[disagree and commit](/knowledge/teamwork/disagree-and-commit/)," and the reason it fails in practice is that teams do half of it. They either commit without disagreeing, or they disagree and keep re-litigating afterward. Both halves are the skill. If you are unsure which mode a conversation is in, ask whether the decision is still open. ### 7. Missed commitments go unmentioned Peer accountability is where the gap between the research and the published advice is widest. The model treats it as decisive, and almost nothing written for a general audience tells a non-manager what to do about a colleague who missed a commitment. The guidance that does exist is specific and does not require authority: [raise it directly](/knowledge/teamwork/peer-accountability/), do not let it sit, and be specific about the commitment rather than about the person or the pattern. Speed is most of what keeps this from turning into criticism, because a missed deadline raised the next day is a logistics conversation and the same one raised a month later is a character judgment. ### 8. Credit lands on the wrong person Individual visibility pursued at the team's expense is the "me over we" failure, and it does lasting damage because it changes what people are willing to share on the next project. It is also the challenge least likely to be recognized as a teamwork problem at all — it is experienced as unfairness, which is a feeling people sit with rather than a diagnosis they act on. The correction that works is factual and unemotional: state who did what, once, in the setting where it matters. The other half is giving credit to the team by default when the work was the team's. ### 9. The problem may not actually be the team A recognized category of teamwork barriers originates outside the team entirely. A review of the most common teamwork barriers in health services lists competing demands, power differentials, lack of resources, member overload, shifting requirements, inexperience working together, and a leader who does not promote collaboration — several of which look exactly like interpersonal dysfunction from the inside. This is worth checking before you spend effort on the other eight, because behavioral effort applied to a resourcing problem does not work and quietly convinces people that the team is beyond help. Misdiagnosis is itself a cost. Sorting which of these nine is genuinely in your hands from which belongs to the organization decides whether any of it improves, and it is easier with an honest read on [where your own habits sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) than with an inventory of everyone else's. ## What makes a difficult team easier to work in Read back over the nine and the available responses have something in common: not one of them is an organizational change. They are behaviors, and the same few keep reappearing under different names. **Teamwork** carries most of this. Every symptom above maps onto a specific part of it having gone missing — duplicated work is complementary roles left unsorted, unequal effort and grabbed credit are "me" displacing the common purpose, unnamed missed commitments are the accountability habit absent, the silent meeting is necessary disagreement being ducked, and low trust is sincerity and reliability having quietly stopped being demonstrated. Identifying which part has failed turns a diffuse sense that the team is dysfunctional into one thing you can act on. **Communication** is where most of these get repaired, in a much narrower sense than communicating more. It is choosing a conversation rather than a message when the subject is sensitive or complex, saying the main point first, speaking up instead of assuming someone else will, and handling the two hard cases that define a struggling team: expressing disagreement without making it personal, and giving feedback that lands as information rather than as an attack. **Influence** is the one that closes the gap between what you have read everywhere and what you can actually do. Nearly every published fix assumes authority you do not have. Influence is the alternative route: credibility built by delivering consistently, a willingness to take responsibility past the edge of your own role, and the initiative to set the agenda — volunteering to write down who owns what, or to raise the thing nobody has raised. Understanding what a resistant colleague actually gets out of a change is preparation, not politics. The free test measures [your weakest link](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) across all of these directly. **It covers twelve work skills in total**, so the three above arrive positioned against the rest rather than in isolation — and none of them is a temperament you either have or do not. ## The part of this you control Some of that will already describe how you work, and some of it probably describes habits you recognize in yourself as well as in the people around you. That is not a verdict on you. Gaps in this kind of skill are the ordinary result of never having been taught them, they are changeable, and closing them does not require becoming a different person at work — you can still be exactly who you are and be considerably easier to work with. The pull does grow, though. The more your work depends on other people, the more of a team's dysfunction becomes yours to navigate rather than someone else's to solve, which is a good argument for knowing where you stand now rather than later. You have already done the part most people skip. You went looking for the mechanism instead of settling for the grievance. ## Find out where you stand The only thing left is finding out which of these behaviors is already working for you, and which one is quietly costing you in the team you are in right now. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your own work skills. It takes about seven minutes, and it gives you a profile across all twelve — teamwork, communication, and influence among them — so you can see which one is your real gap and which single change would do the most for the situation you are in. You do it on your own, and the result is yours. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The nine most common teamwork challenges, why several are downstream of just one or two root causes, and what you can do about each without any authority. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Teamwork. It also relates to Communication, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-challenges/ Preferred summary: "The nine most common teamwork challenges, why several are downstream of just one or two root causes, and what you can do about each without any authority." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.