Moving Fast. Not Yet Moving Together

I was watching them work through a hard, in-flight project together when one of them stopped mid-sentence and said: “I am going to rumble.”

The room got quiet. The leader did not smooth it over. She acknowledged it, appreciated it, and asked for more.

I have been sitting with that moment. Not because it was dramatic, but because of what it told me about what this team had really been missing.

I had walked in thinking this team had a trust problem. It was newly formed with tenured leaders sitting next to brand new ones. There was real friction in the air, alongside real optimism about what they could become. The kind of room where you assume the work is going to be about building trust.

But the longer I sat with them, the clearer it became. They did not have a trust problem, they had a time problem.

There is never a good moment for a team like this to stop and actually become a team. So they keep moving and hope it works itself out. Sometimes it does. More often, the cracks show up later, at the worst possible moment.

And the world is not making this easier. Organizations are restructuring faster, forming teams quicker, and asking experienced leaders to start over without the breathing room that starting over usually comes with. Add AI, complexity, and a pace of change nobody was trained for, and the gap between moving fast and moving together gets wider every quarter.

So here is the question I keep coming back to: what does forming look like when you cannot afford the time forming usually requires?

The team I was with.

This was an HR leadership team inside a business in full transformation. Seasoned executives with deep expertise and real optimism about what they could become together. Too experienced to feel like beginners. Too pressured to stop.

The pressure on this team is not ordinary. When a business is transforming, HR does not just support it. HR carries it. Every culture shift, every capability build, every leadership change runs through this function. They were being asked to redesign themselves while also helping the whole organization redesign, with no time away to figure it out and no later when things would be calmer.

The typical model of team formation — forming, storming, norming, performing — assumes a sequence and assumes time. This team had neither.

So we built something different.

What two days made possible.

• They subtracted. They got honest about the few things that matter most right now. The rest became non-goals.

• They built a new operating rhythm together. Designed by them, in real time.

• They used AI in the room. Not as individuals, but as a team. They left understanding how to use it as a team in their meetings and in the shared work.

• They rumbled. For the first time, together, and it became a team norm.

• They worked on real work, in a new way. That is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

The collaboration lab

We built a three-hour collaboration lab into the design. The premise was simple. Take a real, in-flight project and use it as the vehicle for something bigger. Not to solve the project, but to learn how to work on it together, differently.

We used a framework called dynamic contracting to guide the conversation. Five pillars: the problem they were solving, the competing interests in play, ownership and roles, how they would collaborate, how they would make decisions. Most teams move through work without naming any of these explicitly.

This was the first time they were having this kind of conversation with a framework that gave them the right altitude, depth, and guardrails. The pillars made the gaps obvious: decisions were unclear, ownership was muddy, and competing interests had not yet been discussed.

They walked away with a realization that this is the type of discussion they have been missing. It became abundantly clear that they need to have more working time together at this altitude on the most critical work they are leading together.

That is the part I keep coming back to. The traditional way of thinking about team formation says: build trust first, then go do the work. This team did the opposite. They built trust by doing the work together. The forming was not separate from the doing. It was the doing.

What actually moves a team.

Here is what I keep seeing work with teams like this one.

1. Leadership teams do not build trust by talking about trust. They build it by working through real things together. Trust is not always the precursor to the work. It gets built in the work.

2. You have to practice what you want to become. Talking about how you want to work, agreeing to it, even committing to it does not change anything. Living it in the room is what makes it stick.

3. The work starts long before the offsite does. Two days does not move a team like this without months of work leading up to it. Diagnostic conversations. A team findings report. A team playback to surface tensions and strengths together. Surveys to shape the operating rhythm before anyone walked in. Without that work, you can only scratch the surface. With it, two days can move what would normally take months.

This team did not generate a list of new ways to work together. They started living them.

Speed is not the problem and it never was. The teams that are pulling away right now are not the fastest. They are the ones who stopped, just long enough, to choose each other on purpose.

What is your team moving past that deserves a stop?

Tina Richards is a co-founder + managing partner of Collabic, a leadership and organizational development consultancy. She works with leaders and teams who want to do this differently. Find us at thecollabic.com.