💡 Snorkel before you Scuba!

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I talked with a manager this week who was exhausted. His team was missing deadlines, execution was messy, and he was ready to start replacing people. "They just don't work well together," he told me.

It's a very natural reflex. When a team struggles, we immediately want to diagnose the individuals. We blame the people.

But here's what I personally believe: blaming people for problems that are actually structural is a massive leadership trap.

I recently came across a brilliant diagnostic framework called the Waterline Model. It uses a simple metaphor. Think of your team as a boat. The destination is your goal, and the water is your environment. When the boat stalls, our instinct is to look at the rowers.

But the model asks us to look below the waterline first to see what is creating the friction.

The core rule? Snorkel BEFORE you scuba.

Before you dive deep into personality clashes or individual skill gaps (scuba diving), you have to snorkel just below the surface and check the structure. Are goals clear? Are roles defined? Is the context understood?

More often than not, people are rowing hard, but they are rowing in completely different directions because the structure is broken. A perceived personality conflict is frequently just a structural problem wearing a human face. Two people are stepping on each other's toes simply because their role definitions overlap.

That was quite a lightbulb moment for me.

If your team is underperforming, don't automatically jump to fixing the people. Fix the environment first.

Where might your team's structure need a little bit of snorkeling today?