6 Steps to Reset a Demotivated Team

Harvard Business Review

08-07-2025

How often has your team changed lately? A new member joins. A key player exits. Roles shift. Strategy evolves. A conflict brews. Performance dips. Today's teams are in constant flux —reshaped by both internal dynamics and external pressures. And yet many leaders push forward without pausing to reset after a team change.
The best leaders know that success isn't static—it requires regular renewal. Whether driven by restructuring, relationship tensions, demotivation, or strategic pivots, there comes a moment when a team needs more than a tweak. It needs a relaunch.
Based on our collective work with hundreds of teams over the past decade, we offer a roadmap for getting your team back on track.
1. Reassess: Diagnose before you act
Leaders often rush to make changes without first diagnosing the underlying issues, only to find the problems worsen. Before jumping into action, consider these questions:
Is the team aligned on purpose, goals, and priorities?
Are there unresolved conflicts or trust issues?
Has motivation, engagement, or well-being dropped?
Are there external pressures impacting performance?
Does the team have the right resources?
Is there a shared commitment to investing in relationships?
Are there issues with your leadership style or perceived fairness?
Not all team members will feel comfortable speaking openly, especially in group settings or directly with you. Cultural norms, personal history, and power dynamics can all shape how people express concerns. In addition to one-on-one conversations, consider using anonymous pulse surveys, or have one trusted member of the team compile unspoken themes and report them to you. And if the team's psychological safety allows, host a structured dialogue where members can share their perspectives in a respectful, inclusive way.
The goal isn't to force openness—it's to uncover what's really going on in a way that works for your team. Only then can you address the root causes and relaunch with intention.
Take one leader we worked with at a European tech company. He believed a loss of motivation had caused his team to get complacent, diminishing their performance. We asked him to dive a little deeper into what might really be going on that could perhaps be unspoken. An anonymous team diagnostic revealed a deeper issue: A recent reporting restructure had left several members feeling overlooked and undervalued, driving their disengagement. Once the true cause surfaced, the leader could take targeted action to rebuild trust and reenergize the team.
While individual conversations are helpful for diagnosis, the reset must happen together. Leaders often rely too heavily on private, bilateral talks, unintentionally reinforcing fault lines. The real work lies in building the team's capacity to face hard truths— collectively.
2. Reconnect: Build trust and psychological safety
If your team has been through turbulence, chances are trust has taken a hit. For example, we recently worked with a senior leader at a pharmaceutical company who dismissed a team-composition change as 'just one person' and that it was 'more or less the same team.' But the reality was different: While only one team member was replaced, the new person was dismissive and made sarcastic comments, which fundamentally distorted the whole team's power dynamics and diminished psychological safety.
Relaunching starts with rebuilding psychological safety by creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up, share their experience, challenge ideas, and even engage in a ' good fight ' now and then. Here's how to begin:
Lead with vulnerability by conducting a team check-in to understand how team members are faring both personally and professionally.
Encourage open dialogue through structured team retrospectives. Allow each member to speak about their experience and ideas and be heard and acknowledged by others. Share your own lessons learned and what you'll do differently.
Allow for constructive feedback through a structured team process where feedback is considered a shared responsibility.
3. Reenvision: What's our job to be done?
What is your team's purpose? What does the future hold? What is at stake? Teams rally around clear, inspiring visions, especially during periods of change. Frame the relaunch as an opportunity to realign on the 'what,' not just to react to problems.
While leaders often assume their team is aligned on purpose and strategy, that's not necessarily the case, and it's important to make the implicit explicit. We worked with the CFO of a German manufacturing company who had attempted a relaunch but been unsuccessful. She had skipped this reenvision step because her team members insisted that the vision was 'clear,' when in reality, they weren't on the same page.
To get the alignment you need, be transparent about challenges while focusing on the future:
Clarify the overall vision and strategic map to get there. Align on a few key outcomes that define success in the short and long term.
Reaffirm the team's purpose and value to the organization and to customers.
Set a forward-looking tone that inspires optimism and agency.
4. Recontract: Clarify the team's ways of working
Misalignment often stems from confusion about roles, priorities, and how team members will actually collaborate. During a relaunch, renew and redefine key elements of what McKinsey refers to as the ' team operating system ': 'the building blocks for the way team members collaborate, create change, and support one another.' Consider:
Roles and responsibilities: Ensure everyone knows what's expected of them. This encompasses both written and unwritten expectations of who specifically is responsible for which deliverables.
Decision-making processes: Clarify who makes which decisions and how input is gathered.
Team norms and expectations: Consider which behaviors are expected, what the optimal cadence is for meetings and collaboration, and when you'll engage in feedback. It's especially critical to regularly realign and reinforce these expectations when working across borders, boundaries, and time zones.
We worked with the leadership team of a fast-moving consumer goods company's EMEA region on realigning their meeting practices. They were suffering from meeting proliferation, where their entire days were spent sitting in meetings, leaving little time to get 'actual work' done. We challenged them to be as specific as possible, considering questions like: Who must really be in the room, and who can receive the minutes afterward? What preparation is expected? What are our practices for virtual and face-to-face meetings, including length, how to ensure all voices are heard, and how much time to spend on checking in? And after the meeting itself, is there time for debriefing and sensemaking? After going through that exercise, the team created—and upheld—new standards, and meeting quality improved dramatically.
5. Reenergize: Build on successes
It's easy to fall back into old patterns. To make the relaunch stick, focus on quick wins that demonstrate positive movement and reinforce the new behaviors. Identify one or two visible, achievable objectives that can be met in the first 30 to 60 days and recognize team members for doing so. Small successes build confidence and reinforce positive team dynamics. A team's energy is shaped by its daily interactions, successes, and failures. Relaunching is a great time to introduce or refresh rituals that foster alignment and engagement. Here are some ideas:
Bi-weekly check-ins: Schedule short, focused team meetings to align on priorities.
Wins and learnings reviews: Celebrate progress and reflect on lessons after completing important milestones.
One-on-one coaching: Prioritize regular leader–team member touchpoints with the purpose of having a growth-oriented, developmental conversation. Equally important are the peer-to-peer coaching conversations where colleagues help each other with expansive questions aimed at strengthening skills.
A supply chain team we worked with took time to acknowledge the progress they were making on active listening. They gave encouraging feedback to a team member who had previously been dominating conversations and had practiced stepping back in meetings. This encouraged him to continue the journey, propelling the team forward. These moments of positive reinforcement shape and reinforce team culture.
6. Readjust: Sustain momentum
A relaunch is not a one-time event—it's an ongoing process, and the steps aren't always linear. Keep the momentum by:
Tracking progress against the team's new goals and priorities.
Providing micro-feedback frequent, brief, and targeted, and holding each other accountable to new ways of working.
Regularly reassessing and adjusting what's working and what's not, including roles and responsibilities, decision-making processes, and team norms.
The executive board of a logistics solution company we worked with found itself in a situation where members were frustrated with one of their peers, resulting in an us-versus-him dynamic. But we found that the reality was more complicated. The team was consistently violating an initially agreed-upon norm of turn-taking and sharing the airtime in discussions. The flipchart that featured this agreement had been pushed to the corner of the room and subsequently forgotten. The simple act of asking them to revisit those norms launched the reset. We asked them to evaluate themselves: 'On a scale of 1–10, how well are you doing on your initial agreement to take turns and share the airtime?'
. . .
Like any living systems, teams need regular care, attention, and intentional renewal to thrive. Relaunching a team isn't a sign of failure—it's a sign of leadership. By pausing to reassess, reset, and realign, leaders can reenergize their teams, strengthen trust, and build the clarity and momentum needed for sustained performance in an ever-changing environment.