The Varsity crew team is slowing down because they're not working synchronously—team members feel dejected, are no longer engaged, and are expressing disdain for theirexperience this season. No team members have emerged as leaders. At least several membersfeel that they personally carry the boat's weight. Each rower is focused on his individualperformance as opposed to theteam'sperformance. Rather than engaging in direct dialogue toresolve conflict productively, the team has resorted to finger-pointing.This indicates the critical issue is a lack of trust among the team members. By lack of trust, we mean that each team member does not feel he can rely on his teammates to put forththeir best effort. The rowers are adrift because they lack the bonds best engendered by trust. Noleadership has emerged, because none of the rowers trusts his peers enough to follow them. Therowers are focused on individual performance because they don't trust that their teammates aredoing their best. The rowers don't even trust their team to actively listen to their concerns.Several factors contributed to this deterioration of trust. First, the dissatisfaction with theVarsity team’s margin of victory in Atlanta indicates the absence of clear and specific goals. Thecoach should have used that opportunity to have the team articulate and agree on specificobjectives for the season. Instead, he allowed the team to devolve into a structureless,directionless mess. Each loss further demoralized the team and caused their trust to erode.In addition, the coach downplayed the importance of constructive leadership and alloweddisrupters to lead the team into dysfunction. The absence of established group norms furtherconfused the team’s sense of purpose. Specifically, the team members’ failure to recognize andvalue other members’ contributions prevented the team from developing a mutually supportiveenvironment. Lastly, the team did not hold each other accountable for their collective success orfailure, and instead pointed to individual performances in post-practice self-critiques and inprivate comments to the coach. By discouraging open criticism of each other, the coachexacerbated the problem and prevented the team from developing healthy conflict resolutionhabits.Coach Preczewski could have implemented the following solutions during the season, orshould do so prospectively for success next season. First, he needs to help the team establish aclear common purpose and then articulate specific, attainable goals that will help them realizethat purpose. As the team achieves each goal, they will begin to gain confidence in one anotherand their team’s ability to succeed. This confidence will foster trust and commitment among theteam members. Goals should include measurable objectives such as racing against the clock andalternately forgetting about time in order to focus on near-perfect synchronicity.In order to fulfill these small, attainable goals, the team needs to rely on a framework of specific group norms to guide their interpersonal interactions. Most importantly, a norm thatencourages honest dialogue among team members must be established. The team shouldencourage open, communal discussion of team members’ thoughts and feelings so thatunacknowledged frustrations don’t boil over into angry emails to the coach. A ‘check in’ witheach member at post-practice critiques might open up such dialogue.