Large teams have their virtues: diversity of thought, expanded skillsets, the ability to crowdsource birthday card signatures. But somewhere between “we’re growing fast” and “who are all these people in the Zoom call?” lies a critical tipping point. That’s where cohesion fractures, communication splinters, and a dozen micro-cultures bloom in the shadows.
What’s trickier? These fractures don’t always show up in the usual metrics. Deadlines get met. Jokes fly in chat. Everything looks fine—until decisions stall, cliques form, and no one knows who’s actually in charge of what anymore.
Splintered Communication and the Rise of the Shadow Channels
Subgroups aren’t inherently toxic. They’re a natural consequence of human social wiring. We like familiarity. We flock toward similar schedules, time zones, or shared projects. But once those clusters form, they tend to reinforce themselves—especially in remote or hybrid teams.Think of it this way: when your backend developers have their own Slack channel, complete with custom emoji, inside jokes, and a semi-official hierarchy… they’re a sovereign nation now. Decisions might still technically get made in the “official” meetings, but in practice, power’s already decentralized.
Warning signs include:
- Team-wide meetings where only three people speak regularly
- Repeated project updates that contradict each other
- Slack messages that begin with “as we discussed earlier” but you were never in that thread
- Projects slowing down, not because of incompetence, but because no one’s quite sure who’s actually responsible
Invisible Leadership Drift
This one’s insidious. Leadership drift happens when informal authority stops matching formal roles. Maybe the person who’s technically project lead isn’t the one people go to with tough questions. Or maybe your best facilitator has quietly become a de facto gatekeeper—without realizing it themselves.Subgroups accelerate this drift. Once people start operating in clusters, they recalibrate leadership inside those bubbles. That might mean ignoring the team lead’s priorities in favor of their subgroup’s unspoken goals. It’s rarely malicious. It’s just what happens when there’s no systemic glue holding the entire group together.
Worse still, leaders who don’t see it happening can’t correct it. Their authority erodes invisibly, while real influence migrates to the most charismatic spreadsheet ninja on the dev team.
Diagnostics That Actually Work
Before you can fix it, you’ve got to see it—and not through the rose-tinted dashboard of whatever collaboration tool promised team harmony in six clicks.Try these instead:
- Social Network Mapping – Ask team members to anonymously list who they go to for advice, problem-solving, or collaboration. Then map the results. You’ll likely see clusters—and possibly a few central nodes who weren’t officially in charge of anything.
- Meeting Heatmaps – Track who speaks, and how often, across a few meetings. Visualize it. If 80% of input comes from 20% of attendees, you’re not getting team collaboration—you’re running a panel discussion.
- Cross-Pollination Surveys – Informally ask team members to describe what people in other roles or departments are working on. If answers are vague (“They’re… doing stuff with the app?”), silos are already well-formed.
Tactical Fixes That Don’t Feel Like Trust Falls
Solving subgroup discord isn’t about crushing all informal bonds. The goal isn’t forced unity; it’s strategic integration. You want autonomy without drift—connected independence.A few fixes that work without sending anyone into a cornfield to “reconnect” with their coworkers:
- Rotating Pairings – Shuffle project pairings or review partners every few weeks. It’s like musical chairs, but with less panic and more cross-team understanding. People learn new tools, encounter different work styles, and blur subgroup boundaries naturally.
- Explicit Subgroup Norms – If a subgroup exists (and it will), name it and give it structure. Define when it can make autonomous decisions and when it must loop in the wider team. This makes informal power visible—and accountable.
- Cross-Pollination Sessions – Facilitated working sessions where people from different subgroups must collaborate on time-boxed challenges. Make the task unfamiliar to all of them. Watch them recalibrate hierarchies in real-time. Bonus: someone usually brings snacks.
- Mini Retros Focused on Subgroup Health – Not the usual “what went well / what could be better.” Ask: “Are we leaning too much on the same people? Are we operating in silos without noticing?” Encourage brutal honesty—and give permission for discomfort.
Clusterflux
Subgroup discord isn’t a failure. It’s a signal. It means your team has grown past the point where shared lunches and single-channel announcements can hold it all together.But it also means you’ve got the raw material for something better: a networked team that adapts, learns, and cross-communicates by design, not just by inertia.
So if your project updates feel like espionage briefings and half your team seems to be operating from a different script, take a breath. You might just be in a perfectly normal state of team evolution—one that’s ready for smarter design, not another icebreaker.
Just don’t expect the spreadsheet ninja to give up power willingly. You’ve been warned.
Article kindly provided by groupdynamix.com
