I was twenty-two, back in Sheffield after university, and this job was a stopgap. I knew it, they knew it. I'd taken a contract with the local council as a project coordinator — which sounds more interesting than it was — working on a recycling initiative. The role had two parts. Half of it was surveying council flats, working out how to fit recycling bins into communal areas. The other half was supposed to be project managing a contractor delivering bins across the city. In theory that meant sitting in the cab of a 7.5 tonne wagon with a map, moving slowly down streets while a team worked behind. In practice, on freezing winter days when the light was already gone by four and everyone just wanted to get home, I was out of the cab running with the team. It cost me overtime wages. I didn't care.
The survey work was where things got interesting, and not in a good way.
Driving around Sheffield in a van taking photos and writing short reports, I was running out of things to do. Someone mentioned there were outstanding requests — residents who'd had bins damaged or never delivered. I found one of them myself: an elderly woman with bin bags stacked by her back door, sharing a bin with her neighbour, genuinely grateful when I turned up with a replacement. It seemed obvious. She needed a bin. I had a van full of them.
So I spoke to the admin team, got the full list of outstanding requests, and started working through it. I'd plan a survey route for the areas I needed to cover anyway, load up whatever deliveries fell along that route, drop them off, send an email to tick them off the list. I was helping people and staying busy. Both felt good. We had more inventory than we'd ever use. I couldn't see a downside.
After a few weeks I was called into my manager's office.
The tone was bureaucratic rather than hostile — patient in the way people are patient when they think you simply don't understand how things work. Which, to be fair, I didn't. I was told that delivering bins wasn't my job, and that I was turning requests around too quickly. The service had a four-week turnaround for outstanding requests. I was servicing them in days.
I remember being genuinely baffled rather than defensive. We had the stock. The people needed the bins. What was the problem?
When I pushed — out of puzzlement rather than defiance — they explained something I hadn't known. The bin wagon teams had previously been paid on a job-and-finish basis, so naturally they'd moved fast. But the service had been privatised, and under the new arrangement there was real pressure to shift to hourly pay. The problem was that if the teams demonstrably finished early, it became evidence that routes could be extended, targets raised, budgets cut. Any visible improvement in performance was a threat. The system had learned, through experience, that doing the work well was dangerous.
I sat with that for a moment. I still couldn't fully square it. But I was twenty-two, bored, and this wasn't going to be my career. I got back in the van, carried on doing the job to the best of my ability; I listened to The Archers in the afternoons and I served out the contract.
It's only later, with more context about how teams work and what leaders are actually managing, that the shape of what I was experiencing becomes clearer. Lencioni writes in Three Signs of a Miserable Job about immeasurement — the idea that when people can't see whether their work is making a difference, it becomes miserable almost by default. That felt true here. But the deeper thing, the thing The Five Dysfunctions of a Team gets at, is how fear quietly rewires a team's priorities until self-preservation becomes the actual job. Nobody in that office was malicious. They were just operating inside a system that had learned, through painful experience, that visibility was dangerous.
I've got some sympathy for my manager now. They were sitting inside a broken system, trying to manage a project team attached to something much larger and much more dysfunctional than anything they controlled. The privatisation had happened before I arrived. The defensive culture had formed before I arrived. They were doing what they could in an environment that didn't reward doing more.
But here's what stays with me from that job. I was twenty-two and enthusiastic and I helped an old woman get a bin and got told that was a problem. That's what dysfunction feels like from the ground floor. Not dramatic. Not villainous. Just a quiet, bureaucratic instruction to slow down, stay in your lane, and stop making things visible that people would rather not see.