How Better Team Alignment Helped Drive Trust, Clarity, and Performance

At Career Upside, we believe teams rarely struggle because people are unclear about the mission, misaligned in their roles, frustrated by communication gaps, or operating in an environment that does not bring out their best.

This case study shows how Birkman-informed leadership and team coaching principles helped rebuild a disrupted digital marketing function into a highly engaged, high-performing team.

The same principles apply across corporate, leadership, sales, nonprofit, and athletic teams. People perform better when they understand their role, trust their teammates, communicate effectively, and feel their team uses their strengths in a meaningful way.

Quick Summary

The Birkman Method helped rebuild a disrupted digital marketing team amid leadership turnover, staffing gaps, and stakeholder pressure. By creating a clearer purpose, stronger role alignment, better communication, and a culture built around trust and performance, the team became more engaged and more productive.

Birkman was used as a practical team-development tool to help team members understand their strengths, needs, communication styles, and stress behaviors. That self-awareness helped improve collaboration, reduce friction, and support better leadership decisions.

The result was a 97% sustainable engagement rating, which was 14 points above NCR norms and 17 points above the high-tech company norm.

What this case study shows:

• How Birkman can help leaders understand what drives engagement
• Why role clarity and communication matter to team performance
• How self-awareness can reduce friction inside a team
• Why engagement is not just an HR metric, but a productivity driver
• How these same principles can apply to corporate, nonprofit, and sports teams

Challenge

The digital marketing team at NCR was going through a major transition. The previous Director of Digital and Creative had left the organization, and several team members followed due to loyalty, frustration, and uncertainty around the change.

At the same time, the business still needed support across several important functions:

• Website management
• Marketing automation
• Social media
• Intranet communications
• Digital demand generation
• Shared-services support for business units

NCR designed the team to have eight people when fully staffed. At the time of the transition, it had only:

• 2 contractors
• 1 full-time employee
• 5 open roles

The team needed a stronger foundation for performance and not just more warm bodies.

The team was under-resourced, under-defined, and under pressure. Internal stakeholders still needed help, but the team did not yet have the structure, staffing, or role clarity to meet the business’s needs consistently.

Several barriers were affecting engagement and performance:

• Unclear roles and responsibilities
• Limited staffing capacity
• Stakeholder pressure from multiple business units
• Low confidence after leadership turnover
• Gaps in communication and service expectations
• A need to rebuild trust inside and outside the team

From a team-development perspective, the group needed more than tactical execution. It needed greater Purpose, Clarity, and Psychological Safety. These are core elements of Birkman’s High-Performing Teams framework, which focuses on helping teams understand why they exist, how they should align work, and how people can collaborate more effectively.

Without those elements, even talented people can become frustrated, reactive, disengaged, or misaligned.

Action

The rebuilding process focused on creating the conditions where people could do their best work.

1. Clarified the purpose of the team

The first step was helping the team and its stakeholders understand why the function existed and how it supported the business.

That included clarifying:

• What the team was responsible for
• Who the team served
• Which services were available immediately
• Which capabilities do they need to build over time
• How the team would create value for internal customers

This helped move the team from reactive order-taking to a clearer shared-services model. For business teams, this creates focus. For HR teams, this supports engagement and retention. For sports teams, this connects individual roles to team identity and winning performance.

2. Assessed people, roles, and capacity

The next step was understanding the current team.

This included one-on-one conversations with existing employees and contractors to identify:

• Strengths
• Work preferences
• Communication styles
• Current frustrations
• Capacity constraints
• Role-fit opportunities

From a Birkman perspective, this matters because people are more likely to stay engaged when their work allows them to use their natural strengths, operate in a supportive environment, and understand how their contribution connects to the larger goal.

3. Stabilized the work while rebuilding the team

Before the team could scale, they had to stabilize the immediate work.

The function continued supporting business-critical requests while they built the future structure. This helped reduce stakeholder frustration and gave the team time to rebuild credibility.

The goal was to create enough operational stability for the team to regain confidence and momentum.

4. Built role clarity and service expectations

They developed a clearer operating model for the digital marketing function.

This included:

• Team structure
• Role definitions
• Service-level expectations
• Future capability planning
• Hiring priorities
• Stakeholder communication

Role clarity is one of the biggest drivers of team effectiveness. When people do not know what they own, where they fit, or how the company makes decisions, engagement suffers.

This is true in business, and it is just as true in sports. Players may be talented, but if they do not understand their role, do not trust the system, or do not know how they contribute to the team’s success, their performance becomes inconsistent.

5. Hired and aligned talent around the future state

NCR created key roles and filled in digital marketing, marketing automation, and social media.

The focus was not just on technical skill. The goal was to build a team with the right mix of capabilities, ownership, communication styles, and leadership potential. Talent matters, but fit, trust, and role clarity determine whether that talent becomes productive. 

6. Used Birkman to improve self-awareness and collaboration

The team used Birkman to help better understand how people work.

The focus was practical:

• How does each person naturally communicate?
• What kind of work gives each person energy?
• What does each person need from the environment to perform well?
• What happens when you do not meet those needs?
• How can the team reduce friction and improve collaboration?
• How can leaders coach people based on their wiring?

Birkman was especially useful because it separated visible behavior from underlying needs. A person’s Usual Behavior reflects how they tend to contribute when things are going well. Their Needs describe the environment and support they need to stay productive. When the team does not meet those Needs, Stress Behavior can emerge.

That distinction matters. Leaders often react to visible behavior without understanding what may be driving it. Birkman gives teams a more accurate language for discussing communication, motivation, expectations, and stress.

For a business leader, this can improve delegation, coaching, and execution. For an HR leader, this can support engagement, retention, and leadership development. For a sports leader, this can help coaches better understand what motivates each athlete, how players respond under pressure, and what kind of environment helps the team perform.

7. Built culture around engagement and performance

As the team developed, we intentionally shaped the culture around five principles:

• Transparency
• Collaboration
• Flexibility
• Technical expertise
• Customer service

These principles helped the team work through pressure without losing trust.

Over time, the team expanded its responsibilities to include:

• Analytics
• Email build and deployment
• 800-CALL-NCR support
• Additional digital production responsibilities

The team grew from a small, disrupted group into a 15-person digital marketing function with stronger capability, clearer ownership, and higher trust.

Results

The team achieved a 97% sustainable engagement rating in a Towers Watson employee engagement survey.

That result was:

• 14 points above NCR norms
• 17 points above the high-tech company norm

The team also produced visible talent and performance outcomes:

• NCR recognized several employees for outstanding service
• Two leaders moved into promotional opportunities
• The company promoted one team member to a leadership role
• The team took on expanded responsibility while maintaining strong engagement
• Internal stakeholders gained greater confidence in the team’s ability to deliver

The outcome was not simply better morale. The team became more trusted, more capable, and more productive.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Slogans, off-sites, or generic team-building exercises do not create engagement.

Engagement improves when people understand the mission, know their role, trust their teammates, and feel that the team uses their strengths in a meaningful way.

Birkman gives leaders and teams a practical way to see those dynamics more clearly. It helps explain why some people thrive in certain environments while others become frustrated, withdrawn, reactive, or disengaged.

The lesson for leaders is simple:

• When people are better understood, they are easier to coach.
• When roles are clearer, teams execute better.
• When communication improves, trust increases.
• When trust increases, engagement has room to grow.
• And when engagement grows, performance usually follows.

How Can a Team Chemistry Engagement Help?

This case demonstrates how you can use Birkman as part of a broader team performance strategy. The goal is to help leaders and teams turn self-awareness into better communication, stronger role alignment, greater trust, and more consistent performance.

Whether the team is in a company, a nonprofit, or a locker room, the principle is the same:

• Talent gives a team potential.
• Clarity, trust, and engagement turn that potential into performance.

Book a Consultation with Career Upside Today

In a competitive market like Atlanta, team building and chemistry are critical to drive engagement and productivity. It is what sets you apart. If you are ready to build your team with clarity and confidence, explore Career Upside’s Team Building and Chemistry Program or book a consultation today.