Operations Issues - A Reality Check

Most "People Problems" Are Communication Problems

Confession: for the first few years of doing fractional COO and interim ops work, when a client told me "we have a people problem" on a specific team, I mostly believed them. Personality clash. Attitude. Lack of ownership. Somebody just wasn’t a "team player." I’d usually recommend some mix of coaching, restructuring, or in the worst cases, a managed exit.

A decade in, I don’t believe that framing nearly as often. What I’ve learned to look for first, especially on multinational teams, is much less dramatic: two people using the same words to mean different things, and nobody noticing until the damage is already done. "I’ll handle it" meant "I’ve started already" to one person and "I haven’t started yet, but I acknowledge the ask" to another. "That should be fine" meant "I’m confident" to one person and "I haven’t actually checked" to another. Multiply that across a support team, a compliance function, or an account management desk working across four or five nationalities, and what looks like a string of personality conflicts is usually one root cause: nobody was ever trained to communicate precisely in the language they’re all forced to share.

This isn’t a fringe issue, it’s sitting inside the most-cited driver of engagement and performance data we have. Gallup’s research puts managers at the centre of up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores, and finds that consistent, high-quality communication between manager and employee is one of the strongest levers available. Employees who have regular check-ins with their manager are almost three times as likely to be engaged as those who don’t. In Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, global engagement fell to 20% in 2025 (its lowest point since 2020) an estimated $10 trillion hit to the world economy in lost productivity, with declining manager engagement identified as the single biggest driver of that fall. And the payoff for getting it right is not small: Gallup’s own benchmarking shows highly engaged teams post up to 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales productivity, 78% less absenteeism, and 21% less turnover than disengaged ones.

None of those numbers are about hiring better people. They’re about whether the people already on your team can communicate clearly enough with each other and with their manager to actually function as a team. On a multinational floor - which describes most iGaming operations I’ve worked with, spread across Malta, the UK, the Balkans, Latin America, and beyond - that communication layer is under more strain than most leadership teams realise, because it’s not just management style you’re troubleshooting. It’s whether "should be fine," "I’ll get to it," and "no problem" mean the same thing to everyone using them.

These days, before I recommend a reorg, a coaching plan, or an exit, I ask one question first: has anyone actually checked whether this team is fluent enough, in the specific, structured, low-ambiguity English that operations requires, to avoid manufacturing its own conflicts? More often than I expected going into this work, the answer is no — and the fix is cheaper, faster, and far less disruptive than the org chart surgery everyone was about to reach for.