Most team dysfunction isn’t unique. It follows recognisable patterns that repeat across organisations, industries, and decades. The good news is that if you can name the pattern, you’re halfway to fixing it. The bad news is that most leaders don’t recognise the patterns until the damage is well advanced.

Osmani catalogues these anti-patterns extensively, and I’ve encountered most of them across my career. Here are the ones that I’ve seen do the most damage, organised by where they originate.

Individual Anti-Patterns

The Specialist. This is the engineer who becomes the sole expert on a critical system. They’re not hoarding knowledge deliberately, they’re just the person who built it, and nobody else has learned it. The result is a single point of failure. When they’re on holiday, that system doesn’t get maintained. When they leave, the knowledge walks out the door. The fix is deliberate knowledge sharing: documentation, pair programming, code reviews, and rotation of ownership.

The Hoarder. Unlike the Specialist, the Hoarder actively withholds work until they can deliver a massive, impressive PR. They work in isolation, producing complex code that’s difficult for others to integrate or review. The fix is cultural, establishing norms around small, frequent commits and collaborative development. Osmani tells the story of “John,” a Hoarder who transformed when he realised that sharing knowledge didn’t reduce his importance, it multiplied it.

The Trivial Tweaker. This person stays busy with insignificant changes, minor refactoring, cosmetic fixes, style adjustments, while avoiding the substantive work. They look productive but aren’t contributing to the team’s goals. The fix is clearer prioritisation and regular conversations about whether someone’s work is aligned with what matters.

Practice Anti-Patterns

Last-minute heroics. The team consistently rushes to fix things before a release, treating it as normal rather than as a symptom of deeper problems. The heroics mask underlying issues, poor planning, inadequate testing, unclear requirements, and create a culture where crisis is the default operating mode. The fix is to treat every heroic effort as a signal that something upstream needs to change.

PR process irregularities. Rubber-stamped reviews, self-merging, long-running PRs that nobody wants to review, last-minute PRs that bypass the process, these are all symptoms of a code review culture that isn’t working. Google’s data shows that effective code review involves a median of one reviewer with initial feedback in under an hour for small changes. If your process is significantly slower or less rigorous, it needs attention.

Retrospective negligence. I covered this in an earlier article, but it bears repeating here as an anti-pattern: retrospectives that get skipped, shortened, or produce action items that nobody tracks. The fix is treating retrospectives as a first-class engineering practice, not an optional ceremony.

Leadership Anti-Patterns

These are the ones that do the most damage, because they come from the top and affect everyone.

Micromanagement. The leader who needs to approve every decision, review every PR, and be involved in every meeting. The root cause is usually a lack of trust, and the effect is a team that stops taking initiative. The fix starts with the leader, building trust through deliberate delegation and accepting that things will be done differently than they would do them.

Scope mismanagement. Incessant change requests, inflated workloads, and constantly shifting priorities. The team can never finish anything because the goalposts keep moving. The fix is ruthless prioritisation and the courage to push back on scope changes.

Planning overkill. Overanalysis, endless design iterations, and delayed development. The team spends so long planning that they never start building, or they plan in such detail that the plan is obsolete before implementation begins. The fix is timeboxing planning and accepting that some uncertainty will be resolved through building, not through more planning.

Passive leadership. The absentee leader who provides no direction, misses opportunities, and lets problems fester. This is the opposite of micromanagement but equally damaging. The team drifts without purpose, and the lack of feedback means problems compound until they’re crises. The fix is engagement, not micromanagement, but active, informed involvement in the team’s work and wellbeing.

Underappreciation. Failing to recognise positive behaviours and contributions. Over time, this erodes motivation and signals that effort doesn’t matter. The fix is simple but requires consistency: notice good work and say so. Publicly when appropriate, privately when not.

Diagnosing and Intervening

The challenge with anti-patterns is that they’re often invisible to the people exhibiting them. The micromanager thinks they’re being thorough. The Hoarder thinks they’re being productive. The passive leader thinks they’re empowering the team.

This is why external perspective matters, whether from a coach, a peer, or a skip-level conversation. The patterns are much easier to see from outside than from within.

When I’m trying to diagnose which anti-patterns are present, I look at a few signals: How does work flow through the team? Where are the bottlenecks? What do people complain about in retrospectives (or avoid mentioning)? What happens when something goes wrong? How long do decisions take? Where is knowledge concentrated?

The answers to these questions usually point to one or two dominant anti-patterns. Address those first. Don’t try to fix everything at once, that’s its own anti-pattern.