You may not think this is a dysfunction. Perhaps your team is in deep research mode on a new problem, for example. However, even teams doing research generally have goals and deliverables, even if they’re just in the form of initial findings. Humans, by and large, feel good when they set small goals and meet them regularly.
As the manager of the team, you may worry about pushing them too hard, and so you let them miss deadlines without a fuss. The trick is to learn how to balance pushing your team and holding back. If you’re still writing code for the team, this may be a good time to roll up your sleeves and help the team meet its deliverables, or really dig in to the part of the project that’s slipping and partner with the engineers responsible to help understand the situation.
Sometimes, teams aren’t shipping because the tools and processes they’ve been using make it hard to get work done quickly. A common example is that your team only tries to release changes to production once a week or less. Infrequent releases can hide pain points such as poor tooling around releases, heavily manual testing, features that are too big, or developers who don’t know how to break their work down. Now that you’re managing the team, start to push for the removal of these bottlenecks.
At my last job, there was a critical part of the system that, for a time, we released only once a week. The releases took hours and were very painful, and often suffered from people trying to get in last-minute changes that broke tests and slowed everyone down. We all decided this was a problem and the team came together to improve the code base and automation, in order to make releases happen faster. Toward the end of the process, I pushed the team to make improvements that allowed us to release daily. The impact of this change on the team was immediate. It turns out that releases can be a point of resource contention. When people are contending for a scarce resource, conflicts and unhappiness among team members are almost inevitable. Making the code-shipping resource far less scarce immediately improved team morale.