Urban projects depend on collaboration.
Planners, architects, designers, engineers, policymakers, researchers, consultants, community organisations and public authorities may all contribute to the same project. Each brings valuable expertise, a different professional language, an organisational culture and an understanding of what success looks like.
This diversity can lead to better decisions and more thoughtful places. It can also make urban project teams unusually difficult to lead.
Many urban professionals find themselves coordinating people who do not report to them, balancing competing priorities and trying to move a project forward across organisational boundaries. Often, nobody has formally taught them how to lead in this environment.
The result is a familiar experience: the project progresses, but only because one person is constantly holding everything together.
Technical expertise is only part of the challenge
The technical side of urban work is widely taught. Professionals learn how to develop strategies, analyse data, create designs, manage projects and engage communities.
What receives far less attention is how to create the conditions in which a diverse group of specialists can operate as an effective team.
This matters because multidisciplinary projects rarely struggle due to a complete lack of expertise. More often, problems emerge between areas of expertise:
- Different interpretations of the project’s purpose
- Unclear responsibilities between partners
- Decisions that nobody quite owns
- Meetings that generate discussion but little movement
- Team members responding to different organisational priorities
- One coordinator becoming the central point for every question
These difficulties are often described as communication problems. But communication may only be the visible symptom.
The deeper issue can be how the team has been designed and brought together.
Five signs your project team may need a reset
Not every difficult period means a team is dysfunctional. Urban projects are complex, and some uncertainty is unavoidable.
However, several recurring patterns can indicate that the team needs more than another status meeting.
1. People are working on the same project but towards different outcomes
A project brief can look perfectly clear while team members interpret it in very different ways.
An architect, policymaker, transport planner and community organisation may all support the same overall ambition. Yet when choices become difficult, their underlying definitions of success begin to diverge.
Without enough shared understanding, people can produce excellent work that does not quite fit together.
2. The team leader has become the project’s human operating system
Some project leaders spend much of their time following up, translating between disciplines, resolving misunderstandings and reminding people about decisions.
Because the leader is capable and committed, the project continues. But the team becomes increasingly dependent on them.
This is exhausting for the leader and risky for the project. An effective team should not require one person to be present in every conversation for the work to remain connected.
3. Decisions are repeatedly reopened
A decision appears to have been made, only for the same discussion to return several weeks later.
Sometimes new information genuinely requires reconsideration. In other cases, the decision was never fully understood, accepted or owned.
When this happens repeatedly, the problem may not be indecisiveness. It may be that the team lacks a shared understanding of how different kinds of decisions should be made.
4. Meetings multiply while progress slows
Complex projects need spaces for coordination, technical discussion and stakeholder input. But more meetings do not automatically create greater alignment.
A crowded calendar can conceal uncertainty about where decisions happen, who needs to participate and what each meeting is meant to accomplish.
The warning sign is not simply having many meetings. It is leaving them with different interpretations of what was agreed.
5. Responsibility exists without formal authority
Urban projects frequently cross departments, organisations and sectors. The person responsible for progress may have no formal management authority over many of the people involved.
In this environment, leadership cannot depend on hierarchy alone. It relies on the team understanding why its work matters, how individual contributions connect and what people can reasonably expect from one another.
This is one reason why leading without formal authority is such an important skill for urban professionals.
Why “we need to communicate better” is rarely enough
When collaboration becomes difficult, teams often decide to improve communication.
They schedule another regular meeting, create a new messaging channel or introduce a project-management platform. These interventions may help, but they can also add another layer of activity without resolving the underlying issue.
A team cannot communicate its way out of fundamental uncertainty about its purpose, composition, responsibilities or decision-making.
Research into team effectiveness supports this broader view. Google’s team research, for example, identified psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact as important team dynamics. The 6 Team Conditions framework similarly focuses attention on conditions that leaders can deliberately shape.
The implication is encouraging. Team effectiveness is not purely a matter of chemistry or personality.
But it also raises more demanding questions:
- Is this group operating as a real team?
- Do people share the same understanding of its purpose?
- Does its structure suit the work?
- Was the team ever properly launched?
- What needs to change as the project moves into a new phase?
Answering these questions well requires more than a generic checklist. The answers depend on the team, the project and the wider organisational context.
Leadership is not the same as holding everything together
It is easy to associate strong leadership with responsiveness. This can mean knowing every detail, attending every meeting and stepping in whenever something goes wrong.
In the short term, this can keep a project moving. Over time, however, it can prevent the team from developing shared responsibility.
Effective team leadership is less about personally solving every problem and more about creating an environment in which the team can handle challenges together.
That shift can be difficult. It asks leaders to look beyond individual behaviour and examine the conditions surrounding the work. It may also require a deliberate team reset rather than a series of small fixes.
The overlooked importance of launching and relaunching a team
Most urban projects have a formal beginning, but relatively few teams have a true launch.
A kick-off meeting often focuses on deadlines, deliverables and introductions. These are necessary, but they do not automatically establish how a group of people will function together.
The issue becomes even more visible as a project evolves.
New partners join. Funding conditions change. Community feedback alters the direction. A project moves from strategy to implementation. The team that was appropriate for one stage may need a different structure for the next.
At these moments, leaders often keep the existing arrangements in place and attempt to work around growing friction. A deliberate relaunch can provide an opportunity to reconsider what the team now needs.
Knowing when and how to do this is one of the most valuable but less commonly taught parts of team leadership.
Team leadership is becoming a core urban skill
Urban projects are increasingly interdisciplinary, participatory and cross-organisational. Professionals are expected to coordinate complex collaborations earlier in their careers, often before receiving any formal leadership development.
This makes team leadership more than a management skill reserved for senior positions.
It is relevant to:
- New and aspiring team leads
- Project and programme managers
- Consortium coordinators
- Urban planners and designers managing collaborators
- Professionals working across institutions
- People leading through influence rather than hierarchy
- Experienced leaders whose teams need a reset
Technical knowledge remains essential. But the impact of that knowledge depends on a team’s ability to combine it, make decisions and turn it into coordinated action.
Learn how to create the conditions for an effective team
For urban professionals who recognise these challenges in their own work, All Things Urban and Nina Burke Consulting are hosting Foundations of Effective Team Leadership on 21 October 2026.
This live, interactive two-hour workshop explores what makes teams effective and how leaders can shape those conditions intentionally.
Rather than offering abstract leadership advice, the session works with participants’ real team experiences. It covers team design, launches and relaunches, roles, ways of working, decision-making and meetings, without assuming that everyone on the team reports to the same person.
Participants leave with a practical plan and a materials package they can use with their teams, including an assessment template, meeting agenda and team-launch checklist.
The workshop is facilitated by Nina Burke, a consultant and advanced practitioner of the 6 Team Conditions who works with teams tackling complex projects in urbanism, health and the built environment.
Explore the Foundations of Effective Team Leadership workshop.
Frequently asked questions
Why are multidisciplinary urban project teams difficult to lead?
They bring together people with different expertise, priorities, professional languages and organisational responsibilities. Leadership requires aligning those perspectives while navigating dependencies and decisions that may cross formal boundaries.
Can you lead an urban project team without formal authority?
Yes, but leadership must rely more heavily on clarity, trust, shared purpose and well-designed ways of working. This is common in consortiums, partnerships and cross-departmental projects.
What is the difference between project management and team leadership?
Project management focuses primarily on organising delivery, including scope, schedules, resources and risks. Team leadership focuses on creating the conditions that enable people to work together effectively. Complex urban projects usually require both.
When should a project team be relaunched?
A relaunch may be helpful when the project enters a new phase, membership changes, responsibilities become unclear or recurring friction begins to slow the work. It allows the team to reconsider how it needs to operate under its current conditions.