I speak frequently about the benefits of adopting a continuous improvement mindset and practice—so much so that the premise of my second book, The Balanced Business, is that smooth workflows create an environment that fosters organizational accountability and allows trust to flourish. There are many preconditions to the establishment of smooth workflows, but one of the most important is to create clarity about how the work gets done in your business.

We’ve all heard these phrases before: “My team just clicks,” “My team is a well-oiled machine,” “My team is really gelling,” “My team has great chemistry,” and the ever-nauseating “Teamwork makes the dream work.” This week, I’d like to explore the concept of team chemistry to determine if it’s as mysterious as it’s often made out to be, or if there are necessary conditions that underlie team chemistry and make it something we can create and extend from one team to another.

The reality is that we are all different. Every member of a team has a unique set of change curves that is akin to a fingerprint. We all wear a one-size-fits-you pair of lenses that we see and interpret the world through. Assumptions of sameness quickly break down because for any individual change event that occurs—an acquisition, product sunset, or process change, to name just a few—each team member is going to process said change event differently.

The name “quiet quitting” is problematic because the phrase implies that something nefarious is going on—namely that an individual has checked out and is dead weight to a company or team. The phase is unnecessarily sensational and leads many to jump to the conclusion that quiet quitters are detrimental to company performance and team morale. In my opinion, we need to quickly relegate this phrase to the historical annals of corporate and popular vernacular.