Basketball or bowling.

A framing crew is a team. Nobody's work is finished until everyone's is. A salon of independent chairs is not, however friendly the room. Each stylist's result is their own, and a team-performance system laid over it will produce meetings, not performance.

The test is interdependence. Does the work actually depend on other people? Basketball, not bowling.^C It is the first of four checks I run before taking an engagement, and it is the one owners most often fail without knowing it, because they feel like a team and assume that is the same thing.

What I sell if the answer is bowling is smaller and cheaper: an individual scorecard for each person, with 3 or 4 numbers and a pay formula, plus 2 or 3 shop-level shared goals that everyone contributes to. Rebooking rate, retail per visit, chair utilisation. No pulse, no team debrief theatre. It works, and it costs a fraction.

The other three checks.

1. Size. Process quality degrades above six or seven members.^B A 12-person crew reporting to one lead is two teams pretending to be one. Sometimes fixable in a single conversation.
2. Written expectations. Job descriptions, standards, goals. If they do not exist, building them is the first work, because you cannot review anyone against nothing.
3. Sponsorship. Owner-level, or I decline. Programs without it die, every time, in every source.

I put these in writing on the site because a consultant who takes every job is not a consultant. The value of the analysis is partly that it can come back with "this is not a job for me, and here is who it is a job for."