The Team You Build Versus the Team You Manage
Why Most Leadership Development Is Aimed at the Wrong Level
There is a question I keep coming back to after my conversation with Colin M. Fisher, associate professor at UCL School of Management and author of The Collective Edge. It is not a complicated question, but it exposes a genuine blind spot in how most organisations think about performance.
The question is this: when a team underperforms, what is the first thing we reach for?
Almost always, we reach for the individual. We ask which person needs more training, better feedback, clearer goals. We commission a coaching programme. We restructure someone’s development plan. And sometimes, of course, that is exactly the right call.
But Colin’s work suggests we are systematically missing something more fundamental, and the consequences of that gap are quietly significant.
Structure First, People Second
The central argument of The Collective Edge is that the structure of a team, not the talent within it, is the primary driver of whether that team succeeds or fails. Colin has spent his career researching group dynamics, and his findings are uncomfortable for anyone who has invested heavily in individual leadership development.
He puts it plainly: you can take a group of genuinely talented, capable people and put them into a poorly designed group dynamic, and they will underperform. Conversely, give a group of individually unremarkable performers the right conditions, the right norms and the right dynamic, and they will consistently outperform the superstar team. This is not conjecture. It is backed by decades of research in organisational behaviour.
The four structural forces that determine whether a group thrives are composition, goals, tasks and norms. Who is on the team, what they are collectively trying to achieve, the nature of the work they are asked to do, and the unwritten rules that govern how they interact. When these are well designed, the team has a fighting chance. When they are not, no amount of individual coaching will compensate.
The Jazz Band Lesson
Colin came to this research through an unusual route. Before his academic career, he was a professional jazz trumpet player. And it was in jazz that he first noticed the phenomenon that would define his research: some groups simply clicked. They played beyond what any individual could have produced alone. Others, despite containing more technically gifted musicians, never found that chemistry.
The jazz band metaphor is not just a stylistic flourish. It is diagnostically useful. The great jazz ensembles in history sit between three and seven members. Basketball teams. Hockey teams. The players who are actually interdependent in a football match at any given moment. Three to seven seems to be the sweet spot in which human beings can genuinely coordinate, listen and adapt in real time.
Now consider what happens in most organisations. A meeting with fifteen or twenty people is unremarkable. Every one of them is nominally expected to contribute meaningfully, and to understand the others well enough to act on shared insight. Colin is blunt on this point: if he had to guess the single most common mistake in the organisations he works with, it would be too many people in the room. Too many people in the meeting, and too many meetings full stop.
The Multi-Team Problem
One of the most resonant parts of our conversation was about the increasing trend of matrix structures and multi-team working. People spread across ten, fifteen, twenty teams simultaneously, never quite sure which role they are playing or what norms apply. It sounds efficient on an organisational chart. In practice, it creates enormous cognitive drag.
Colin draws on the classic research insight around working memory: the rule of seven. We can meaningfully keep track of roughly seven things at a time. That applies not just to the size of a team, but to the number of teams we are juggling. When we push beyond that, coordination loss escalates. People spend increasing amounts of time just reorienting themselves to each team’s context, their role, and the current state of play. The reorientation itself becomes the bottleneck.
His prescription has two tiers. Where possible, reduce the number of teams and keep them small. Where that is not possible, the answer is not to work harder on individual awareness; it is to build system-wide norms, clearer roles and stronger cultures that transcend any single team. The jazz equivalent is the shared musical vocabulary that any two jazz musicians can draw on the moment they play together for the first time. They do not need to start from scratch. The norms are already there.
The Sorting Hat Problem
This leads to one of Colin’s most striking ideas, and the one that has stayed with me the longest. He opens The Collective Edge with a question: is the Sorting Hat the real villain of Harry Potter?
If you know the story, the Sorting Hat places every eleven-year-old entering Hogwarts into one of four houses, based on their defining characteristics. And if you zoom out across the arc of the entire series, both wars in the story map almost perfectly onto house divisions. The school spent years sorting children into fixed categories, seeding intense inter-group competition, and expressing surprise when those same children grew up unable to trust or collaborate across those boundaries.
Colin’s point is not really about fiction. It is about what happens in every organisation when we over-sort people into teams, departments, functions and specialisms, and then inadvertently build reward systems and cultures that pit those groups against each other. We create the conditions for the very conflict and disengagement we spend enormous energy trying to resolve.
The sorting hat metaphor is worth pausing on. Where in your own organisation have you drawn boundaries that now feel permanent? Who is in which box, and what assumptions come with that assignment?
Healthy Competition, Honestly Examined
Competition within teams deserves its own scrutiny here. There is a powerful motivator in individual competition, and Colin does not dismiss it. When people are genuinely independent and competing against an external benchmark, competition can drive strong performance.
The problem arises when competition is introduced between people who are interdependent. Once that happens, there are two ways to win: perform better yourself, or help someone else perform worse. Over time, research suggests that zero-sum reward structures almost always drift towards the latter. People hoard credit, avoid sharing information, and start paying more attention to attribution than to outcomes.
The healthiest form of competition, in Colin’s view, is against your own past performance. It removes the incentive to undermine others while preserving the motivational tension that drives improvement. As a leader, the practical audit is straightforward: look at your formal reward systems first. If your bonus pool is zero-sum, you are already working against yourself. Then listen for the ratio of ‘I’ to ‘we’ in how your team talks about its work. It is not a precise instrument, but it is a telling one.
What This Means for Leaders
The practical implication of all of this is that leaders need to shift their gaze. Most of the leadership interventions I see are aimed at the individual level, and many of them are genuinely useful. But if the structure of the group is wrong, the intervention lands on sand.
Before you commission the next coaching programme or development day, ask the structural questions. Is this team the right size? Do the members have genuinely diverse perspectives, or have we assembled a group of people who all think similarly because they come from the same background? Are the tasks rich enough to demand real collaboration? Do we have norms that govern how we work together, or are we assuming people will figure it out? Are our reward systems encouraging team behaviour, or quietly punishing it?
The answers to those questions will tell you more about why your team is underperforming than almost any personality profile or individual feedback conversation.
For Coaches
If you work with leaders on team performance, Colin’s framework offers a useful diagnostic lens. When a client presents a team problem, resist the pull towards the individual explanation. Ask them to describe the structure: how many people, what kind of work, what are the actual norms in place, and what does the reward system incentivise? Often, the issue they identify as a person problem turns out to be a design problem.
It is also worth exploring the sorting hat question gently with clients. Where have they, perhaps inadvertently, locked people into fixed categories? Who on their team never gets to play outside their assigned lane? And what would happen if they were given a different context, a different combination of people, a different set of conditions?
The most important shift Colin’s work invites is from treating team performance as a steady state to treating it as a dynamic balance. The tension between cohesion and productive dissent never fully resolves. The leader’s job is to keep watching it, keep adjusting, and resist the temptation to declare the team ‘sorted’.
That last word feels appropriate. The best teams are never fully sorted. They are always in motion.
If this has sparked something for you, I would strongly recommend picking up a copy of Colin’s book, The Collective Edge. You can also find the full conversation on the Level Up Leadership Podcast. And if you find this kind of thinking useful, the themes of trust, accountability and smart team design sit at the heart of everything I write about, including in my book Enhanced Leadership, available at mybook.to/EnhancedLeadership
Thanks so much for these thoughtful takes on our conversation, Lee!