Building the High Performing Team: What If the Best Team Does Not Exist?

14 hours ago
6 min read

For almost two decades of my professional life, I have had the opportunity to work with different teams, people and leaders. I have seen teams with a remarkable ability to get things done. I have also seen teams struggle despite having some exceptionally capable individuals.

Over the years, this has made me wonder: What really makes a great team? And is there actually something that can be called the “best team”?

The more I think about it, the more I question whether a perfect team exists at all.

Nature Gives Us the First Clue

Look at our hands. Five fingers, none identical. They differ in length, shape and strength, yet together they allow us to hold, grip, write and create. Our two eyes do not see exactly alike, yet together they give us depth and perspective. Even our teeth perform different functions—some cut, some tear and some grind.

Nature, it seems, did not always choose symmetry. It chose complementarity.

Perhaps teams are meant to work the same way—not in perfect symmetry, but through complementarity.

We often imagine that the best team would be one where everyone is equally capable, equally committed, equally enthusiastic and perfectly aligned. It is a comforting thought, but probably neither natural nor realistic.

Like the five fingers, every individual brings a different combination of strengths, weaknesses, experiences, personalities, ambitions and ways of thinking. Someone may be brilliant at generating ideas but struggle with execution. Someone may be highly analytical and cautious, while another naturally takes risks. One person may communicate exceptionally well, while another quietly notices details that everyone else overlooks.

The strength of a team does not lie in making people similar. It lies in understanding how their differences can work together.

Different Does Not Mean Dysfunctional

Sports make this particularly visible.

A good sports team does not expect every player to perform the same role. The coach studies the opposition, understands the capabilities available and decides which combination is most likely to deliver the desired outcome. The playing order may change. Strategy may change. Individual roles may change. Yet the objective remains common.

The strength of the team lies not merely in having great players, but in knowing which strength is required, at what moment, and how it complements the others.

The armed forces provide another powerful example of interdependence. In an operation, one soldier may provide cover while another moves forward. One person's action gives another the confidence to take a risk. Their responsibilities and capabilities may be different, but there is an implicit understanding: while I move, someone has my back.

Perhaps that is teamwork in one of its simplest forms—different roles, one purpose and enough trust to depend upon each other.

I have often wondered whether sports teams and military units demonstrate something that corporate teams sometimes struggle to achieve. Not because their people are fundamentally different from corporate employees—they are not—but because, when the moment of delivery arrives, the larger objective can temporarily become more important than individual differences.

The five fingers become one grip.

Different players become one playing unit.

Different individuals become one force moving towards a common objective.

When Teams Become Sub-Teams

And then we come to the corporate world.

The human beings are the same, but somehow teamwork becomes much more complicated.

Within every large organization, smaller teams naturally emerge. Departments develop identities. Functions develop priorities. People build closer relationships with colleagues who share similar experiences, interests or ways of thinking. Even while pursuing the same organizational objective, different teams can have different opinions, approaches and sometimes competing interests. Perhaps we should not see this as a problem in itself.

A team becoming a collection of smaller teams is natural. A collection of smaller teams becoming silos is the problem.

The challenge begins when people start identifying more strongly with their sub-team than with the larger team. When “our department” becomes more important than “our organization”. When another team's success starts feeling like a loss for us. When information becomes something to protect rather than share, resources become territorial, or one team begins measuring its success partly by the failure of another.

That is when a healthy sub-team can become a silo.

A leader should therefore not necessarily try to eliminate sub-teams. Instead, the leader should build enough trust between them that their differences remain complementary rather than divisive.

Corporate teams and business leaders sometimes make the mistake of expecting uniformity where complementarity is required.

The objective is not to make every team think alike.

It is to make different teams trust each other enough to work towards the same outcome.

The Challenge: When Disagreement Turns Into Undermining

Consider two teams working towards the same organizational objective.

Team A believes its approach is better. Team B disagrees.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, disagreement can be extremely valuable. It challenges assumptions, exposes blind spots and protects organizations from groupthink.

The problem begins when:

“I think you are wrong”

quietly becomes:

“I want you to fail so that I can prove I was right.”

And this does not always appear as open confrontation.

Sometimes it is passive resistance. Sometimes information travels a little slower than it should. Sometimes support is technically provided but without genuine intent. Sometimes people simply stand aside and wait for an initiative to struggle so that they can eventually say, “We told you so.”

Sometimes it is not even conscious.

A team may become so protective of its own priorities that it stops seeing the larger organizational objective. A person may become so attached to an idea that another person's success begins to feel like a personal loss. A department may become so focused on demonstrating its own importance that it inadvertently creates friction for another department.

Perhaps this transition—from disagreement to undermining—is one of the reasons why organizations containing some of the best individuals do not necessarily create the best teams.

And this made me think: perhaps teams do not become mature simply by becoming more collaborative. There may be stages to that maturity.

From Cooperation to Collaboration to Trust

At the most basic level, there is cooperation.

It says: “I will do my part.”

People perform their responsibilities, meet their commitments and deliver what is expected of them. The team functions because everyone is doing what they are supposed to do.

The next level is collaboration.

It says: “I will help you do your part.”

People begin to look beyond their own responsibilities. They share information, solve problems together and step in when someone else needs help. They understand that the larger outcome may depend on more than the completion of their individual tasks.

But perhaps there is a third and deeper level: trust.

It says:

“Even when I disagree with you, I will not undermine you.”

This is where I believe team maturity is truly tested.

Cooperation is relatively easy when responsibilities are clearly defined. Collaboration becomes possible when people recognise their interdependence. But trust is tested when interests, opinions or approaches begin to differ.

At this level, I do not need everyone to agree with everyone else. I need people to believe that disagreement will not automatically become opposition, and that another person's success will not be treated as their own loss.

Cooperation gets the work done. Collaboration makes the work better. Trust keeps the team together when people disagree.

This also changes the role of a leader.

The leader may not need to eliminate every difference between people or every tension between sub-teams. Instead, the leader needs to establish the boundaries within which those differences can exist productively.

Challenge the idea—but not the person.

Put forward a better approach—but do not quietly make another approach fail.

If you cannot contribute, at least do not undermine.

That may sound like a modest standard. But perhaps it is the foundation on which extraordinary teamwork is built.

Perhaps the Best Team Does Not Exist

So, after all this, what is the best team?

I am still not sure there is one.

Maybe the best team is not the team with the best people. It is not necessarily the team where everyone thinks alike.

Maybe it is the team that makes the best of its people. Perhaps the ultimate test of a team is not what happens when everyone agrees. It is what happens when they don't.

Can we challenge one another without damaging one another?

Can we disagree without discrediting?

Can we compete without becoming opponents?

Can one team's success be celebrated without another team feeling diminished?

Can I trust you enough to know that, even when we disagree, you will not deliberately pull me down?

Maybe the best team does not exist.

But perhaps the best version of a team does.

It emerges when different people stop trying to become identical and start learning how to become complementary.

Because ultimately, a great team is not built on the absence of differences.

It is built on the ability to make those differences work together.

And perhaps that is what leadership is really about—not creating a team where people always agree, but creating one where people can disagree, remain different, and still move forward together.

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