After decades of working with and leading technology teams, one trend has become clear: most performance problems don’t come from individual capability. They come from how teams are composed. 

I’ve seen technically brilliant teams struggle because the team itself wasn’t ‘designed’ to succeed. I’ve learnt over time that strong individuals don’t automatically make a strong team. 

I’ve worked with teams where every member had impressive CVs, and yet progress felt heavier than it should have been, and decisions stalled. Meetings took longer than necessary, and energy felt low. 

At the time, it was tempting to see this as a motivation issue, a skills gap, or a leadership failure, but looking back, the real problem was how the team had been assembled. 

When performance dips  

Teams are rarely developed. They’re more likely to be inherited or assigned. Leaders are often asked to “make it work” with the group they’re given. When performance dips, the assumption is usually that something needs fixing at the individual level: push harder, motivate more, add a better process or change the schedule. 

Very rarely is attention paid to how the team actually fits together. How they challenge each other and how they interact under pressure. 

And yet, evidence is clear: interaction matters far more than individual capability. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the strongest predictor of team success, outweighing seniority, experience, or technical ability. Teams that felt safe to speak up consistently outperformed technically stronger but less cohesive groups

Research in organisational psychology echoes this. Cognitively diverse teams, those with different thinking styles, experience levels, and perspectives, outperform homogeneous teams on complex work. McKinsey data shows similar patterns at scale: teams with diverse perspectives and problem-solving approaches are more likely to outperform peers financially and operationally. 

Interestingly, the data also shows that high-performing individuals grouped together can underperform. They tend to move cautiously, defer more, and avoid the friction that surfaces weak assumptions. Experience can bring confidence, but it can also bring habits, assumptions, and subtle hierarchies that slow things down.

According to McKinsey high performing teams’ model, data shows similar patterns at scale: teams with diverse perspectives and problem-solving approaches are more likely to outperform peers financially and operationally. 

Interestingly, the data also shows that high-performing individuals grouped together can underperform. They tend to move cautiously, defer more, and avoid the friction that surfaces weak assumptions. Experience can bring confidence, but it can also bring habits, assumptions, and subtle hierarchies that slow things down. 

In practice, this doesn’t look like chaos. It looks like slow progress and decisions are taking longer than they should. Work progresses, but momentum is inconsistent. Meetings feel productive, but don’t produce clarity. Leaders sense something is off, but nothing is “broken” enough to point at.

What the best teams do differently 

The teams I’ve seen consistently deliver high performance aren’t harmonious. They’re deliberately mixed and combine: 

• Builders and finishers 
• Fast movers and careful analysts 
• Strategic thinkers and operational specialists 
• People who process out loud and people who think best in writing

This creates safe and focused friction and surfaces gaps early. It improves decision quality and delivery predictability. 

This doesn’t happen by accident. It means that someone is paying attention to how the team functions, not just who is in it. 

High-performing teams are dynamic. As work changes, teams must adapt. Exploration requires different energy than delivery, scales different strengths than invention, and stability requires a different focus than transformation. Leaders who consistently build high-performing teams notice this and act. They rebalance roles. They rotate responsibilities. They introduce differences when things have become too comfortable. 

Practical guidance for leaders developing high-performance teams

1. Assess team composition regularly
   • Look beyond CVs. Map thinking styles, decision-making approaches, energy levels, and communication preferences.
   • Identify overlaps and gaps. Is everyone a “fast mover”? Does anyone slow the team down to think critically?
2. Create structured tension
   • Make disagreement safe and expected. Encourage early challenge of assumptions.
   • Set clear norms for decision-making. Let people know that disagreement isn’t personal; it’s part of doing the work well.
3. Align the team with the work type
   • Different work phases need different mixes. Discovery needs curiosity and debate. Delivery needs focus and discipline. Scaling needs process-oriented execution.
   • Be prepared to rotate, move, or pair people intentionally.
4. Pay attention to cognitive load
   • High-performance teams don’t just have complementary skills; they have complementary energy and focus.
   • Avoid overloading teams with too many priorities or too many high-pressure people simultaneously.
5. Make leadership about interaction, not just talent
   • Stop thinking only about whether you have the best people. Start asking whether the team you have is structured to support each other and the work at hand.
6. Observe outcomes, not activity
   • Busy doesn’t equal productive. Strong composition shows in how quickly decisions are made, how clearly work moves from start to finish, and how sustainable energy is over time.

The subtle shift to developing a cohesive high-performance team

High-performance teams aren’t assembled once and left alone. They are curated with attention given to how people interact as much as who they are. 

Leaders who make that shift stop trying to fix individuals and start designing the environment for success. They design for interaction, for productive friction, for complementary thinking. This is leadership that works in the real world. 

High performance isn’t an accident. It’s intentional and built with care, and that’s what separates high-performance teams that deliver consistently from those that only appear to.