Executive Summary

This book synthesizes the core principles of effective leadership and team performance, arguing that traditional, leader-centric models are fundamentally flawed. The central thesis is that organizational success hinges not on accumulating individual “star” talent, but on cultivating “Team Intelligence”—the skills, attitudes, and habits that enable groups to be collectively brilliant.

Effective leadership is redefined not as a set of universal traits, but as the ability to make followers feel a better future is possible, driven by a leader’s unique “super skills.” The primary function of a leader is to act as a connector, building the trust and psychological safety necessary for a team to thrive.

The performance of a team is governed by three pillars of Team Intelligence: Reasoning (achieved through clear alignment on goals), Attention (managed through synchronized, “bursty” communication and high emotional intelligence), and Resources (maximized by leveraging a diversity of skills and knowledge made explicit to the group). Organizations must actively identify and mitigate toxic personalities (the “Dark Tetrad”) while empowering “glue players” who multiply the effectiveness of others. Ultimately, sustainable success requires an organizational culture that intentionally balances the needs of all stakeholders—employees, customers, and the community—over the narrow, and often destructive, pursuit of short-term shareholder value.

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I. Deconstructing Foundational Leadership Myths

The prevailing narratives about leadership are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. A thorough analysis reveals that widely accepted archetypes and training methodologies are ineffective and often counterproductive.

The Fallacy of the “Alpha” Leader

The popular portrayal of leaders as dominant, aggressive “alphas” is a myth rooted in flawed science. This concept gained traction from a 1970 book, The Wolf, which described wolf packs as being led by alphas who maintain control through intimidation. The author, L. David Mech, later retracted this finding, clarifying that wolf packs are typically family units led by parents guiding their young, not by constant domination.

• Inapplicability: Wolf behavior is not a valid model for human organizational dynamics.
• Counter-Productivity: In both wolf packs and human teams, overly aggressive leaders can provoke unnecessary conflict, alienate members, and weaken the group.
• Media Distortion: The media’s focus on sensational, outsized personalities (e.g., Elon Musk, Michael O’Leary of Ryanair) creates a distorted perception. The majority of successful leaders, particularly across the Fortune 500, are not aggressive, media-seeking figures.
• Negotiation: Studies show that empathetic and generous individuals are better negotiators in the long run, as aggressive tactics destroy relationships and future opportunities.

The Ineffectiveness of Traditional Leadership Training

The leadership development industry, particularly prestigious MBA programs, operates on a flawed premise derived from the Second Industrial Revolution: that leaders can be engineered like standardized machine parts.

• Failed Promise: Research, including studies by McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, indicates that possessing an MBA degree does not correlate with superior career success or leadership ability compared to non-MBAs.
• Historical Flaw: The “scientific management” approach, popularized by figures like Elton Mayo at Harvard Business School (who was later revealed to have faked his credentials), falsely assumes human behavior can be quantified and engineered like a physical science. The reality is that human interaction is too complex and variable for a standardized formula.
• Cost vs. Impact: Leadership training accounts for approximately $40 billion in annual spending, yet research by Harvard’s Barbara Kellerman shows there is no evidence that most of it has a long-term impact on performance.

The Unreliability of Personality Assessments

Personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) are widely used by corporations but lack scientific validity and predictive power. These tools are based on theories from Carl Jung, which were expanded by individuals with no formal psychological training.

• The Forer Effect: These tests succeed due to a psychological phenomenon where individuals accept vague, general descriptions as being highly specific to them. An experiment by Bertram Forer in 1948 demonstrated this by giving 39 students the exact same “personalized” assessment, which they rated as highly accurate (4.3 out of 5).
• Lack of Consistency: Studies show that as many as 50% of individuals get a different MBTI result when re-taking the test just five weeks later.
• False Constraints: Human personality is not static; it changes based on context, time of day, and social environment. Attempting to categorize individuals into sixteen rigid types is fundamentally flawed and can lead to prejudiced hiring and promotion decisions.

The “Authenticity” Racket

The modern concept of “authentic leadership”—acting in accordance with a “true self”—is a problematic guide.

• No “True Self”: Neuroscience shows the brain is a collection of competing systems. There is no single, authentic self; different behaviors emerge based on myriad factors. The notion of authenticity cannot be located in the brain or consistently measured.
• Dangerous Justification: The concept can be used to excuse toxic behavior. Harvey Weinstein, for example, could be described as acting authentically, revealing the concept’s moral limitations.
• Perception vs. Reality: Research indicates that “authenticity” is not an intrinsic quality but a perception. People are seen as authentic when their actions align with the narrative others have constructed for them. Furthermore, studies show that individuals who self-identify as highly authentic are more likely to lie to appear authentic.

II. The Core of Effective Leadership

Stripping away the myths reveals a simpler, more powerful definition of leadership focused on influence, unique strengths, and fostering a healthy team environment.

The Foundational Principle: Creating Followers

The single universal characteristic of a leader is having followers. People choose to follow a leader not based on a checklist of traits, but because the leader makes them feel that a new or better future is possible. This is an emotional response, not a logical one. The story of Mother Teresa illustrates this principle: her perceived selflessness created a powerful vision of a better future for humanity, inspiring a global following, even though later analysis revealed significant discrepancies between this perception and the actual results of her organization.

The Power of “Super Skills”

Effective leaders are not well-rounded paragons of virtue. Instead, they possess one or two “super skills” that are so disproportionately strong they inspire others and compensate for numerous weaknesses.

• Case Study: Paul Erdős: The highly prolific mathematician Paul Erdős was socially inept and incapable of basic life tasks like laundry or boiling water. However, his profound love for mathematics and his unique ability to bring out the best in his collaborators were so powerful that colleagues flocked to work with him, caring for his basic needs in exchange for the “religious experience” of solving problems with him.
• Implication: Leaders should focus on identifying and cultivating their unique super skills rather than trying to become competent in a long list of generic “essential” traits. Attempting to mimic another leader’s style is often futile, as it may not align with one’s own super skills.

Prioritizing Growth: Eliminating Negative Behaviors

The most significant gains in leadership effectiveness come not from refining existing strengths, but from mitigating negative behaviors that harm the team. The negative impact of toxic actions far outweighs the positive impact of beneficial ones.

• Psychological Safety: Citing Google’s Project Aristotle, the greatest predictor of team success is psychological safety—a shared belief that team members can speak up and take risks without fear of punishment or humiliation.
• Breaches of Contract: Actions that belittle, humiliate, or threaten team members breach the social contract, signaling that the environment is unsafe and causing disengagement. This can have catastrophic consequences, as seen in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, where engineers were afraid to voice concerns.
• Building Systems: The most effective way to curb negative habits is to create systems that prevent them from occurring in the first place, rather than relying on willpower. An example is the F-16’s Auto Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto G-Cas), which automatically pulls the jet up to prevent a crash, automating a pilot’s response under extreme pressure.

III. The Anatomy of a High-Performing Team

The essential unit of productivity is the team. An effective leader’s primary role is to shift focus from themselves to the team’s dynamics, fostering the connections that unlock collective intelligence.

The Leader as Connector

The “trickle-down” model of leadership is inefficient. A more effective model views the leader as an architect of connections, similar to how Dwight D. Eisenhower championed the Interstate Highway System to unlock the nation’s potential by connecting its resources.

• The Passing Metric: The greatest predictor of a positive coaching impact in the NBA is how much more players pass the ball. Increased passing indicates a shift from self-interest to a focus on the team’s collective success, a direct result of the trust and connection fostered by the coach.
• Building Trust: Trust is the foundation of connection and is composed of three elements, in order of importance:
  1. Benevolence: Believing the other person has your best interests at heart.
  2. Honesty: Believing they are truthful and act with integrity.
  3. Competence: Believing they are capable of doing their job.
• Trust-Building Mechanisms: Trust can be actively built through mechanisms like the Ikea Effect (we value what we build together), Stacking (starting with small favors to build to larger ones), and Vulnerability Loops (vulnerability precedes trust, it does not follow it).

The “Too-Much-Talent Problem” and Super Chickens

Simply assembling a team of individual superstars often leads to failure.

• The Talent Threshold: On teams with high “task interdependence” (where members must collaborate closely), performance declines when top talent exceeds 50-60% of the team. This has been observed in both World Cup football and NBA basketball.
• The Super Chicken Experiment: An experiment by evolutionary biologist William Muir contrasted two chicken breeding strategies. One group consisted of individually hyper-productive “super chickens” who achieved their output by pecking their competition to death. The other group was bred for team productivity. After six generations, the collaborative “super team” was far healthier and massively out-produced the aggressive super chickens.
• Organizational Analogy: Many corporate and sports environments reward individual stats and internal competition, effectively breeding aggressive “super chickens” who undermine team success. The goal should be to create “super teams” that are rewarded for collective achievement.

The Role of the “Glue Player”

Some of the most valuable team members are “glue players”—individuals whose contributions are hard to measure with traditional stats but who significantly improve the performance of everyone around them.

• Case Study: Shane Battier: The NBA player Shane Battier had unremarkable individual statistics but a consistently high “plus-minus” rating, meaning his teams scored significantly more points when he was on the court. He was described as a “Lego” piece who made everything fit together through unselfish play, constant communication, and deep strategic understanding that elevated his teammates.

IV. The Three Pillars of Team Intelligence

Research led by Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University identified a “general intelligence” for teams, which is uncorrelated with the IQs of individual members. This collective intelligence is built on three pillars.

Pillar 1: Reasoning

A team’s ability to reason—to plan the best route to its goal—is contingent on alignment.

• Commander’s Intent: Drawing from military strategy, every team member must understand the organization’s overarching goal, the specific mission parameters, their team’s objectives, and how their individual contributions support the mission.
• Leadership Fluidity: The smartest teams often have fluid leadership, where different people lead at different times based on their expertise for the task at hand. Power struggles are a primary cause of “team stupidity.”
• Connection Prerequisite: In experiments, teams of subject matter experts only outperformed teams of generalists after they participated in a trust-building exercise. Connection is a prerequisite for leveraging expert resources effectively.

Pillar 2: Attention

An intelligent team knows what to focus on, when, and how. This requires synchronized attention and communication.

• Case Study: LEGO: In the early 2000s, LEGO nearly went bankrupt due to “corporate ADD.” It launched a torrent of unfocused new products, diluting its core strengths. The turnaround came when new leadership imposed discipline and refocused the company’s attention on its core, profitable products.
• Hallmarks of Effective Attention:
  • Bursty Communication: Teams communicate in intense bursts to align and define next steps, followed by periods of uninterrupted individual work.
  • Conversational Turn-Taking: Over the course of a project, speaking time is distributed relatively evenly among all members.
  • Emotional Intelligence: The single greatest predictor of team intelligence is the number of women on the team, which correlates with a higher average “theory of mind” (social sensitivity). This empathetic capacity allows the team to navigate interpersonal dynamics and manage its collective attention more effectively.

Pillar 3: Resources

Team intelligence is maximized when a team has diverse, complementary resources and makes those resources explicit.

• Case Study: The Antwerp Diamond Heist: The successful 2003 heist was only possible because the team comprised individuals with highly specialized and different skills (a social engineer, a tech expert, a key forger, a mechanical “monster”).
• Diversity of Resources: This includes not just knowledge and skills but also diverse life experiences, cognitive styles, and contacts. Racial and gender diversity are valuable because they often serve as proxies for these unique resources.
• Making the Implicit Explicit: An intelligent team has a shared understanding of “who knows what.” Members must openly catalog their skills, expertise, and even their weaknesses, and maintain organized, accessible information systems (e.g., shared file drives).

V. Managing Team Composition and Dynamics

Building an intelligent team requires both cultivating positive contributors and actively managing negative ones.

Identifying and Mitigating Toxic Personalities

Psychologists identify a “Dark Tetrad” of toxic personality traits that are destructive to team intelligence.

Trait	Description	Key Behavior
Psychopathy	Impaired empathy, lack of remorse, superficial charm, and boldness.	Acts without regard for the consequences to others.
Narcissism	Intense entitlement, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.	Makes everything about themselves; may use DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender).
Machiavellianism	Cunning and ruthless manipulation of others to achieve personal goals.	Treats people as tools to be used and discarded.
Sadism	Enjoyment derived from the physical or emotional suffering of others.	Creates situations to humiliate or cause pain.

Strategies for Dealing with Toxic Individuals:

1. Do Not Call Them Out Directly: This will likely trigger a defensive and aggressive response.
2. Find a Partner: Validate your perceptions with a trusted colleague.
3. Document Everything: Keep a detailed record of behaviors, conversations, and their impact.
4. Limit Engagement: Create physical and procedural distance where possible.
5. Create Transparency: Foster an open culture where workloads and responsibilities are discussed publicly, making manipulation more difficult.

How to Spot and Empower “Glue Players”

In contrast to toxic individuals, “glue players” or “multipliers” make teammates more effective. They are often undervalued because their impact is not captured by traditional metrics.

• High Emotional Intelligence: They are socially sensitive and can navigate both written and unwritten organizational rules.
• Benevolent/Team Orientation: They consistently put the team’s needs above their own, building trust and acting as connectors.
• Proactive Thinking: They see beyond their assigned tasks and do what is needed for the team’s success, often leading from behind.

VI. Cultivating an Intelligent Organizational Culture

Team intelligence is best sustained when it is embedded in the broader organizational culture.

The Failure of Shareholder Value Theory

The doctrine that a company’s only social responsibility is to increase shareholder value, popularized by Milton Friedman, is “the dumbest idea in the world,” according to former GE CEO Jack Welch.

• Case Study: Boeing: The erosion of Boeing’s world-renowned safety culture is a direct result of prioritizing shareholder value above all else. Shifting headquarters away from engineering centers, cutting design budgets, outsourcing critical work, and punishing engineers who raised concerns led to the fatal 737-Max crashes and a catastrophic loss of financial value and public trust.
• A Stakeholder Approach: Long-term value is a result, not a strategy. It is created by balancing the competing responsibilities to all stakeholders: employees, customers, products, the community, and shareholders.

The Four Elements of a Strong Culture

1. Membership: Creating a clear sense of belonging through defined boundaries, emotional safety, personal investment, and a common symbol system (e.g., internal language, stories).
2. Influence: Ensuring employees feel they matter and have a voice in the organization’s direction.
3. Integration and Fulfillment of Needs: Clearly communicating the organization’s mission so that people can align their personal goals with it. Cultural adaptability is often more valuable than initial cultural fit.
4. Shared History and Values: Using stories and mythology to reinforce the organization’s core values and guide decision-making (e.g., the Nordstrom tire refund story).

VII. Synthesis: A Case Study in Leadership and Team Intelligence

The story of Draper L. Kauffman, the founder of the precursor to the Navy SEALs, serves as a powerful synthesis of all these principles. An ordinary man with poor eyesight, Kauffman embodied effective leadership and built one of the world’s most elite teams by learning and applying the core tenets of team intelligence.

• He learned the importance of team connection from the French Corps Franc.
• He saw the power of unconventional super skills from the nun who secured his release from a POW camp.
• He demonstrated that teams must be aligned around a greater purpose by volunteering for bomb disposal.
• He fostered psychological safety and bursty communication by empowering his teams to operate independently.
• He unlocked his team’s potential by assembling members with diverse resources and expertise.
• He built profound trust by training alongside his men, demonstrating competence, honesty, and benevolence.

Kauffman’s legacy is a testament to the fact that leadership is not about innate greatness but about intentionally creating the conditions for a team to unlock its collective genius.

Contact Factoring Specialist, Chris Lehnes

The Manager’s Guide to Unlocking Team Intelligence

Executive Briefing

This guide provides a research-backed framework for managers to shift their focus from managing individuals to architecting intelligent teams. For the time-crunched executive, here are the core takeaways:

• Team Dynamics Outperform Star Power: A cohesive team will consistently beat a collection of brilliant but disconnected individuals. Your primary role is to architect the system that allows the team to thrive.
• Psychological Safety Is Not a Soft Skill: It is the single greatest predictor of high-performing teams. A lack of safety, where people fear speaking up, is the root cause of catastrophic failures.
• Your Highest Leverage Is Eliminating Harm: The impact of negative behaviors (belittling, shaming) far outweighs the good done by positive ones. Your first priority is to create systems that prevent breaches of the team’s social contract.
• Reward the “Glue,” Not Just the “Superstar”: The most valuable players are often not the ones with the highest individual stats, but the “glue players” who make everyone around them better. You must learn to see, celebrate, and give status to these contributions.

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Introduction: Beyond Individual Brilliance

For decades, we’ve been sold a simple narrative of success: hire individual stars, put a star leader in charge, and watch the magic happen. But this model, focused on individual “star power,” is outdated and often counterproductive.

Consider the 1980 US Olympic basketball team. Made up of college kids juggling math class and meal plans, they were pitted against the seasoned NBA All-Stars—the best players in the world, in the prime of their careers. The outcome wasn’t even close. The young, cohesive Olympic team demolished the All-Stars, winning four out of five exhibition games. This isn’t a fluke; it’s a fundamental principle. If packing a team with stars were enough, the 2004 US Olympic team—featuring legends like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Allen Iverson—would have cruised to gold. Instead, they barely earned a bronze, suffering a devastating 19-point loss to Puerto Rico.

Time and again, from the sports arena to the corporate world, superior team dynamics consistently outperform raw individual talent. This guide provides a research-backed, actionable framework for managers to make a critical shift: from managing a collection of individuals to architecting intelligent teams that are truly greater than the sum of their parts.

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1. Redefining Your Role: From Star Player to Team Architect

To build an intelligent team, you must first challenge your fundamental role as a manager. The most significant leadership leverage comes not from top-down directives but from cultivating the network of relationships within the team. The modern leader isn’t the star player; they are the architect of the system that allows every player to thrive. This section outlines a critical paradigm shift away from outdated leadership myths and toward a more effective, research-backed approach.

1.1. The Failure of Old Models: Why “Alpha Leaders” and “Star Power” Fall Short

Our culture is saturated with myths about leadership, none more pervasive or damaging than the “alpha mentality.” This idea, rooted in debunked 1970s wolf research, portrays leaders as dominant figures who maintain control through intimidation. The problem is, humans aren’t wolves, and even if we were, the original research was wrong. Overly aggressive leaders don’t strengthen the pack; they alienate members, get into unnecessary fights, and weaken the entire group.

This flawed “top dog” model leads directly to the “star power” fallacy—the belief that packing a team with A-list talent guarantees success. The evidence shows the opposite:

• Quibi, the short-form video platform helmed by Disney’s former chairman and eBay’s former CEO, burned through nearly $2 billion before shuttering almost immediately after launch because its seasoned team ignored ideas that challenged their assumptions.
• The 1998 Daimler-Chrysler merger was celebrated by Wall Street, but the two superstar companies combined were soon worth less than Daimler-Benz alone. Billions in value were lost to cultural conflicts and a failure to create alignment.

These failures stand in stark contrast to underdog successes like Netflix and Pixar, which started with less experience and traditional top-tier talent but created something special that allowed them to outperform their peers. A leader’s job is not to be the most dominant person in the room but to create an environment where the entire team can become smarter together.

1.2. The Team as the Core Unit of Productivity

Globally, companies spend roughly $40 billion a year on leadership training. The shocking truth? According to extensive research, there is no evidence that almost any of it has a long-term impact on leadership performance. The fundamental flaw in this approach is its narrow focus.

Consider the leverage points. Training a manager who oversees a nine-person team affects only nine one-directional relationships. However, focusing on the dynamics of the entire ten-person team strengthens forty-five two-directional relationships.

The essential unit of productivity is not the individual; it’s the team. The magic happens in the connections between team members. Therefore, your primary function as a manager is to maximize team intelligence by focusing on these internal dynamics.

Having dismantled the myths of alpha leaders and star power, we can now build a more durable leadership model. That construction begins not with grand strategies, but with the non-negotiable foundation of any high-performing team: trust.

Manager’s Key Takeaway: Your greatest leverage is not in directing individuals, but in strengthening the 45 connections within your 10-person team. Stop focusing on the nine one-way arrows from you to them and start architecting the network that connects them to each other.

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2. The Bedrock of Success: Forging Psychological Safety and Trust

Before any advanced strategies can be implemented, a team must be built on a foundation of profound trust and psychological safety. This is not a “soft skill” to be addressed at an off-site retreat; it is the single greatest predictor of high-performing teams, as identified by extensive research from institutions like Google. It is the social contract that allows a group to move from a collection of individuals to a truly intelligent unit.

2.1. Defining Psychological Safety and Its Impact

Psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.” Its absence can have catastrophic consequences.

• The space shuttle Challenger disaster is a tragic real-world example. Engineers knew about the faulty seal that led to the explosion but were too uncomfortable to keep raising the issue within a culture that downplayed problems.
• In Star Wars, the Death Star was built with a fatal flaw—a thermal exhaust port that led to its destruction. This kind of flagrant error could only happen in a work culture governed by fear, where engineers were too terrified of Darth Vader to point out a critical design vulnerability.

When psychological safety is low, team members stay silent. Critical errors go unnoticed, innovative ideas are never shared, and the team’s collective intelligence plummets.

2.2. Your First Priority: Eliminating Harmful Behaviors

As a manager, your most potent lever for improvement is not adding positive behaviors but eliminating harmful ones. The impact of negative actions—like belittling, shaming, or threatening—far outweighs the good done by positive ones. We’ve all been there. A project goes wrong, and our first instinct is to find out who messed up. I used to have a nasty habit of asking questions that were less about finding a solution and more about making the other person feel incompetent. I realized this was my own small breach of the social contract, creating a tiny crack in the team’s foundation of safety.

A single toxic individual can derail an entire team, regardless of their talent. NBA star Draymond Green, for example, is one of the best defensive players in the league. Yet his repeated history of unsportsmanlike acts, including punching a teammate during practice, has been cited as a key factor in derailing his team’s chemistry and performance. His individual skill is useless when his behavior gets him kicked out of the game and breaks the team’s social contract.

Expecting yourself or others to simply “use more willpower” to stop bad habits is unrealistic. Instead, you must build automatic systems that prevent breaches before they happen. Consider the F-16 fighter pilot’s Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto G-Cas). When a pilot becomes disoriented or loses consciousness, the system automatically takes control and pulls the plane up, preventing a crash. This is a technological way to automate willpower. As a manager, your job is to create the team equivalent: processes and policies that make it difficult for harmful behaviors to occur in the first place.

2.3. The Three Pillars of Trust: Benevolence, Honesty, and Competence

When we talk about trust, we are actually talking about a combination of three distinct components. It is crucial to understand them in their order of importance:

1. Benevolence: This is the belief that the other person has your best interests at heart. It is the most critical element of trust.
2. Honesty: This is the belief that the other person is truthful and acts with integrity.
3. Competence: This is the belief that the other person is capable of doing the job that is expected of them.

Most corporate communication gets this backward. We lead with presentations designed to prove our competence, when what people are really assessing is our benevolence. A breach in competence is often forgivable; a breach in benevolence is almost always fatal to a relationship.

2.4. Actionable Techniques for Building Team Trust

Trust isn’t built through a single off-site event; it’s forged through consistent, intentional actions. Here are several research-backed techniques you can use to strengthen the connections on your team.

• The Ikea Effect People care more about things they invest effort into. That poorly assembled bookshelf means more to you because you built it. To build trust, create opportunities for team members to invest effort in one another’s success. This can be through collaborative projects, peer mentoring, or simply asking for help.
• Vulnerability Loops Most people believe trust must come before vulnerability. The research shows the opposite: vulnerability precedes trust. This happens in a predictable five-stage process: Person A signals vulnerability (e.g., “I’m nervous about this presentation”), Person B acknowledges it and signals vulnerability back (“Of course, I was nervous before my first one too”), and trust increases. As a manager, be the first to signal vulnerability in small, safe ways, and be vigilant about closing the loops your team members open.
• The Pratfall Effect Research shows that highly competent individuals who make a small, relatable mistake (like spilling coffee on themselves during an interview) are liked more than those who appear perfect. Perfection can be intimidating. Demonstrating your humanity through a minor, harmless stumble can make you more approachable and trustworthy, so long as it doesn’t call your core competence into question.

Once you have established a foundation of trust, you can turn your attention to the strategic challenge of assembling the right mix of talent.

Manager’s Key Takeaway: Trust is built on benevolence first, honesty second, and competence third. Stop leading with your credentials and start by demonstrating that you genuinely have your team’s best interests at heart. This is the only sequence that works.

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3. The “Super Chicken” Dilemma: Engineering a High-Performing Talent Mix

While hiring top talent seems like the most logical path to success, research reveals a counterintuitive problem. On teams where work is highly interdependent, an over-concentration of individual stars can actually damage performance. The drive to stand out can create a hyper-competitive environment where collaboration dies. This section explains this “too-much-talent” effect and offers a superior model for team composition.

3.1. The Super Chicken vs. The Super Team

Evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a fascinating experiment in chicken breeding that holds a powerful lesson for managers.

• He first identified the most individually productive hens—the “super chickens” (Dekalb XL)—and put them together. The result was disastrous. The hyper-competitive birds became aggressive, pecking each other to death. By the end of the experiment, only three of the super chickens were left alive.
• He then took a different approach. He created groups of average chickens and, over six generations, selected the most productive groups for breeding. These “super teams” were not only massively more productive than the super chickens, but they were also healthy, social, and fully feathered.

The conclusion is clear: rewarding group productivity creates healthy, high-performing teams. Corporate cultures that reward individual stats at the expense of collaboration are breeding super chickens, not super teams.

3.2. Identifying the Hidden MVP: The “Glue Player”

In the quest for a super team, one of the most valuable but overlooked roles is the “glue player”—the person who makes everyone around them better. NBA player Shane Battier is the quintessential example.

• Traditional stats failed to capture Battier’s value. He didn’t score many points or grab many rebounds. But an advanced metric, the “plus-minus” score, revealed a stunning fact: every team he was on scored significantly more points when he was on the court.
• His general manager, Daryl Morey, called him “Lego” because he made all the other pieces fit together. He was abnormally unselfish, constantly communicating, and always making the smart play that enabled his superstar teammates to shine.

Battier’s effectiveness is a real-world demonstration of the research from Anita Williams Woolley, which identifies high emotional intelligence as the single greatest predictor of team success. Glue players may not be the stars, but they are often the hidden MVPs. Their value comes not from individual stats, but from a unique combination of attributes:

• High emotional intelligence
• A benevolent, team-first orientation
• Being a proactive thinker

3.3. Manager’s Action Plan: Rewarding the Right Behaviors

To shift your team from a super chicken model to a super team model, you must change what you measure and what you reward.

• Audit Your Rewards: Analyze your team’s compensation, recognition, and promotion structures. Do they primarily reward individual statistics (e.g., sales numbers, lines of code written) or collaborative, team-lifting behaviors (e.g., mentoring, improving processes, resolving conflicts)? If you reward super chickens, that’s what you’ll get.
• Look Beyond the Obvious Stats: Actively search for and document contributions that are hard to measure but vital to team success. Acknowledge the person who stays late to help a colleague meet a deadline or the one who proactively smooths over a conflict between two other departments.
• Give Status to Glue: Publicly celebrate and reward the “glue players” who make others better. When you give status to these behaviors, you send a powerful signal to the entire team about what is truly valued.

With a well-composed team built on a foundation of trust, you can now implement the operational framework that enables peak performance.

Manager’s Key Takeaway: Your job is to stop rewarding the ‘super chickens’ who post individual stats and start giving status to the ‘glue players’ who make the entire team more productive. Audit your rewards system today: what you celebrate is what you will replicate.

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4. The Three Pillars of Team Intelligence in Action

High-performing teams don’t just happen; they operate on a set of specific, observable habits that allow them to function as a single, intelligent unit. Groundbreaking research by Anita Williams Woolley identified three core pillars of this “team intelligence”: Reasoning, Attention, and Resources. This section provides a practical breakdown of each pillar and how to cultivate it within your team.

4.1. Pillar 1: Reasoning through Alignment

• The Principle: A team’s ability to reason effectively—to plan the best route from where they are to their goal—is directly tied to its alignment. Before a single F-35 fighter jet mission, the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Justin “Hasard” Lee, may need to align hundreds of people, from intelligence analysts and cyber teams to space force operators and ground troops. Without a shared understanding of the objective, the mission is doomed.
• The Strategy – Commander’s Intent: The military uses a concept called “Commander’s Intent” to ensure alignment even when plans go awry. As a leader, you must relentlessly test for alignment. Walk up to any team member at any time, and they should be able to answer these five questions without hesitation:
  1. Commander’s Intent: What is the organization’s broader goal?
  2. Mission Parameters: What does the successful end state for this specific project look like?
  3. Team Objectives: What is our team’s unique contribution to that mission?
  4. Individual Contributions: What is my specific role in supporting the team’s objective?
  5. Personal Goals: How does this work align with my own career aspirations and development?

4.2. Pillar 2: Focusing Collective Attention

• The Principle: A team’s ability to focus its collective attention is critical to success. In the early 2000s, LEGO was on the brink of bankruptcy. Despite being a beloved brand, it had developed a case of “corporate ADD,” launching a dizzying array of disconnected products, from electronics and jewelry to action figures. The company was saved when CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp forced a radical simplification, focusing the company’s attention back on its core, profitable products: interlocking bricks.
• The Habits of High-Attention Teams: Intelligent teams manage their attention through specific communication habits.
  • “Bursty” Communication: This involves periods of intense, synchronized communication followed by periods of quiet, uninterrupted individual work. This pattern allows for alignment and focused execution, avoiding the constant distraction of a 24/7 communication culture.
  • Conversational Turn-Taking: Over the course of a project, the most intelligent teams feature roughly equal communication from all members. No single voice dominates, ensuring that all perspectives are heard and integrated.
  • High Emotional Intelligence: Defined as the ability to read social cues and understand others’ perspectives (also known as “theory of mind”), this is the single greatest predictor of team intelligence. It is the underlying skill that enables effective conversational turn-taking and psychological safety. It can be measured by tests like “Reading the Mind in the Eyes.”

4.3. Pillar 3: Activating Team Resources

• The Principle: Success on complex tasks requires a diverse set of complementary resources—skills, knowledge, tools, and contacts. The team that pulled off the infamous Antwerp diamond heist succeeded because it was composed of a social engineer, a tech expert, a master key forger, and an all-around “monster”—not four safecrackers. Overlapping resources are redundant; complementary resources create collective genius.
• The Strategy – Make Resources Explicit: The key to unlocking team resources is making them visible. Team members can’t leverage skills and knowledge they don’t know exist.
  • Create a “Resource Catalog” or “Player Cards” for your team. Ask each member to list their unique skills, areas of expertise, key contacts, and even areas where they need support. This makes the implicit explicit.
  • Organize shared information. A poorly organized shared drive is not a resource; it’s a source of distraction and team stupidity. Ensure that files, documents, and project histories are structured in a way that makes them an easily accessible shared asset.

This operational model provides the ideal framework, but real-world teams face complex human challenges, including difficult personalities and entrenched cultures.

Manager’s Key Takeaway: Team intelligence is built on three pillars: Alignment (Reasoning), Synchronization (Attention), and Visibility (Resources). Your primary job is to ensure every team member knows the mission, communicates in focused bursts, and has a clear map of the team’s collective skills.

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5. Advanced Applications: Managing Toxicity and Shaping Culture

Even with the right structures in place, teams are complex human systems. Managers must be equipped to handle two of the most difficult challenges: neutralizing the impact of toxic individuals and proactively shaping a high-intelligence team culture that can endure.

5.1. Defending Your Team from the “Dark Tetrad”

Psychologists identify a “Dark Tetrad” of toxic personality traits that can appear in the workplace: Psychopathy (lack of remorse), Narcissism (entitlement and need for admiration), Machiavellianism (manipulative exploitation), and Sadism (enjoying others’ suffering). Dealing with individuals who exhibit these traits requires a defensive, not an offensive, strategy.

• The Prime Directive: Do not call them out directly. This will only make them defensive and turn their manipulative skills against you. You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.
• Defensive Action Plan:
  • Document Everything: Keep a detailed, private record of behaviors, conversations, and their impact on the team. This protects you and helps you maintain your sanity against gaslighting techniques like DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender).
  • Limit Engagement: Create buffers and boundaries to minimize your interaction with the individual. This might mean restructuring projects or workflows to reduce dependency.
  • Foster Transparency: Manipulative behavior thrives in secrecy. Foster a culture of open discussion about workloads, responsibilities, and project progress. This makes it harder for toxic individuals to exploit others or take undue credit.

5.2. Your Role as a Deliberate Culture-Shaper

Culture is not what you write in a mission statement; it is the collection of behaviors a leader models, rewards, and tolerates. While the military builds “automatic systems” like Auto G-Cas to prevent catastrophic failure, Boeing’s culture became an automatic system that incentivized it, replacing a focus on safety with a blind pursuit of shareholder value. The catastrophic result—deadly crashes and felony charges—stands in stark contrast to the legendary customer-service culture of Nordstrom. The famous (and true) story of a Nordstrom employee giving a customer a full refund on a set of tires—a product the store doesn’t even sell—perfectly illustrates a culture where employees are empowered to make decisions based on clear, shared values.

5.3. A Framework for Culture: The COACH Ways of Working

To shape culture, you need a simple, memorable, and actionable framework. The fashion house Coach provides an excellent model with its “COACH Ways of Working,” which empowers employees to use their own judgment based on five principles:

• Common sense: If something doesn’t make sense, speak up.
• Opt out: If a meeting or task isn’t critical, opt out and do real work.
• Accept imperfection: Make thoughtful decisions with the information you have; don’t wait for impossible certainty.
• Courageous: Take action and don’t operate out of fear.
• Have fun!

As a manager, you can develop a similarly simple and actionable set of principles to guide your team’s daily interactions and decisions.

Manager’s Key Takeaway: Culture is the sum of the behaviors you model, reward, and tolerate. Your most critical defensive action is to protect your team from toxicity, and your most critical offensive action is to codify a simple set of principles that guide behavior when you’re not in the room.

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Conclusion: Becoming the Leader We Need

The story of Draper L. Kauffman provides the ultimate case study for the modern leader. After his poor eyesight disqualified him from a US Navy commission, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in France at the start of World War II. He was captured and became a POW, but never lost his drive to serve. His release was secured by an unconventional nun who, when a guard refused her request, simply hit his helmet in what was surely the most badass move by a nun in the entire war.

Upon his release, Kauffman joined the British Royal Navy as a bomb defuser, taking on one of the most dangerous jobs imaginable. His expertise eventually led him back to the US, where he was tasked with founding the precursor to the Navy SEALs.

Kauffman’s journey illustrates every core principle of this guide. He learned from the nun that leadership isn’t about fitting a mold but leaning into your unique super skills. He understood that selfless, aligned teams of volunteers could achieve the impossible. He built profound trust by embracing shared vulnerability, training alongside his men in the most grueling conditions to show his benevolence. And he created one of history’s most effective teams by harnessing diverse resources, bringing together people from across the military to solve problems no single group could.

Draper Kauffman was not a lone hero. He was the architect of teams that could achieve heroic things together. That is the modern leader’s true role. It is not to be the star player, but to create the conditions—the trust, the alignment, and the connections—that unlock the collective genius of the entire team.