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Collaboration and Teams

Teamwork at the Top

It’s not just who’s in the room—it’s how they behave together.
by Gregory LeStage, Sara Nilsson DeHanas, and Pete Gerend

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Teamwork at the Top

It’s not just who’s in the room—it’s how they behave together.
by Gregory LeStage, Sara Nilsson DeHanas, and Pete Gerend
From the Magazine (September–October 2024) / Reprint S24053

Matt Stevens

What could our senior leadership team achieve if we worked at full

potential? And what’s keeping us from achieving it? Those were the
questions the leaders at Root Capital found themselves asking in 2022.

Founded in 1999 by Willy Foote, the nonprofit investment firm provides

small working-capital loans to farm cooperatives in Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia. In its successful first two decades, the
company was run by Foote and a team of passionate, energetic leaders.
But as it grew in both size and ambition, its management challenges
grew as well. In 2018, the firm added a chief operating officer to run

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day-to-day operations so that Foote could devote more of his attention

to organizational culture and stakeholder relationships.

In 2020, Root launched a five-year growth strategy, which included

new lending and advisory services. It required changes to certain
roles on the top team and the addition of several new roles. It also
required a high level of cross-functional integration and collaboration—
neither of which were strengths of the firm. Innovation often seemed
disconnected from the business, strategy execution was moving too
slowly, and too many decisions were bubbling all the way to the top,
slowing down the organization. Then Covid hit, and all aspects of
leading the firm became harder, with compounding repercussions for
the inner workings of senior management and the organization as a
whole.

By 2022, Root’s top leaders had lost the structure and discipline
of meeting, debating, and leading as a team. Some executives were
included in discussions about how to deploy new capital infusions while
others were not. Communication became siloed and inconsistent. The
broader organization was hungry for clarity of purpose and direction
from the top but was not getting it. “We were a team only in name,”
Foote says. “We were drifting, and the organization saw and felt it.”

Root’s leaders had arrived at a point of reckoning. So they held a mirror

up to themselves, and with vulnerability and humility they began to
focus on developing new collective behaviors that would help them be
more effective as a team. They examined everything from how often
they met and how they debated issues to how they developed strategy
together.

Root’s investment in its top team had a big impact on organizational

performance. This is not surprising: A recent Bain & Company

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study of 1,250 companies found that organizations led by highly

effective executive teams had revenue growth, profitability, and total
shareholder returns that were three times higher than the study group’s
average. Research also shows that highly effective leadership teams are
correlated with consistently high employee retention, productivity, and
morale. In short, they are force multipliers: Effectiveness radiates from
the top team throughout the organization.

But so does ineffectiveness. Poorly functioning top teams can

spread malaise across their companies, creating a powerful drag
on productivity, lowering revenue, and leading to higher employee
turnover. The problem is pervasive: Roughly two-thirds of the senior
executives surveyed in 2020 by the Center for Creative Leadership
felt that their top team was ineffective, and only 20% felt that their
team was high performing. (We define a top team as any leadership
team responsible for the creation of a strategy and accountable for its
execution by others in its organization, business unit, or function.)

It’s easy to sympathize with the challenges that leaders face. Teaming
is difficult at any level, but for top teams, the challenges expand
exponentially. They are responsible for addressing their organization’s
weightiest and most complex problems, so their struggles are almost
existential. As one expert put it, these teams “exist to get really hard
stuff done.”

Part of the problem is that companies prioritize the development of

individual leaders over leadership teams—an understandable choice,
given that business schools, management books, and the media all
celebrate leadership as a solo skill. Another obstacle to high-performing
teams is internal dynamics. It’s common for individual members or
factions to have opposing viewpoints or conflicting communication
styles; it’s also common for teams not to address—or even recognize

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—those dynamics. To their detriment, top teams tend to keep such

difficulties secret, fearful that acknowledging their struggles could
shake the confidence of their many stakeholders. Instead, they either
grind along in silent mediocrity, or the CEO tries to root out the problem
by replacing seemingly problematic team members.

Both paths lead to dysfunction. Instead, organizations need to prioritize

the development of strong and effective leadership teams that function
as a collective behavioral unit rather than a loose affiliation of
individual leaders. That’s what the team at Root Capital did: The leaders
acknowledged that the hard, deliberate, and sustained effort that it
takes to become a team is actually part and parcel of being a team.

In this article, we’ll discuss the key traits of effective top teams that we
(together with our colleague Ineet Narula) identified in our research and
on-the-ground consulting work. Then we’ll lay out a four-step process
to help you use those behaviors to boost the effectiveness of your own
team.

Five Traits of Effective Top Teams

Not all effective top teams are the same, of course. But after
studying hundreds of them across 11 industries and six continents, we
identified five behavior traits that effective top teams have in common:
direction, discipline, drive, dynamism, and collaboration. These traits
are collective: They characterize the behaviors of the team as a whole,
not those of its individual members.

Let’s consider each trait in turn.

Direction. How a top team works together to set the organization’s

direction—its purpose, vision, and strategy—is a cornerstone of its
effectiveness. Team members must be aligned on and share ownership

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of their short- and long-term priorities. They must exhibit public

commitment to one another and their strategy, even when facing
pressure from outside forces and other teams within the organization.

When a team is not aligned on the priorities that propel its strategy, it
can easily lose direction. That’s what happened at a rapidly growing
technology company in Southeast Asia that we worked with. As it
navigated a major scale-up, its top team lost its way. Although the team
members shared a bold long-term vision to achieve unicorn status, they
had not articulated their immediate and short-term strategic priorities,
and in that vacuum, they individually began pressuring the founder to
fund their particular strategies. This created divisions within the team
and pulled the company in different directions, causing collaboration,
innovation, and growth to suffer. The team was very busy, but much of
its time and energy went to working on the wrong things.

When the top team recognized that it had a problem, the leaders looked
inward to address it. First they developed an inclusive list of all the
strategic priorities, and the members each ranked their top three. After
discussion and debate, they settled on the five most critical priorities
for the business overall. At subsequent meetings, they kept their focus
on those priorities. If things got off track, every team member had
permission to stop the discussion and refocus the team. Through
practice this became a team behavior.

The team also built a stronger sense of direction through clear

communication and active listening. Together, they arrived at an
understanding of how individual and team goals related to the overall
business strategy and began to cultivate a culture of ownership
and commitment. Those efforts paid off: The team stopped funding
initiatives in isolation and began moving in a unified direction.

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Discipline. In order to make and execute decisions consistently, have

productive meetings, and practice healthy norms and routines, team
members need to have a clear understanding of their own and
one another’s roles—and all too often, they don’t. CEOs are often
perplexed to learn that members of their top team don’t sufficiently
understand their peers’ strategies, objectives, and deliverables, or
how they spend their days in pursuit of them. When members don’t
know those things, they can’t fully support one another or identify
the interdependencies among their agendas that would encourage
cooperation. More concerning perhaps, team members are often not
clear on the role of the team itself. Many are unable to answer the
question “What kind of team must we become to lead our strategy and
people?” They may even struggle with a more existential one: “Why are
we here?”

For many top teams, a lack of discipline, particularly in managing

meetings, can be at the core of problems. Meetings are a mainspring
in team effectiveness because they create the time and space for
effective traits and behaviors to flourish. But getting meetings right
is deceptively difficult, often because team members don’t appreciate
their importance to business performance and thus fail to give them
their due focus. To get the most out of meetings, each team member
must be disciplined in properly preparing for, participating in, and
following up after them. At Root, Foote and the COO introduced a
seemingly simple procedural shift that had an outsize effect: They
stopped cochairing meetings and deputized team members to preside
over them instead. The effect was to distribute leadership among the
members, giving the whole team a greater sense of shared ownership.
The new regime sharpened the team’s decision-making discipline and
produced better alignment between decisions and strategy.

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Teams can further strengthen their discipline by coauthoring a one-

page charter clarifying the team’s purpose, focus, collective behaviors,
norms, and routines. This work is both pragmatic and symbolic. When
the members of the top team at Root Capital engaged in this exercise,
they found that it not only helped them improve focus and efficiency
but also gave them a powerful vision of themselves as a single cohesive
unit rather than a collection of individuals.

Drive. Top teams with drive prepare assiduously, debate constructively,

and are industrious and resilient over the long term. They know how
to prepare for and surmount obstacles. As the COO of one global
consumer-products company told us, teams with drive do “the hard
work of doing the hard work.”

Drive is pivotal when a top team faces a crisis. That was the case for one
life-sciences company we worked with after it learned that it was being
investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The CEO and
his top executives were certain that there had been no wrongdoing,
so they devised a plan for how they would behave as a team: They
would face every difficulty head-on, immediately, and with optimism.
When the SEC made a request, they would work together to address
it, regardless of whose domain was at issue. They would pay careful
attention to detail. Most important, they would be resilient, engaging in
constructive debate throughout the process.

The strategy worked. “Our team lived and breathed these behaviors
for six months,” the company’s general counsel told us—and the SEC
ultimately cleared the company of any violations. In the process, the
team developed an enduring mindset and behaviors that have since
allowed it to surmount other obstacles and to differentiate between
problems that can be solved and those that can be only mitigated.

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Not surprisingly, our research shows that the top teams of many of the
companies that thrived during Covid exhibited high levels of drive.

Dynamism. Dynamic teams treat change as constant and positive. They

actively scout information from outside and inside their organization so
that they can take advantage of opportunities and head off challenges.
They have a bias for action and respond with speed and flexibility
to new scenarios, modifying plans and executing accordingly. They
invest in resources to accelerate innovation and protect initiatives from
anything that might undermine them. They set compensation and
incentives to support risk-taking and don’t penalize for failure.

In business, as in life, allowing for the possibility of failure is important

because it’s a prime source for learning and positive change. But top
teams typically avoid practicing this behavior. In the high-stakes world
they work in, failure can be a terrifying prospect, but aversion to risk
undercuts dynamism and means that leaders can’t respond effectively
to change.

A better approach is for top teams to publicly recognize the

opportunities for learning that failure provides. That’s what happened
at a major pharmaceuticals company we worked with. The team
that leads the firm’s center of excellence for talent—which serves a
workforce of 80,000—spends 15 minutes of every monthly meeting
studying the “failure of the month.” It’s an agenda item that many look
forward to because it’s constructive and free of judgment.

Collaboration. The very heart of teaming is collaboration. It combines

direction, discipline, drive, and dynamism, and it thrives in an
environment of connection, inclusion, and trust. Collaborative
behaviors include developing personal relationships, giving everybody
an equal voice, and sticking to commitments. Teams that excel at

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collaboration create the psychological safety needed to give and

take feedback, listen actively, brainstorm, solve problems, and hold
themselves accountable. None of this just happens on its own. It’s hard
to collaborate well and consistently without instruction and practice.

Collaboration can be especially challenging during mergers or in

multicultural team environments. Consider the case of an Asia-
headquartered technology firm we worked with. After acquiring a
European competitor, it entered a prolonged period of integration,
during which a fierce battle raged over who would become the
combined regional CEO. When the selection was finally made, the
new regional CEO was left with a fragmented, angry top team that
somehow had to find a way to meet high-growth expectations from
the corporate center. For the first six months the members of the team
chased individual goals, struggled to make decisions, and increasingly
avoided one another.

Matt Stevens

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To break the cycle, the regional CEO scheduled a series of top-team

off-sites designed to build personal relationships and foster mutual
empathy—two key enablers of collaboration. The first meeting started
with the team sharing stories that highlighted their values and past
experience. Anonymous quotes and data about the team’s functioning
were gathered from members in advance and shared to help build a
picture of strengths and gaps. Two things in particular helped the team
bond. First, the regional CEO modeled vulnerability by highlighting an
area in which he needed to improve. And second, the team created a
charter that identified their purpose, desired behaviors, focus areas, and
priorities for the year.

Building cohesion was also a key priority. After the off-site, the team
began every meeting with a “team moment” during which members
talked about their behaviors and made plans for relationship-building
social outings. Within a year, the regional CEO saw a meaningful
improvement in collaboration. Mutual support and empathy were
clearly evident during meetings. Leaning on the team charter, the team
had begun to behave as a collective.

Four Steps to Success

Top teams seeking to become more effective can take these four steps.

1. Commit and invest. The first step is to make a commitment that

teaming is a core skill at all levels of your organization—and that you
and your team will model the right collective behaviors. Your team must
make an explicit commitment to invest time and money establishing
and nurturing the five traits discussed earlier. Four hours once a year
during the executive off-site won’t cut it, and funding can’t be patched
together from other budgets. You’ll need to secure resources and make
time on your calendar at regular intervals to work on capabilities so that
they become routine behaviors.

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The price of not making this investment became clear to many

companies during the Covid era. In the two years of remote work that
followed lockdowns, one leadership team watched its cohesion erode.
“We lost our personal connections,” the CEO told us. “It felt like we
had disbanded.” When subsequently drafting a new team charter, the
team committed to routinely meeting in person. A sprint team devised
a budget for travel, accommodation, and other costs for two days
every quarter, one half-day of which was devoted to team-effectiveness
training.

2. Hold up the mirror. To determine how you’re currently

working together, conduct a team-effectiveness diagnostic. Focus on
understanding how your team views itself as well as how others see
it. Use a survey or interviews to get members’ opinions on their
experience of the team—everything from its culture and climate to
its operations and routines. Survey your direct reports or run focus
groups to get an outside-in perspective. Ask questions about whether
the team is demonstrating the five traits or not. Whenever possible,
ensure anonymity and confidentiality to encourage candor.

This process reveals truths that can help a team get better faster.
Consider the experience of one fintech CEO who, on the basis of
anecdotal evidence and his own observations, was certain that his
team’s struggles stemmed from animosity between two business heads.
Anonymous surveys and confidential interviews revealed that the
problems went deeper, however, including a general lack of agreement
on the company’s overall strategy and the existence of in-groups and
out-groups. The CEO assigned the two business-unit heads to cochair
a series of strategy triage sessions and provided training in dilemma
management to help them identify interdependencies among their
respective objectives. They soon shifted from obstructing or ignoring
one another to collaborating. Six months later, a follow-up survey

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showed strong strategic alignment among team members and decreased

evidence of factions.

3. Map the journey and begin. Next, plan your team’s journey to new
collective behaviors. You can’t outsource this work to HR or anybody
else. Begin by asking: “How do we need to work together as a team to
help others achieve our strategy?” Start with the business goals that you
and your team have set for the firm, and then use the results from your
team-effectiveness diagnostic to identify which gaps most affect their
execution. For example, if you’re launching a multiyear transformation,
it will be crucial to address deficiencies in the team’s dynamism that
might hold back change. If you’re a new team formed after a merger,
start by clarifying each member’s role to establish discipline and set the
stage for collaboration.

4. Maintain momentum. Mapping out and embarking on the journey

are easy compared with sustaining it. Many teams quickly align around
priorities, convene for a launch event, and make plans for future
meetings—but then fail to follow through. Some call this “the boom
splat.” When it happens, firms often rationalize their inaction, insisting
that other work simply became more important. But maintaining
momentum—and correcting course when necessary—is critical to
changing behavior and making it stick.

Enabling Factors

Following through on those steps is hard but rewarding. Several

enabling factors can help.

Get together. The potency of in-person sessions has no substitute. Build

your annual program around as many face-to-face gatherings as you can
afford. Save money elsewhere.

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Build habits. In your regular meetings, dedicate a few moments

for team learning. And during your monthly or quarterly meetings,
dedicate an hour—or even a day—to yourselves as a team. The continual
dedication of time is more important than the amount of time.

Be opportunistic. Top teams struggle with time famine, so take

advantage of meetings that have been convened for other purposes to
work on teaming.

Be adaptable. Team members should agree on what skills and habits

they need to learn and be ready to call on different ones as the business
environment changes. When a team needs to power through a sudden
adverse event, for example, it should pivot toward drive behaviors.

Make teaming real and applicable. Integrate the building of skills

with the execution of work activities. Practice constructive debate and
listening in the context of specific questions facing the business (about,
say, where to build a new factory).

Reinforce. Between working sessions, encourage subgroups to form

sprint teams to reinforce what they’ve learned—through after-action
reviews, for example.

Measure. Regular measurement of the team’s progress will keep the

journey headed in the right direction. After six to 12 months, survey or
interview team members and others again. Then celebrate progress and
stretch further.

Communicate. Over time, get used to making your goals public, and
share mistakes and successes along the way. If you can model this
behavior and foster a culture of continuous improvement, other teams

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throughout the organization will feel that it’s safe and productive to
change as well.

...

Since beginning its self-improvement work, the top team at Root has
become more purposeful. Members have more-constructive debates,
delegate more of the right decisions, and are more collaborative and
transparent. Communication is clearer. The company’s performance
has been excellent. Now Root is getting ready to launch another five-
year strategy review, and although senior leaders are still working to
improve their effectiveness as a top team, they now know that they’re
up to the task—because they’ve seen the results. Your team can do the
same.

A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2024 issue of Harvard Business
Review.

Gregory LeStage is a partner at Bain & Company based in Boston and

an expert in leadership, team effectiveness, and transformation.

Sara Nilsson DeHanas is a partner at Bain & Company based

in London and an expert in leadership, team effectiveness, and
transformation.

Pete Gerend is a partner at Bain & Company based in

Washington, DC and an expert in leadership, team effectiveness, and
transformation.

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