Developing Teams That Deliver

Developing Teams That Deliver

I was working with a senior leadership team that had been together for a while. A team of ten, covering all areas of the business. They got along well personally, but something wasn't quite firing, and they were having difficulty putting their finger on what it was.

Some red flags were waving:
🚩 No CEO, no meeting. When the CEO wasn’t around for their weekly catch-up, the meeting simply didn’t happen.
🚩 Siloed reporting. Each leader gave excellent updates, but only about their own area—there was little crossover.
🚩 Decisions weren’t team-based. Critical calls weren’t debated as a group; instead, the CEO handled them one-on-one with individual leaders.
🚩 Avoiding conflict at all costs. Team members were overly polite and hesitant to challenge ideas or debate openly. Instead, real discussions happened in offline conversations, creating hidden misalignment.

So, were they a team, or just a group of senior people working in the same organisation? And why does it matter anyway?            

Group vs. Team: Why It Matters

Understanding the difference between groups and teams is crucial. Gordon Curphy, an expert on team dynamics, breaks it down:

🔹 A group = individuals with separate goals, working independently. One person’s failure doesn’t impact the others.

🔹 A team = shared goals, shared accountability, shared success (or failure). They win and lose together.

Many businesses love to say they have a "team culture." But in reality? Many leadership teams function more like loosely connected groups, despite the label.

Before calling a group a team, ask: What are we trying to achieve? If one person can do it alone, why force a team structure? But if collaboration, buy-in, and shared problem-solving are critical, then you need a real team, not just a collection of individuals.

Are Silos Always Bad?

Not necessarily! Silos work—if independent execution is enough. But if you need leaders to:

✅ Share resources
✅ Exchange ideas
✅ Solve complex problems together
✅ Keep momentum when the CEO is absent
✅ Back each other up

…then silos are a major barrier to impact.

The Reality of Leadership Teams

Most senior leadership teams don’t want to work in silos. Yet, time and again, we see this because leaders feel comfortable looking after their functional teams or business units, and we don't always spend time developing the understanding and capability of what a cohesive top team looks like and how everyone can contribute to its success.

So what to do?

In my experience, there are often two key areas that teams can consider when looking to shift the dial on their current performance and results. To identify the best starting point, we spend time discussing some of the current challenges so we can get the sequence of development right. Once we have uncovered the challenges, we want to gain real insights through the use of data as opposed to using our intuition which is more of a feelings-based approach and may not directly address the challenge.

The first area is to decode the team's performance against the characteristics of a high-performing team. This approach gives the team a scorecard of current collective performance and through a facilitated discussion of the team's results, we identify the most relevant path forward for team development. The typical approach for Decoding Team Performance looks like this:

The second area (or the first depending on the most pressing needs) is understanding what I call the collective inner game of a team. What does that mean? It's about:

🔹 Recognising collective strengths
🔹 Identifying blind spots and derailers
🔹 Aligning motives and values

Your team’s inner game is the invisible force shaping not only the team's but your organisation’s culture—whether you realise it or not. If your team lacks awareness in this area, you may be unintentionally creating a culture that doesn’t support your strategic goals.

So, if you want to shape your culture with intention, or ensure you are identifying, designing, communicating and executing on strategy most effectively, you must start by understanding your team’s collective inner game.

The typical approach for understanding your team's collective inner game looks like this:

🚨 It's worth remembering, you can’t change what you’re not consciously aware of.

Need some help

If you would like some help measuring your team's performance against the components of a high-performance team or the impact of your collective inner game so you can target your team development activities, email or give me a call, details are below.

PS: You don’t need to have all the answers about your team’s development challenges before we chat. Together, we can explore where you are now and uncover the best path forward.