Why Talented Teams Still Crumble

We tend to believe that if you put talented people together, you will get a talented team.

It sounds logical.

Hire smart people. Put them in the same room. Give them a clear goal. Add process, metrics, and accountability. Then wait for performance to follow.

Except that is not how teams actually work.

Some groups with brilliant people underperform. Some teams with less obvious individual star power outperform everyone around them. Some teams click almost immediately, while others get stuck in friction, hesitation, politics, and status management.

That is what I wanted to explore with Daniel Coyle on What’s Next.

Listen to the full conversation here:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-some-teams-click-while-others-crumble-with-daniel-coyle/id1262213009?i=1000751778137

Spotify:

Daniel has spent the last two decades acting as what I called a performance detective for some of the most elite organizations on the planet. You may know him as the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code and The Culture Code. His newest book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment, looks at what creates the conditions for people and teams to truly thrive.

What I appreciated most about Daniel’s perspective is that he challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in business: that talent is the primary ingredient of performance.

Talent matters, of course.

But talent alone does not create a team.

The real work happens in the space between people.

And that space is where many leaders are not paying enough attention.

Daniel shared a story I cannot stop thinking about: the spaghetti-marshmallow test.

The setup is simple. Teams of four are given 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, three feet of tape, and one standard-sized marshmallow. The goal is to build the tallest tower with the marshmallow on top.

If you had to bet on who would win, you might assume CEOs, lawyers, or MBA students would outperform a group of kindergartners.

But the kindergartners often win.

Why?

Because the adults spend too much time managing status.

Who is in charge?

Who has the best idea?

Who has engineering experience?

Who looks smart?

Who is being judged?

Who should lead?

The kindergartners do not carry the same baggage. They start building. They experiment. They fail quickly. They try again. They learn by doing.

The adults appear organized. The kindergartners appear chaotic.

But the appearance of coordination is not the same as performance.

That is a lesson every leader should pay attention to.

Because in organizations, status management shows up everywhere. It shows up when people hesitate to ask a question because they do not want to look unprepared. It shows up when someone with a better idea stays quiet because the highest-paid person in the room has already spoken. It shows up when meetings are dominated by the same three voices while everyone else watches the conversation happen.

It looks professional.

It feels normal.

But it slows the team down.

Status kills speed, creativity, learning, and collaboration.

One of the things I said to Daniel during our conversation is that leaders need to become master askers.

That phrase has been important to me for a long time.

The better the question, the better the conversation.

The better the conversation, the better the insight.

The better the insight, the better the decision.

But asking is only half of the skill. You also have to listen.

That is where many leaders struggle. They ask a question, but they are already preparing the answer. They ask for input, but they are really looking for confirmation. They ask for ideas, but the room can sense that the decision has already been made.

A great question opens the room.

A performative question closes it.

Daniel shared an example from his work with the Cleveland Guardians. The organization wanted to develop better coaches. At first, they tried bringing in expertise from the outside. It did not work as well as they hoped.

Then they flipped the approach.

They brought coaches together and asked a simple question: Who was the best coach you ever had, and what exactly did they do?

That changed everything.

Suddenly, the room had energy. People shared stories. They named behaviors. They built a model of excellence from the inside out.

That is the power of a great question.

It does not just extract information. It creates ownership.

And ownership changes the quality of the work.

A lot of organizations have become very good at optimizing performance.

We measure more. Track more. Dashboard more. Forecast more. We know how many widgets were made, shipped, sold, and renewed. We can slice performance by region, rep, product, segment, and quarter.

That discipline matters.

I am a believer in measuring and managing.

But not everything important fits neatly into a metric.

That is where leaders can get into trouble. They optimize the visible work while missing the invisible conditions that make the work possible.

Meaning is one of those conditions.

Daniel describes flourishing as joyful, meaningful growth. That may sound soft to some leaders, but it is not. Meaning is what turns effort into commitment. It is what helps people keep going when the work gets hard. It is what connects the task in front of someone to something bigger than the task itself.

When meaning disappears, people may still perform for a while.

But over time, the work gets hollow.

The team may hit the number and still lose energy.

They may ship the project and still feel disconnected.

They may look productive and still be quietly disengaging.

This is one of the biggest risks in today’s workplace. We have optimized so much of work for output that we can forget the human energy required to sustain it.

And as AI accelerates the information side of work, this becomes even more important.

Information is getting cheaper. Answers are getting easier. Tasks are getting faster.

So what becomes more valuable?

The ability to ask better questions.

The ability to create trust.

The ability to bring people together around uncertainty.

The ability to turn a group of talented individuals into a team that actually learns together.

Leaders love alignment.

And they should.

But alignment without agency can become compliance.

People may understand the goal. They may know the strategy. They may have the talking points. But if they do not feel they have a real role in shaping the work, they will not bring their full creativity to it.

Agency is different.

Agency says: your perspective matters here.

Agency says: you are not just executing the plan, you are helping us make it better.

Agency says: we need your fresh eyes.

Daniel gave the example of Zingerman’s, the Ann Arbor-based community of businesses. What stood out to him was how the CEO approaches new employee orientation. Instead of simply broadcasting information about the company, the CEO creates a conversation.

Who are you?

How did you get here?

What is your story?

Then comes the powerful part: we need your fresh eyes. We are imperfect here. We need you to help make us better.

That is not just onboarding.

That is belonging in action.

It tells people they have intrinsic value before they have proven anything. It also tells them they are expected to contribute to something bigger than themselves.

That combination matters.

People want to be valued as individuals and needed as contributors.

When leaders create both conditions, teams move differently.

One of the traps leaders fall into is reading a book, hearing a podcast, or attending a keynote and then trying to flip a switch with their team.

Suddenly, the Tuesday meeting is different.

The leader wants more ideas. More candor. More participation. More vulnerability. More challenge.

But the team has been operating under a different set of norms for months or years.

You cannot expect people to suddenly speak up if the room has taught them to stay quiet.

You cannot expect better questions if the culture has rewarded quick answers.

You cannot expect agency if people have been trained to wait for permission.

You have to build the beams first.

By that, I mean the structure that allows trust, participation, and contribution to happen. Clear roles. Clear expectations. Psychological safety. Shared language. Repeated rituals. Real listening. Visible follow-through.

This is where leadership gets very practical.

If you ask for input and never use it, people stop giving it.

If you invite dissent and punish it, people stop risking it.

If you say you want creativity but reward only certainty, people stop experimenting.

Teams do not click because a leader announces that they should.

They click because the leader creates the conditions, over and over again, where people feel safe enough, valued enough, and responsible enough to contribute.

One practical habit Daniel mentioned is the after-action review.

It is simple.

After something happens, a meeting, a sales call, a project milestone, a launch, the team circles up and asks three questions:

What went right?

What went wrong?

What will we do differently next time?

The power is not in the complexity of the exercise. The power is in the habit of shared reflection.

Even more important, Daniel suggested having the least powerful person lead the process.

That detail matters.

Because if the most senior person always frames the conversation, the team learns to orbit around hierarchy.

When someone with less formal power leads the review, it changes the room. It creates a different kind of safety. It signals that learning belongs to everyone, not just the leader.

This is how teams build muscle.

Not through one big offsite.

Not through slogans.

Not through posters about culture.

Through repeated moments where people tell the truth, learn together, and improve the work.

What I loved most about this conversation is how Daniel reframes leadership as the work of creating moments where people feel they matter, both as individuals and as contributors to something bigger.

That shift matters.

Because it moves leadership from managing performance to cultivating meaning.

And when people feel they matter, teams move differently.

They ask better questions.

They recover faster.

They contribute more fully.

They stop protecting status and start building something together.

The question is not simply, “Do I have talented people?”

The better question is, “What happens between my talented people?”

Is the space between them filled with trust or tension?

Curiosity or status?

Questions or assumptions?

Shared ownership or quiet compliance?

Meaning or just motion?

That is where teams are made.

And it is also where they crumble.

The future of work is going to demand more collaboration, not less. More adaptability. More creativity. More human judgment. More ability to work across functions, generations, time zones, technologies, and priorities.

That means the leaders who win will not only be the ones who hire the best people.

They will be the ones who create the best conditions for those people to become something together.

Because talented individuals may help you start strong.

But only a real team helps you go far.

Tiffani Bova is Chief Strategy and Research Officer at The Futurum Group.

Ranked for the last six years in the Top 50 Business Thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, Tiffani Bova is a thought leader who Forbes says “reshapes our perception of growth.”

As both a practitioner and academic she offers a unique perspective and has helped lead the tech industry through several evolutions over her nearly 30-year career as Salesforce’s former Growth and Innovation Evangelist, and previously as a Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow at Gartner and a sales, marketing and customer service executive for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of two Wall Street Journal bestsellers: GrowthIQ and The Experience Mindset.