The Performance Gap: Issue 13

Over the first 12 issues we looked at individual performance - how leaders learn, develop, and sometimes stall. This issue opens Season 2, which turns the lens outward to the collective. If you lead a senior team, or are part of one, the next eight issues are for you.

Most senior leaders are managing a group. They call it a team.

The distinction matters more than it might appear.

A team is not a reporting structure. A team is not a shared calendar or a set of people who attend the same meetings. A team, in any meaningful sense, is a small number of people who need each other to succeed - where the quality of one person's output materially affects the quality of another's, and where both people know it.

By that definition, most senior leadership teams are not teams. They are well-coordinated collections of function heads who are broadly collegiate and operationally efficient. That is not a criticism. It is a description of what the structure actually produces, and it has real consequences for what leaders can expect from the people around them.

The coordination trap

Senior leaders often mistake smooth coordination for high performance. The team operates with minimal friction. Information moves between functions. Meetings are productive. No one is obviously struggling.

But coordination is the floor, not the ceiling. A well-functioning group of individuals who share a reporting line can achieve coordination without ever achieving collective performance - the kind that requires genuine interdependence, honest dialogue, and shared accountability for outcomes that no single function owns.

The cost of this is usually invisible until the organisation faces something that cannot be solved within a single function: a restructure, a strategic pivot, an unexpected failure. At that point, the group discovers it cannot operate as a team, because it never built the conditions for one.

What genuine interdependence requires

Interdependence is not proximity. It is not created by putting people in the same room or inviting them to collaborate on a document. Interdependence means that the success of one person's domain is genuinely bound up with the success of another's - and that the structure makes that visible, rather than obscuring it.

When that is true, relationships between team members have a different quality. There is a real reason to invest in each other's success, to surface problems early, to give honest information rather than managed information. Without it, the rational behaviour (for intelligent, well-intentioned leaders) is to protect their own domain and manage their own reputation. That is not a character failure. It is a structural outcome.

What the evidence says about team conditions

Richard Hackman's decades of research on team effectiveness identified five conditions that distinguish high-performing teams from functional ones: a real team with clear boundaries and stable membership; a compelling direction that is clear, challenging, and consequential; an enabling structure with norms that support good work; a supportive organisational context; and expert coaching that is available at the right moments.

Most organisations invest heavily in the last of these and neglect the first four. They hire coaches and run team away-days while leaving the structural conditions unchanged. The evidence suggests this is the wrong order.

The question for this week

Think about the team you lead or are part of. What would be genuinely worse for the organisation if your team stopped functioning as a team and simply coordinated more efficiently as individuals? If the answer is 'not much', that is informative - about the structure, not the people.

Issue 14: Trust - what it actually is, why organisations consistently misunderstand it, and why fixing the wrong thing makes it worse.

If something in this issue resonated and you'd like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com