Capable Managers Don't Automatically Make Effective Teams
I worked with a group of managers who had grown frustrated with several persistent problems in their organization. They were capable people who cared about their work and wanted things to improve. But their concerns were not getting the attention they believed they deserved.
Eventually, they decided to speak up.
That took courage. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it particularly skillfully. They brought the executive team a collection of concerns without enough context, clear priorities, or specific requests.
The response from the executives wasn’t particularly skillful either. Some reacted defensively, while others were more sympathetic. The initial exchange produced more frustration than understanding.
But here’s what I find interesting: The managers had taken an important first step. They’d stopped simply talking among themselves about what wasn’t working and tried to do something about it. And despite the awkward beginning—and the imperfect responses on both sides—several of their concerns were eventually addressed.
I see variations of this pattern often in my work with managers. Talented, well-intentioned people struggle to address difficult issues together—not necessarily because they lack the desire, but because they haven’t yet developed the skills to do so.
Individual competence does not automatically translate into collective competence.
The missing ingredient: collective competence
In their Talent Quarterly article, 4 Ways Top Talent Is Destroying Your Teams, Gordon Curphy and Dianne Nilsen describe a paradox. Organizations invest heavily in hiring, promoting, and developing talented individuals, yet give far less attention to whether those individuals can build and work in effective teams.
The authors cite research by Ruth Wageman and her colleagues showing that members of senior executive teams were four times as likely to describe their team as poor or mediocre as to describe it as high-performing.
Curphy and Nilsen identify four common problems: cloning, where executives think too much alike; alpha-paralysis, where discussions drag on without important decisions being made; artificial harmony, where people avoid difficult but necessary conversations; and myopia, where executives focus on their own functions rather than the organization as a whole.
They argue that organizations have become so focused on individual performance that they’ve neglected another essential leadership capability: TQ, or a manager’s ability to build high-performing teams. One result of that capability is what we might call collective competence: a team’s ability to think, decide, and act effectively together.
Curphy and Nilsen focus on executive teams, but their argument applies at every level. We teach managers to set goals, delegate, give feedback, and evaluate individual performance. All important skills. But how deliberately do we prepare them to help people work through disagreements, challenge assumptions, make decisions, and solve problems together?
Those capabilities deserve just as much attention. Organizations can reinforce that priority by recognizing and rewarding managers not only for their individual accomplishments, but also for how effectively they build and lead teams.
Speaking up—and listening well—takes practice
In a 2024 Harvard Business Review article, When a Team Member Speaks Up—and It Doesn’t Go Well, Megan Reitz and Amy Edmondson explore a closely related challenge: What happens when someone raises a concern and the conversation goes badly?
Unsuccessful attempts to speak up, they explain, can discourage people from trying again. Embarrassment, frustration, blame, and defensiveness make future conversations harder, and over time people may conclude that remaining silent is safer.
Their alternative is to treat these imperfect conversations as opportunities to learn—about the issue, one another, and how people work together. They recommend preparing intentionally, noticing emotional reactions in the moment, building in simple ways to reflect, and focusing on learning over time rather than the outcome of a single exchange.
The important insight is that both speaking up and listening well are skills that can be developed through practice.
The managers in my story could have organized their concerns, distinguished observations from conclusions, considered other perspectives, and made clear, constructive requests. The executives could have listened without immediately becoming defensive, sought to understand what was behind the concerns, and helped turn a difficult exchange into a productive conversation.
With more practice, both groups might have reached a better outcome with far less frustration along the way.
Building an effective team is part of the job
We sometimes treat team development as separate from the everyday work of management—something accomplished through an occasional retreat, team-building activity, or special initiative. But building an effective team is ongoing work.
Managers play a critical role. They help people establish shared goals, clarify responsibilities, work through disagreements, and make clear agreements. They create opportunities for different perspectives to be heard and help teams examine how well they’re working together.
It’s not simply about helping people get along. Effective teams disagree productively, make difficult decisions, and hold one another accountable for results.
Those capabilities develop through practice. Understanding a framework for solving problems collaboratively is one thing. Applying it when emotions are running high, relationships are strained, or important decisions are at stake is something else entirely.
Managers strengthen collective competence when they develop these skills themselves and give their teams opportunities to practice, reflect on what happened, receive feedback, and try again.
From talented individuals to effective teams
For founders and executives of growing companies, this distinction has real consequences.
As an organization grows, its work becomes more interdependent. Coordination across people and functions becomes more complex. Decisions involve a wider range of perspectives. And the ability to resolve disagreements without escalating everything to the CEO becomes increasingly important.
Hiring good people and promoting capable managers are essential steps. But they’re not enough.
Here are three questions worth asking about your management team:
When did your managers last disagree openly—and productively—in a meeting?
Which problems still land on your desk that your managers could reasonably resolve together?
When someone raises an uncomfortable concern, what happens next?
If the answers make you uneasy, the solution may not be another talented hire. It may be developing managers who can bring people together to solve difficult problems, make sound decisions, and accomplish what none of them could alone.
That’s how a management team begins to carry more of the company’s weight.
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