The Double-Edged Power of Building Teams

I recently read Patrick Lencioni’s “The Advantage” and highly recommend it if you’re thinking about teams and organizational health. In it, he makes this compelling case that leadership teams need to function as actual teams, not just collections of department heads who happen to sit in the same meetings. Their identity should be with each other and not the teams they lead.

If you want something to succeed, you build a team around it. In many organizations, teams are built around areas of the business (sales, marketing, technology, etc) and the leaders of those teams identify strongly with those teams. Of course, this works until it doesn’t. The familiar probem of tribalism creeps in as the success of those individual areas come into conflict. The only solution is to get leaders to put the company health as the top priority and that’s only possible if there’s a true team built around it.

It got me thinking about how this principle plays out everywhere — and how I’ve seen both its incredible power and its dangerous pitfalls in my consulting work.

Teams Form Around What We Value Most

Think about it: we instinctively create teams around our priorities. Want to launch a product? Assemble a cross-functional team. Want to transform your data capabilities? Put together a team that owns that transformation from start to finish. Want to priotize customer experience? Create a team that’s responsible for specific customer outcomes.

When done right, this creates something magical. I’ve watched teams rally around a shared mission with an energy that’s almost palpable. They stop thinking about their individual contributions and start obsessing over the collective outcome. They challenge each other, cover for each other, and push boundaries they’d never approach alone.

In the data world, you can see this when data experts are embedded into business line teams. They are truly part of the business outcomes — not just report or dashboard factories. The team gets more from their data because the resources are strongly aligned with their mission.

The Tribal Trap

But here’s where it gets tricky. That same energy that makes teams powerful can also make them dangerous.

When the mission of the group isn’t aligned to the mission of the company, you can see high-performing teams start to view everyone else as either allies or obstacles. The “us vs. them” mentality creeps in. They develop their own language, their own processes, their own way of seeing the world. “Why did that client project fail? It was because of that group over there.”

In consulting, I see this pattern repeat itself constantly. Groups optimizing for different metrics (and having their own special versions of metrics) that make communication difficult. It might be the IT department that begins viewing business users as problems to be managed rather than customers to be served. Everybody can say “no”, but no one feels obligated to help find “yes.” Often, I see it in the centralized analytics team becoming so focused on technical excellence and clean, governed reports that they lose sight of business impact and bring new data insight to a crawl.

Each group is genuinely trying to do good work. But they’re doing it in isolation, optimizing for their piece of the puzzle while losing sight of the whole picture.

Knowing When It’s Time to Reorg

One of the most fascinating challenges in leadership is recognizing when team structure has become misaligned with their current mission. The team organization that got you to this point isn’t necessarily the one that will get you to the next. Some companies never make this shift and end up stuck in a cycle of frustration, blaming other teams for their problems. Others pull the trigger on a yearly basis because an executive got bored. Both extremes are problematic.

Imagine a company that has spent years optimizing around product expansion — organizing teams by features, building specialized capabilities in each product area, celebrating rapid releases. And that structure served them incredibly well when market penetration was the goal.

But then something shifts. Maybe customer acquisition costs spike. Maybe retention becomes the bottleneck. Maybe they realize their biggest growth opportunity isn’t new features but deeper relationships with existing customers. Suddenly, the feature-focused teams that were their greatest strength become a limitation.

A reorg isn’t about fixing broken teams — it should be about recognizing that excellent teams optimized for the wrong mission can’t deliver excellence.

Making It Work

So how do you harness the power of team formation without falling into the tribal trap? Here’s what I’ve learned:

Be intentional about the mission. Teams need to be built around outcomes that matter to the larger organization, not just to themselves. Ask: if this team succeeds wildly, does the whole organization win?

Design for connection, not isolation. The most dangerous teams are the ones that stop talking to everyone else. Build in regular touchpoints, shared metrics, and collaborative processes that keep teams connected to the broader ecosystem.

Measure the right things. Teams optimize for what they’re measured on. If you measure teams on departmental metrics, you’ll get departmental thinking. If you measure them on business outcomes, you’ll get business thinking.

The Balancing Act

At the end of the day, building teams around priorities is both necessary and risky. Necessary because essential goals need dedicated focus and collective ownership. Risky because that same focus can become tunnel vision.

The key is being thoughtful about when to build teams, how to structure them, and how to keep them connected to the larger mission they’re supposed to serve. You also need to be honest when things have become misaligned, becuase of mission drift, changing priorities, or just the natural evolution of the business.

When you get it right, there’s nothing quite like watching a group of people become genuinely obsessed with solving the right problem. It’s the best gift you can give to your people.