How To Make A Team Of Stars Work

Team Effectiveness Explains Almost 80 Percent Of Leaders’ Success.

- Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

IN MY EARLY YEARS as an executive search consultant in Argentina, I was frequently asked to hire senior investment bankers. Citibank and JP Morgan were the leading players in the region at the time, but as I contacted and interviewed most of their key bankers, I saw something strange going on. While both had top people, one was dramatically more successful in the market.

How did the stars at that firm manage to shine brightly together, while those at the other merely twinkled on their own?

For years, I puzzled over the huge performance gaps I often saw between teams that, on paper, looked as if they would be equally effective. You see it in business, in sports, in creative endeavours from movies to magazines. What made the difference? And what was the secret to both evaluating and enhancing team, rather than individual or organisational, dynamics?

My questions were answered in the late 1990s when Elaine Yew, my great colleague at Egon Zehnder, led a firm-wide project called the Team Effectiveness Review (TER). This proprietary model analyses six critical team competencies: Balance: How well a team understands the importance of diversity of skills and strengths and is willing to incorporate them; Energy: How ambitious the team is, and how much it takes the initiative and maintains long-term momentum at a high level; Alignment: How well team members understand the larger team purpose, and focus their actions and those of the team on that objective; Resilience: How well a team can hold itself together even under severe internal or external stress and remain effective;