“Group dynamics are everywhere. They're all around us. They're influencing us all the time.”

– Dr. Colin Fisher

In the spring of 2022, the Oklahoma City Thunder were the definition of a sports team in crisis. You don’t need to be a basketball fan to know that only 24 wins and 58 losses in a single season is a disaster. 

Three seasons later, they were NBA champions. This season, they currently have the best record in the league.

And here's what makes the story worth your time even if you’re not a sports fan – the transformation wasn't built on acquiring better talent. It was built on creating better conditions. 

In the work I do now, I’ve found myself applying the same mentality that allowed me to become a martial arts champion in my youth – I am disciplined about studying my craft. And the dynamics that create high-performing teams particularly fascinate me. 

I learnt about the Thunder after reading an article by psychologist Ron Friedman in the Harvard Business Review about how ‘superteams’ are built and what separates them from the rest. He used them to make a point that challenges almost everything we assume about performance: in periods of rapid change, the teams that outperform the rest are not those with the most talent. They're the ones that learn the fastest.

I wanted to deepen my understanding of the complexities of team behaviours, so I did exactly what I used to do in my teenage years, and sought out a ‘master’ In this case, he wasn’t wearing a black belt, but Dr. Colin Fisher is Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at UCL's School of Management and the author of The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.

Before academia, Colin was a professional jazz trumpet player and his experience of playing and improvising with other musicians means he understands instinctively what it feels like to be part of a high-performing team.

The reality is that most leaders don't focus nearly enough on collective team performance – not because they don't care, but because it's genuinely complex and hard to measure. 

So they tend to default to what's easier: individual performance, individual accountability, individual development. It feels logical. With the benefit of hindsight, I was frequently guilty of this.

However Colin’s research proves that this means you’re leaving critical data on the table.

So, in the spirit of sharing, here’s what I want you to know so you can avoid my mistakes and build and lead a high-performing team…

THE SCIENCE

I've recently started reading Two Heads by Uta and Chris Frith – husband-and-wife cognitive neuroscientists who've spent 50 years studying how brains interact. Their central finding: brains don't just work in isolation. They're wired to operate in connection with other brains, continuously reading, predicting, and calibrating off each other.

That wiring has a name – Theory of Mind. It's the brain's capacity to model what another person is thinking, feeling, and intending. In a team context, it's what allows people to anticipate rather than react, to coordinate without constant instruction. It functions well when the environment feels safe and legible. By contrast, introduce threat or ambiguity and it degrades.

Mirror neurons close the loop. Your team's nervous systems are continuously calibrating off one another and, given power dynamics, yours in particular. Your behaviours, even if they’re unconscious, will affect their performance. 

Colin Fisher's research maps directly onto this. The conditions that separate high-performing teams aren't intuitive management preferences,  they're what socially-wired brains require to function at their best. Clear shared goals. Explicit norms. And psychological safety: this can often be misinterpreted as an environment that’s warm and fuzzy. What we’re talking about here is creating an environment where there is an absence of threat when someone speaks an inconvenient truth.

THE PROOF

What Friedman identifies as a ‘superteam’ isn't bought, it's built. The Thunder's transformation from bottom to best in the NBA wasn't about acquiring better talent, it was built on a change of mindset and a sense of purpose – relentless experimentation, learning from failure, intellectual curiosity modelled from the top and made contagious at every level. Structure over talent.

Google's Project Aristotle found the same thing at a different scale. 180 internal teams were studied to identify what separated the tech giants’ highest performers from the rest. The answer wasn't tenure, technical ability, or IQ. It was psychological safety – creating the right conditions under which people would actually express their talent to the full.

Colin spent years on stage with the award-winning Either/Orchestra. For him, jazz isn't a metaphor for high-performing teams, it's where he experienced one. In his book, he shows how The Miles Davis Quintet didn't succeed because they were all brilliant soloists in their own right. It succeeded because of what happened between these greats – the listening, the responsiveness, the willingness to follow and lead in real time, the shared language that made risk-taking possible.

The Quintet had shared language, clear norms, and the safety to take risks in front of an audience. That's what made them an exceptional team. Remove any one of those conditions and you just have talented individuals playing alongside each other. That might still be good, but it won’t be great. 

THE APPLICATION

There's a distinction worth making before we get into the specifics. Team building – the away day, the facilitated session, the trust fall – is not the same as building a team. One is an event. The other is an ongoing discipline. The conditions that make teams exceptional aren't created in a single afternoon. They're built deliberately, over time, through structure and process.

Start with structure

1. Start with goals – in this case we mean a specific, shared understanding of what success looks like where everyone on the team could describe it the same way. If you asked each person independently, would the answers match? In most teams, they don't. That gap is where performance leaks.

2. From clear goals come clear tasks. And from clear tasks comes trust. Relational trust (the bond built through personal connection and shared experience) matters, but it takes time. What really drives performance is task-based trust: the confidence that the person next to you will do their job and deliver when it counts. That is built through doing real work together, not through away days. Put your team in situations where they have to rely on each other's competence. That's where the trust that matters most will form.

3. The corollary of task-based trust is autonomy. Once you're confident someone will deliver, get out of their way. Micromanagement signals you don't trust them and the moment someone feels that, they stop bringing their best thinking to the table. You get compliance. Not commitment.

Then process 

1. Model the behaviour you need. Friedman’s research shows that high performing leaders are 33% more likely to openly admit when they don't have the answers. That intellectual humility sends out the signal that it’s safe for everyone else to do the same. Your team is reading you constantly.  The climate is set by behaviour, not words.

2. Ask the question so obvious most leaders forget it: "What are you stuck on?" Superteam leaders are 43% more likely to use it. It normalises difficulty, surfaces problems before they compound, and turns individual obstacles into shared challenges. One question. Significant return.

3. On feedback: frame mistakes as useful data, not failures to be managed. Superteams create constant informal feedback loops so are able to constantly course-correct. 

4. Finally, connect the work to something larger than the deliverable. Leaders of superteams are 59% more effective at helping people understand why their work matters. This is purpose in its purest form, not the performative kind that the team can’t relate to in reality. 

Build the conditions. The performance follows.

You've probably been in team-building that features fads like firewalking – pricey, performative and with no proven practical benefit. If you really want to create an ignition point for a high-performing team, there is a better way to spend that budget. Let’s talk.

J.

🔥  LIVE BETTER, LEAD BETTER  

The best content I researched this week:

1. Perfect timing – why your team won’t speak up and what to do about it is the theme of the latest podcast from HBR. Charles Duhigg, author of ‘Supercommunicators’, explains that many senior leaders say they want an organization filled with psychological safety, but they often act in ways that are counterproductive to that goal. Fortunately he also shares how you can fix that. 

2. Simon Sinek speaks about the first step to creating positive change in this video. Definitely worth 2 minutes of your time as it’s about thinking like a team rather than just about yourself. 

3. In just 1 slide, Dr Ryan Cedermark explains why movement isn’t just good for your physical health, it’s like therapy for your brain. 

4. And finally, a fascinating deep dive into the psychology of performance under pressure, with Dr Michael Gervais in conversation with American football great Andrew Whitworth.