Three Counterintuitive Ways To Build A Better Team

Picture this: You’ve been tasked with assembling a team to tackle a large, important program. It’s your first time as a program lead, and you want to set your team, and yourself, up for success. You know that diversity is important, and, naturally, you want to stack the team with top talent. You can’t wait to jump in and start solving problems. But is this really the right approach? The experts say no.

If you want a high-performing team that will get the type of results your boss will rave about, follow these three counterintuitive tips:

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Stacking the team with similar top talent could result in failure.

The 2014 study “The Too-Much-Talent Effect,” published in Psychological Science, examined the relationship between talent and performance in sports. The question researchers posed is this: Does more talent equal better performance? According to the study’s authors, though you might believe teams will see great success from high levels of top talent, their findings “reflect the disappointing fact that teams of superstars often fail to live up to expectations.”

In fact, the relationship between talent and performance “decreased at a much faster rate than people believed it would” in both football and basketball. The exception was baseball where there is low task interdependence, which means players’ individual performance has a greater impact on success than team performance.

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