When a leadership team underperforms, the diagnosis often sounds the same: wrong people. Not enough of the right talent. Need to upgrade. That's a real conversation, but it's only one of two levers available to you. Many leadership teams only pull one of them.

The first lever is talent. Who's on the team, how strong they are, how well they fit the role. It's important work and it never stops. The second lever is how the team operates. The habits it has built around time, feedback, and learning. It's the lever that often gets overlooked, and for many leadership teams, it's where the most significant gains are waiting.

Ron Friedman, a social psychologist, surveyed thousands of teams for his book Super Teams and identified the top 8%, what he calls super teams. What separated them wasn't individual talent. It was three operating habits:

  • They managed their time and attention with discipline
  • They actively developed each other rather than just collaborating
  • They treated continuous improvement as how they worked, not something reserved for the annual offsite

These habits are learnable. You don't have to wait for the right people. You can start where you are.

What getting it wrong looks like

The failure mode is recognizable. A leadership team where each person shows up to win their argument. Meetings are status updates rather than decisions. Feedback flows down from the leader and rarely travels between peers. The same problems surface every quarter because no one has the safety, or the time, to say "I don't know how to fix this."

Friedman's data puts a number on the time problem. The average worker loses 18 hours a week to meetings and another 11 to email, leaving roughly one day for actual work. Super teams are substantially better at protecting focus time. They cut unnecessary meetings, eliminate recurring ones that have outlived their purpose, and guard space for real thinking.

It sounds straightforward. The reason it's uncommon is that the leader has to protect it actively. No one else will.

What getting it right looks like

In my experience, those habits don't emerge in isolation. They require a shift in how each member of the leadership team understands their role.

The clearest example I can offer is what happened when our executive team made that shift.

Every executive naturally thinks of their department as their team. That's the group they built, the people they're responsible for, the results they're measured on. That instinct makes sense. But it's the execution layer. As the CEO, you have one team reporting to you, the executive team. Each of those executives leads their own department. Their job is to run the business at the leadership table and execute through their area. Patrick Lencioni calls this the first-team concept: your first team is not the one you lead below you, it's the one you sit on.

Until each executive genuinely owns that distinction, the leadership team doesn't function at its highest level.

Getting there was harder than the concept suggests. Executives understood it intuitively. They could state it clearly. But when departmental friction surfaced, when resources were competed over, when there was conflict between functions, the instinct to protect their area came back. What they knew and how they behaved when we needed the other behavior most were two different things.

Making it real took years of continuous reinforcement. It showed up in how we recruited. It was part of business planning, quarterly and monthly reviews, the weekly cadence, and the one-to-one meeting rhythms. When people operated as a first team, we recognized it. When they reverted, we said so. When someone couldn't make that shift consistently, we eventually had to make a different decision.

The concept wasn't hard to grasp. The discipline to live it when it was inconvenient, that was the work.

When the shift took hold, the second and third habits Friedman describes became possible in ways they weren't before. A customer was determined to leave. Rather than letting one team carry it, the whole group worked the problem. We kept the customer. That's teams actively making each other better, not in theory, but under pressure.

A  major global brand client needed document search functionality that didn't exist off the shelf at that time, or if it did, it was cost-prohibitive for anyone other than the largest corporations. We didn't wait for a perfect solution. We ran an experiment. We hit setbacks. We re-piloted. Within 24 hours, we had a prototype running. Within 72 hours it was live. The customer was thrilled. That's the experimentation habit at speed, and it was only possible because the team had built enough trust and urgency to operate that way.

Friedman found that super teams run nearly 48% more experiments than average teams. That doesn't reflect a personality type. It reflects a culture where imperfect results are expected and, therefore, safe. The standard isn't "did we get it right?" It's "did we learn something and move faster?"

One question that changes meetings

One of the simplest practices Friedman found in super teams: leaders regularly ask, "What are you stuck on?"

That question changes the room. Instead of a status parade, you get a problem-solving session. People stop managing how they look and start asking for help. Teammates engage. The meeting actually does something.

People avoid this question because they don't want to appear to be struggling. The best leaders make it the norm. When someone has nothing to say to it, that's the real warning signal. They're probably not working on anything hard enough.

The shift that happens when it works

When an executive team stops protecting its corners and starts running the business together, people show up differently. The work extends beyond their function. They're invested in each other. They care how the whole thing turns out. Friedman observed that on average teams, the primary source of meaning is salary. On super teams, it shifts to the team itself.

Keep working on talent. That lever matters and it never stops. But the habits lever is available right now, with the people you already have. Many leadership teams never have that second conversation. The ones that do, don't look back.

Cole Dolny is the founder of 6S Advisory Inc. and a TEC Canada Chair serving growth-minded business leaders. He works with CEOs and owners on leadership effectiveness, talent systems, decision-making, and building healthier, more profitable businesses. Confidential peer groups and trusted one-to-one advisory relationships help leaders uncover blind spots, improve judgment, and reduce the isolation that often comes with leadership.