Why I Keep Harping On About Team Dynamics
I have two professional passions. The first is teams, collaboration and human behaviour patterns. The second is strategy execution, meaning the framework and disciplines that actually get things done and measurable towards strategic goals. Over the years, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: you can’t have the second without the first. Cohesive teams are both the starting point and the end point of strategy execution maturity.
This newsletter unpacks the “why” and gives you a practical framework for building real teams around your strategic objectives, not just assembling work groups and hoping for the best.
The Sobering Reality: Most Teams Aren’t Teams
Teamwork is the bedrock of any organisation. We all carry this ideological image of what a team looks like: a small number of people with complementary skills, committed to a common purpose, with shared performance goals, practising mutual accountability. That definition, from Katzenbach and Smith, has held up well.
But let’s be honest:
Research by Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman and colleagues at Harvard, published in Senior Leadership Teams: “What It Takes to Make Them Great” (2007), studied more than 120 leadership teams across industries and 11 nations. They found that only 21% were high performing. 37% were mediocre. And 42% were outright poor. Your odds of being on a lousy team are not much better than flipping a coin.
Which means roughly four out of five teams are not really teams at all. They’re work groups, consisting of a collection of people who happen to share a department or a reporting line. And here’s perhaps the most telling finding from the same research: when team members were asked to describe their team, fewer than 10% agreed on who was actually on it. If you can’t even agree on membership, you’re definitely not a team. You’re an agglomeration. Or a workgroup at best.
In a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, the adaptability of teams within organisations makes or breaks a company’s ability to thrive and remain relevant. And that relevance is directly tied to how well teams can execute against a company’s strategic aims. So if 80% of teams are underperforming, we have a massive execution problem hiding in plain sight.
Functional Teams vs. OKR Teams: A Critical Distinction
Not all teams are created equal, and understanding the structural difference between functional teams and OKR teams is essential if you aim to get strategic execution right.
Functional teams have most of the team ingredients built in by design.
Take a finance team: its purpose is clear: secure financial flows, ensure governance, manage cash. The skills are structurally present: financial controllers, analysts, AP/AR specialists, perhaps legal expertise, led by a CFO. Performance goals are embedded in individual reviews and departmental P&Ls. Mutual accountability exists because everyone pulls toward a determined outcome within a hierarchical structure and performance management metrics to match those requirements. Purpose, skills, goals, accountability, all structurally embedded.
OKR teams are fundamentally different.
They are formed for a specific strategic purpose that transcends any single function. They are cross-functional by design, time-bound by nature, and, crucially, more democratic in structure. An OKR team gathered around international growth might include business development specialists, country experts (perhaps even hired in temporarily), analysts, marketing, operations, finance, and legal. The composition serves the outcome, not the org chart.
A side-note that matters: OKRs are not strategy. They are a translation methodology. They provide a structured execution cadence when applied well. The strategic goals come first; OKRs translate them into objectives and measurable key outcomes. The team is then formed around that translation and ambition.
And this is where the challenge begins. Because unlike functional teams, OKR teams don’t get their cohesion handed to them by the hierarchy. It must be built deliberately, intentionally, and fast. Building Cohesion at Speed: Team Development for OKR Teams
Most of us are familiar with Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing. It remains a foundational framework, and it applies to OKR teams just as much as functional ones. The difference is speed. Where a functional team might take months to move through these stages organically, an OKR team often needs to compress the journey into days, seeing their “time-bound” purpose.
Forming
This is where team members come together. There’s general excitement, you’ve been selected for a strategic ambition goal, brought together across functions to pursue something that matters to the organisation. In this phase, the priority is finding your footing: understanding roles, getting to know each other on a personal level, and building initial rapport. This is where tools like the Working Genius assessment can be enormously valuable as it opens people up, surfaces natural preferences for how work gets done, and immediately reveals where everyone’s strengths lie. It’s a great underlayer for what comes next.
Storming
This is where the first euphoria fades and reality sets in. Individuals start to assert their ideas and personalities. Conflict emerges, and that’s not just normal, it’s necessary. The critical task in this phase is establishing operating principles: how will we make decisions? How will we handle disagreement? What are our meeting protocols? Decision-making frameworks like DARE (McKinsey) are useful here. The storming phase is also where Working Genius continues to pay dividends: understanding each other’s conflict styles and natural working preferences reduces friction significantly and in less time.
Norming
This is the phase where the real collaboration begins. Conflicts have been weathered. Good trust foundations have been built. There’s a stronger sense of cohesion, purpose, and direction. The team starts to operate as more than the sum of individual contributions.
Performing
In this phase teams are operating at highest efficiency. Norms are clear. Accountability is embraced. Trust is solid. Communication is effective. Members are autonomous and capable of handling conflict, decision-making and problem-solving with minimal supervision. This is when a team truly becomes more than the sum of its parts.
My experience is clear on this: OKR teams that take time before their cycle begins to invest in deliberate team formation consistently outperform those that don’t. Even a few hours spent together, doing the forming work, establishing operating principles, setting up conflict protocols, can mean the difference between a high-performing team and another work group that produces mediocre results.
Hackman’s research supports this with the 60-30-10 rule: 60% of the variance in team performance is determined by how the team is designed before it even starts working. 30% comes from the quality of the launch. Only 10% comes from real-time coaching. The pre-work is where the leverage is.
The OKR Team Lifecycle: Retrospectives That Actually Work
The retrospective ritual that the OKR process dictates should be treated with the same rigour I’ve seen in the best agile teams. But here’s where most companies get it wrong: they only do half the intended retrospective.
Part one is about outcomes: The numbers. Where did we land? What approaches worked? What best practices do we need to carry forward? How do we embed those into our processes? This part also determines whether team members remain or rotate for the next cycle. Most organisations do this part reasonably well.
Part two is where the real value lies, and it’s the part that gets skipped far too often. This is the reflection on how the team worked together. How did we communicate? What was our meeting hygiene like? Are our operating principles still serving us? Where are we in our team development? Any unspoken issues we need to surface before continuing? If you’re using Working Genius as a backbone – and this is precisely why I use it so much with teams that aren’t naturally bound together – this becomes a structured conversation about dynamics, strength and frustrations and not just a vague check-in.
I see too many companies so obsessed with output that they forget to invest in the operating system that produces the output. Taking one to two hours to genuinely examine how the team operates (every 3 – 4 months) will allow them to step back into norming and performing far faster in the next cycle, even when team composition changes.
And composition will change. People rotate in and out between OKR cycles. When that happens, you need to go back to the beginning, not for days, but very deliberately. Rehash the norms. Re-establish operating principles. Use Working Genius to onboard new members into the team’s dynamics and conflict preferences. Then step into performing at speed.
Optimal Team Size and Leadership
Research consistently points to 5 to 8 members as the optimal team size for strategic decision-making. If your OKR team is larger, appoint key result owners with a core group that comes together for critical conversations.
Leadership in OKR teams deserves specific attention. Unlike functional teams that have a clear hierarchical leader, a team lead, manager, or director, OKR teams are more democratic. In the forming phase, certain personalities will naturally establish themselves as (informal) leaders. I recommend that strategic OKRs be owned by a member of the C-suite to guarantee upward accountability, but that the team also appoints a widely accepted leader from within the group, almost a natural leader. You will need arbitrage at certain points, a decision maker and that person needs legitimacy from the team, not just positional authority.
The Leadership Imperative: From Framework to Culture
Leadership as the Starting and End Point
Patrick Lencioni’s “ONE team” concept is the litmus test for leadership readiness. Leaders whose primary team is the leadership team, not their functional department, (as often mistaken) naturally embrace cross-functional OKR teams. They’re less territorial about resources, less biased about team composition and more focused on the combined outcome and success for the company.
The common mistake I see repeatedly: implementing OKRs tool-first, process-second, people as an afterthought. Organisations that truly shifted their cultures through the adoption of the OKR methodology are the ones that invested in team cohesion and process first. The tool followed. It didn’t lead.
But leadership in strategy execution isn’t a single act. If we look at the five dimensions of the Strategy Execution Maturity 360™ model: Align, Execute, Improve, Scale, and Empower, each demands a distinct leadership discipline.
Alignment: A process, not a destination
Alignment is not something leaders achieve once and move on from. Meaning, all-hand’s at the beginning of the year does not mean the organisation is aligned on strategic priorities. It’s an ongoing discipline. Strategic priorities must be reconfirmed, recommunicated, and reconnected to team objectives and results every cycle. Leaders at high-maturity organisations don’t just set direction, they actively reinforce it through goal-setting routines, strategic narratives, and visible commitment to shared outcomes. The moment a leader stops actively aligning, drift begins.
Execute: Model accountability, demand accountability
Execution is where strategy gets tested. The leader’s job is twofold: model the accountability you expect, and ask for it in return. This means owning your commitments visibly, running structured progress reviews, and refusing to let objectives remain aspirational. When leaders tolerate ambiguity in ownership or let deadlines slide without consequence, they signal that execution is optional. High-performing OKR teams need leaders who create execution rhythms at their level, regular check-ins, transparent tracking, proactive issue resolution and who (activally) participate in them, not just oversee them.
Improve: Embed learning, cut red tape
The leader’s task here is to accelerate the structural adoption of best practices and remove the bureaucratic friction that slows teams down. This means building formal retrospectives into every cycle and not just the outcomes part. The team dynamics retrospective is where the real learning happens. Leaders must model openness in discussing what failed and create the psychological safety for others to do the same. Without that, retrospectives become box-ticking exercises and a waste of everybody’s time.
Empower: Build capability, build autonomy
Empowerment is not delegation without support. It means actively building team capability through coaching, training, decision-making “bandwidth”, and clear boundaries for autonomous actions. The goal is to foster teams that function as autonomous organisms outside their functional boundaries: self-correcting, data-informed, and accountable for outcomes, not just activities.
Scale: From one team to many
Scaling strategy execution means ensuring that what works in one team can be replicated without the leader being the bottleneck. This requires standardised processes, shared tools, and capability building so new teams adopt proven practices quickly. Leaders who hoard the playbook or rely on personal intervention to keep teams on track will hit a ceiling.
The Performance Management Reckoning
Here’s the part most organisations have in their blind-spot:
You cannot preach team cohesion, demand cross-functional collaboration, and shared accountability while your performance management system still rewards individual heroism and goals. It simply will not work. People are rational. They respond to what gets measured and rewarded, not to what gets talked about in town halls.
If the desired behaviours that drive collaboration, cohesion, and psychological safety are not embedded in performance reviews and rewards, they will remain aspirational at best and cynicism inducing at worst. Performance management must include a layer where the qualitative indicators, the behavours of real teamwork are visible and rewarded: how someone contributes to the team’s operating principles, how they show up in conflict, how they take ownership, how they share knowledge across functions, how they hold themselves and others accountable to shared outcomes.
The leader’s job here is to ensure that people structures, processes, and incentives are fine-tuned for true teamwork and outcome-based results. Pretending to value team cohesion for strategy execution while still running individual performance reviews on siloed KPIs is organisational hypocrisy and your best people will see through it immediately and disengage.
The Bottom Line
Team cohesion is not a soft skill. It is the essential ingredient for successful adoption of OKRs as a strategic execution mechanism. The whole human side: people coming together from different areas of the company to form a real team, not another work group, is what separates organisations that get great use out of this methodology from those that merely go through the motions, or even experience it as an added burden.
The companies I’ve seen shift cultures completely through strategic execution are the ones that understood this: you cannot separate the human dynamics from the framework. Cohesive teams are where strategy execution begins. And cohesive teams are where it matures.
The research is clear. The practice confirms it. The question is whether you’re willing to invest in the conditions that make it happen or whether you’ll keep assembling work groups and wondering why your strategy stays on the slide deck.
Where Do You Start?
If this newsletter hit a nerve, if you recognised your teams in the 79% rather than the 21% the worst thing you can do is launch another framework without understanding where your execution actually breaks down.
That’s exactly why I built the Diagnostic & Roadmap engagement. It’s designed for leadership teams who know execution is suboptimal but don’t know how where to start looking, let alone fixing it.
Here’s what it looks like:
We begin with a Strategy Execution Maturity (SEM360™) diagnostic across your organisation, giving you hard data on where you stand across the five dimensions of execution maturity. From there, a one-day leadership alignment session to confront the findings together, followed by a gap analysis with prioritised recommendations. We then translate strategy into OKRs and deliver a 90-day quick-win implementation roadmap so you leave with clarity, alignment, and momentum and not another slide deck.
For teams that are ready to dive deeper on the human dynamics side, I also offer a 4-month Working Genius adoption programme specifically designed to accelerate team cohesion for cross-functional execution teams. It’s the fastest way I know to move a group of talented, smart individuals from work group to high-performing teams.
About the Author
Fran is a strategy execution consultant and fractional COO/CSO at franWorks, specialising in helping scale-up leadership teams (10–200 employees) close the gap between strategic ambition and execution results. She is an associate member of OKR Mentors and co-author of the SEM360™ strategy execution assessment framework.
