I’ve spent over a decade working with teams across financial services, healthcare, government, and the public sector. And one pattern repeats itself so reliably it’s almost comforting: organisations invest enormous energy in what a team needs to do, and almost none in how the people in that team will actually work together when things get difficult.
They’ll define the strategy. Map the deliverables. Set the KPIs. And then throw a group of people together and assume that shared objectives will produce shared behaviour.
They won’t.
The Group vs. The Team
A group is a collection of individuals who happen to report to the same person or sit in the same meeting. A team is a group of people who are aligned behind not just a common goal but shared values and non-negotiable behaviours, who have a shared language and shared standards, and, critically, the skills to hold each other to those standards when the pressure is on.
Why Tuckman Isn't Enough
Most people who’ve done any kind of management training have heard of Tuckman’s stages – forming, storming, norming, performing. It’s a useful model for understanding that teams go through phases. But it’s become a kind of comfort blanket. Managers learn the stages, nod along, and assume the team will eventually sort itself out if they just weather the storm.
The problem is that Tuckman describes what happens. It doesn’t tell you what to do about it. And more importantly, it doesn’t account for the fact that most teams don’t just form once. They re-form constantly. Every new project, every restructure, every new starter, every departure, the dynamics shift. The team doesn’t neatly progress from one stage to the next and stay there. It loops. It regresses. It gets stuck.
What teams actually need isn’t a model that explains the journey. They need the skills to navigate it. Repeatedly. Under pressure. When the model on the whiteboard bears no resemblance to what’s actually happening in the room.
Shared Language Before Shared Goals
One of the most powerful things you can do when forming or re-forming a team is to build a shared language. Not corporate values on a wall. Not a mission statement that nobody remembers. A practical, everyday language that people actually use when they’re talking to each other about what’s going well and what isn’t.
When everyone on a team understands the same frameworks and uses the same vocabulary, something shifts. Conflict stops being personal and starts being observable. Instead of “you’re being difficult,” it becomes “I think we’re seeing obstacles and opportunities differently here.” Instead of “you need to calm down,” it becomes “I think the stress response is running the show right now.”
That’s not soft. That’s operational. It removes blame from conversations about behaviour and replaces it with a shared reference point that everybody owns. And it’s the single biggest accelerator of trust I’ve seen in thirteen years of doing this work, because people stop guessing at each other’s intentions and start having conversations that actually go somewhere.
Values That Live Beyond the Flip Chart
Team values exercises are either transformational or completely pointless. There is very little in between.
The pointless ones are the ones where someone from HR or an external facilitator runs a session, the team picks five words from a list, they get written up nicely and stuck on a wall, and within three weeks nobody can remember what they were. Those aren’t values. Those are decorations.
The transformational ones are those in which the team itself defines its shared standards and, crucially, translates those values into specific, observable, non-negotiable behaviours. Not “we value respect.” That’s meaningless. But “we don’t talk about people who aren’t in the room” that’s a behaviour. You can see it. You can hold each other to it. You can call it out when it’s not happening.
When the team defines their own standards, buy-in is genuine rather than imposed. They own them. They police them. And they become a reference point not just for the programme that generated them, but for ongoing team culture long after the flipchart paper has been recycled.
The Skills Gap Nobody Talks About
Most of the things that make teams break down are skills problems, not people problems.
A team member who goes quiet in meetings isn’t disengaged; they might not have the skill to voice disagreement constructively. A manager who avoids difficult conversations might never have been taught a framework for delivering unwelcome feedback while maintaining the relationship. A team that fragments under pressure isn’t dysfunctional; they might simply lack the shared skills to regulate their stress responses, communicate clearly in volatile moments, and stay focused on what they can actually control.
We don’t train people for this. We assume that smart, experienced professionals will figure out how to work together effectively because they’ve been doing their jobs for years. But experience doesn’t teach you how to manage your emotional response in a high-stakes meeting. It just gives you more high-stakes meetings where you didn’t.
The skills that make teams work (emotional regulation, cognitive agility, the ability to manage energy under sustained pressure, clear communication during conflict and genuine self-awareness) aren’t personality traits. They’re learnable, practicable, measurable skills. And in most organisations, they’re the skills nobody deliberately builds.
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The Power of Different Strengths
Here’s something that sounds obvious but almost nobody acts on: the best teams are not made up of people who are all good at the same things. They’re made up of people whose strengths complement each other.
Research into character strengths, particularly the work of the VIA Institute, backed by over 600 peer-reviewed studies, consistently shows that when people understand and use their signature strengths at work, performance improves, engagement goes up, and counterproductive behaviour drops. But the real power isn’t at the individual level. It’s at the team level. When a team collectively understands the different strengths sitting around the table, something shifts in how they work together.
The person with honesty and fairness as signature strengths sees a situation differently from the person leading with creativity and curiosity. Neither is better. Both are needed. But if nobody knows those strengths exist, or worse, if the team treats the creative one as a dreamer and the honest one as blunt, you’re wasting the very assets that make the team stronger than any individual in it.
We use the VIA Character Strengths assessment in our programmes because it gives people data about themselves that’s grounded in positive psychology, not deficit-based. It doesn’t tell people what’s wrong with them. It tells them what’s best about them, and shows how those strengths interact with the strengths of the people they work with every day. When you can see that your team has five people who lead with perseverance and none who lead with perspective, you’ve identified a blind spot. And blind spots in a team are where mistakes live.
The research is clear: teams that understand and leverage their collective strengths outperform those that don’t. Not because they’re more talented, but because they’re more deliberate about who does what and why.
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Different Perceptions of Change Are a Feature, Not a Bug
One of the most common frustrations in any team going through change is the person who seems resistant. The one who raises obstacles. The one who asks difficult questions while everyone else is trying to move forward.
Most managers try to manage that person. Get them on board. Convince them to see the opportunity. Sometimes they just work around them.
That’s a mistake. And here’s why.
People genuinely perceive change differently. Some people naturally see opportunity; they get energised by what’s possible, they move quickly towards the new thing, and they’re comfortable with uncertainty. Others naturally see obstacles they spot risk, they identify what could go wrong, and they need to understand what’s being left behind before they can move forward.
This isn’t attitude. It’s perception. And critically, both are needed.
A team full of opportunity-focused people will move fast, take risks, and innovate, but they’ll also miss the landmines. They’ll launch before they’re ready. They’ll dismiss legitimate concerns as negativity. A team full of obstacle-focused people will be thorough, careful, and risk-aware, but they’ll also stall. They’ll over-analyse. They’ll struggle to act without certainty.
The strongest teams have both. The skill isn’t getting everyone to see change the same way. The skill is recognising that different perceptions of change are a genuine strength, and building the shared language to use them deliberately.
The same is true of time focus, whether someone naturally anchors to the past, the present, or the future. Someone who keeps referencing “how we used to do it” isn’t stuck. They’re bringing institutional memory and pattern recognition. Someone who’s always three steps ahead isn’t ignoring reality. They’re providing direction. The person focused on right now is the one who makes sure things actually get done today.
When everyone in a meeting understands these differences and has a common language to talk about them without it becoming personal, something remarkable happens. The obstacle person stops being “the negative one” and starts being the team’s risk radar. The opportunity person stops being “unrealistic” and starts being the team’s engine. The past-focused person stops being “resistant” and starts being the team’s memory. Conflict reduces. Decision quality improves. And the team starts using its full cognitive range instead of fighting about who’s right.
This isn’t about personality typing. It’s about giving people the language and the self-awareness to understand that the diversity in how their team sees the world is their greatest competitive advantage, if they know how to use it.
What Good Looks Like
Good team formation is boring. There’s no ropes course. No falling backwards into a stranger’s arms. No personality quiz that tells you you’re a blue-green dolphin.
Good team formation is a group of people sitting in a room together, learning the same skills, building the same language, defining the same standards, and then going back to their jobs and practising those skills in the moments that actually matter — the difficult conversation, the missed deadline, the decision that could go either way, the colleague who’s struggling and doesn’t know how to ask for help.
It’s practical. It’s evidence-based. It’s measured. And it works — not because it’s exciting, but because it builds the capacity for people to be better together when it’s hard. Not just when it’s easy. When it’s hard.
Because that’s the only test that matters.
