We celebrate teams as the performance engines of modern organisations.
But the truth is less romantic: teams are never neutral. They either multiply performance, or they divide it.
When teams multiply, the effect is exponential. Collective clarity, trust, and accountability create an environment where individuals take risks, grow their capability, and contribute more than they could alone.
The team amplifies the individual, and the individual uplifts the team.
But the opposite is just as powerful. Poorly formed teams don’t just fail to multiply; they actively erode performance. Energy goes into politics, mistrust, or avoidance. Individuals retreat, play safe, or become scapegoats for what the group can’t face.
The group becomes tyrannical – quietly disciplining difference, stifling dissent, and reducing contribution.
Why it happens: a systemic lens
This multiplier/divider effect isn’t just about “good chemistry” or a neat set of behavioural rules. It runs deeper, into the system the team sits within and the unconscious dynamics that shape its work.
Task clarity
Every team needs a clearly defined primary task – the work it uniquely exists to deliver.
Without this shared purpose, the group drifts. People retreat into their functional silos, or compete for secondary interests that feel safer than the real work.
Obholzer and Roberts described this as “losing the task to the system’s anxieties,” in which ambiguity makes people defend their patch rather than align on the whole. A well-held primary task, by contrast, acts as an anchor. It keeps attention on what matters and helps the team metabolise the pressures around it.
The near enemy of trust
Patrick Lencioni was right that the absence of trust is corrosive for teams.
But there’s also a near enemy of trust: something that looks like trust on the surface, but quietly erodes it. This disingenuity shows up when harmony is prized over honesty. People nod along in the room, then leak doubts into corridor conversations. Decisions appear unanimous but quickly unravel under a veneer of pleasantries.
Real trust doesn’t mean smoothing things over; it means people can voice dissent and work through conflict.
Having the tussle ‘in the arena’ rather than behind closed doors means that once a decision is made, everyone backs it. That kind of trust sharpens performance.
Role dynamics
Every team member carries both a formal role (Head of X) and an informal one (the diplomat, the disruptor, the scapegoat).
Wilfred Bion called this valency: our unconscious pull to take up functions on behalf of the group. These roles aren’t random – they express what the team can’t acknowledge directly. Left unexamined, they distort the work and leave individuals trapped in patterns they didn’t choose.
When leaders name and work with role dynamics, the team regains choice.
People stop being typecast, and the group can own its anxieties rather than offloading them onto one person.
Systemic containment
Teams don’t just hold the work; they hold the organisation’s anxieties.
In periods of transformation, teams become vessels for fear, loss, and resistance. If that anxiety is denied, it leaks into behaviour – avoidance, compliance without commitment, or open conflict.
Containment doesn’t mean eliminating anxiety; it means naming it, giving it a place, and showing it can be survived. Leaders who provide this containment allow the team to stay with its task, rather than being hijacked by what the system cannot face.
Multiplication looks like…
- Individuals bringing more of themselves to the table. People share not just their technical expertise but their perspective, instincts, and creativity, because difference is valued rather than disciplined. The team gets access to more capability than job descriptions alone would suggest.
- Conflict that sharpens thinking. Disagreements are surfaced directly and worked through. Arguments become a source of clarity, not division, and members leave the room more aligned than when they entered.
- Stretch without fracture. Members take risks, admit uncertainty, and lean on one another’s strengths. The team provides a sense of safety that makes ambition possible.
- The whole being greater than the parts. Decisions and outcomes carry a collective stamp. No single member could have achieved them alone, and everyone can see their fingerprints in the result.
Division looks like…
- People censoring themselves. Contributions shrink to the safe or obvious. Individuals hold back perspectives that might provoke conflict or expose vulnerability, and the team runs on partial information.
- Dissent leaking sideways. Conversations that should happen in the room move into corridors, inboxes, or subgroups. Politics thrive while trust erodes.
- Energy consumed by managing dynamics. More effort goes into keeping the peace, navigating personalities, or second-guessing the leader than into progressing the actual work.
- Withdrawal and fatigue. Members disengage, attend less fully, or play their role mechanically. The team drains capability instead of building it.
Examples from practice
In a global consumer brand, the marketing leadership team began as a collection of regional silos. Without a clear primary task, meetings defaulted to defending local budgets.
Once the work was reframed around one global marketing agenda, trust grew, conflict could be surfaced, and they became a genuine multiplier of innovation.
In a regulated financial services organisation, an executive team faced into restructuring thousands of frontline roles. Unspoken anxiety dominated: some functions would shrink, others grow. Left unnamed, the fear leaked into mistrust.
The breakthrough came when the leader explicitly contracted: “Our task is to transform the customer experience together.” Naming the anxiety and re-anchoring on the task shifted the team from division into multiplication.
The leadership challenge
The leader’s job isn’t to keep the peace or “be inspiring.” It’s to hold the container: creating enough clarity, safety, and stretch that the team can metabolise its anxieties and focus on the work. That means:
- Naming dynamics as they happen. When avoidance, scapegoating, or side conversations surface, the leader brings them into the open. Making patterns explicit gives the team a chance to work with them rather than being driven by them.
- Contracting around the primary task, not just the personalities. Teams often become absorbed in managing interpersonal style clashes. Returning the focus to the task helps reset attention on shared purpose and collective responsibility.
- Building the discipline to disagree and commit. Teams that avoid conflict stall; teams that fight without closure fracture. Effective leaders set the expectation that dissent will be voiced, tested, and then resolved into a collective commitment.
- Seeing individuals as voices of the system. Withdrawal, disruption, or persistent challenge often reflects tensions in the wider group. Leaders who treat these as signals can unlock what the team has been unable to acknowledge directly.
All this matters because the difference between multiplication and division is rarely marginal. It’s the difference between an executive team that unlocks transformation; and one that quietly undermines it.
Teams are the fulcrum of organisational performance. Formed well, they’re multipliers. Formed badly, they don’t just fail to add value; they divide it.
Looking for insight into your team(s)?
We created the X Model to give teams fast, sharp insight into their levels of trust, collaboration, and efficacy. You can find out more here.
