Building Teams That Trust and Deliver

A team can be full of capable, committed people and still fail to deliver together. Read side by side, Patrick Lencioni’s two teamwork books show why the answer rarely sits with the people alone, and why the conditions you set from the top decide how much of their contribution reaches the customer.

Andy Demir | Qalbur Perspective | People & Culture | 14 minute read

Two executives row a boat tied to a dock; a manager watches. Caption: “We need more committed rowers.”

Executive Summary

Lencioni’s models still give a leadership team useful language for individual contribution and team behaviour. They become far more useful when you also examine what the organisation itself asks of its teams: authority, workload, incentives and what happens to people who speak honestly. Hybrid work and AI make that examination more urgent. This essay proposes a simple distinction between problems within a person, problems between people and problems in the conditions under which they work. For the people who run the organisation, the task is to find which one is binding, keep standards demanding and make responsible contribution sustainable.

Two books, two different questions
What humility, hunger and people smarts require now
Trust is tested when the news becomes inconvenient
From disagreement to accountable delivery
Working together across distance and difference
AI changes the contribution a team needs
Locate the constraint before choosing the intervention
What Senior Leaders Should Consider
Questions for the Boardroom
The organisation’s side of the bargain
References

Two books, two different questions

“Team player” is one of those phrases that sounds settled until people disagree about what the team is entitled to ask. It can describe someone who shares knowledge, keeps promises and helps colleagues rescue a difficult project. It can also become a loose verdict on someone who questions a deadline, declines another evening call or refuses to sign up to a forecast. If your leadership team uses the phrase in talent reviews or succession discussions, it is worth first agreeing on what you mean by it.

The question belongs at the top because the phrase travels downwards. Whatever the executive committee means by it becomes, a level or two below, the standard by which managers decide who gets the stretch assignment and who is quietly marked as difficult. Underneath it sit three questions: what cooperation requires, who carries its cost and how fairly it is recognised. All three are ultimately answered by the people who design the organisation.

Patrick Lencioni, founder of The Table Group, gives you useful language for these questions. His 2002 book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, examines collective obstacles: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. His 2016 book, The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognise and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues, turns to the individual and proposes humility, hunger and people smarts as the qualities that make collaboration work. Both teach through a fictional story followed by a practical model. They offer a vocabulary for discussion, and make no claim to be a tested causal model of team performance. [1] [2]

Read together, the books connect the people you select with the behaviour a group develops. My suggestion is that a 2026 reading should extend that connection to the organisation around them, where most of a senior leader’s influence lies. Capable people need arrangements that support the conduct you expect: credible priorities, decision rights that match their responsibilities and permission to name the limits. Team effectiveness comes from the interplay of individual contribution, collective behaviour, and operating conditions; improving only one can leave the source of difficulty untouched.

What humility, hunger and people smarts require now

Start with humility, which matters because it lets expertise correct a decision. When you admit an assumption you are unsure of, you give the specialist two levels below you room to improve it, and when people share credit, colleagues stay willing to share what they know. Lencioni means the absence of excessive ego, which is different from a lack of confidence. Applied carelessly, the label rewards people who make themselves small. The engineer who accurately describes an achievement or challenges a superior may still be the most generous colleague on the floor, and a talent process that reads it as arrogance teaches everyone else to stay quiet.

Hunger is harder to judge, because activity is visible and judgement is not. Lencioni describes self-motivation, diligence, and an appetite for responsibility; a useful test is whether someone spots the work that needs doing, follows it through, and builds capability around them, and hours online tell you little about that. A parent with clear working boundaries may contribute more reliably than a colleague who accepts every request and leaves others to sort out the clashes. If your promotion decisions quietly favour visible availability, you are paying for the wrong signal, and the people below you will notice long before you do.

The pressure behind this shows in Europe’s own data. Eurofound’s overview of its 2024 European Working Conditions Survey, published in April 2026 and covering 35 countries including the EU27, Norway, Switzerland and the Western Balkans, notes that around two-thirds of the workforce still works on the frontline and the factory floor, and that many frontline workers face the poorest conditions: high intensity, low autonomy and little recognition. The data are from 2024, a solid baseline rather than a live reading. The implication is plain: look at the work before you read exhaustion lower down as a lack of ambition. [3]

People smarts, in Lencioni’s model, means awareness of other people and of the effect your own behaviour has on them. It stays useful as long as the assessment does not slide into a preference for fluent conversation, sociability or familiarity with the interviewer. A quiet engineer who documents uncertainty and hands work over carefully can hold a team together. Judge cooperation by what people do and how easily colleagues work with them, and the pool you consider for bigger roles widens.

All of this shapes how your organisation hires and promotes, which is a design choice made at the top. A shared work exercise shows more than an agreeable interview: how a candidate explains an assumption, takes correction and credits someone else. Comparable questions and recorded evidence make the judgement inspectable afterwards. Lencioni’s attention to character survives; what shrinks is the room for “culture fit” to mean resemblance to the people already in the room, an effect that compounds over every hiring round.

Trust is tested when the news becomes inconvenient

Once people join, their behaviour responds to what they see happen around them. Lencioni’s vulnerability-based trust asks colleagues to admit mistakes, acknowledge weaknesses and ask for help. Those acts cost very different amounts depending on where you sit. When a chief executive admits uncertainty, it reads as candour; when a new hire on probation does the same, it can look like a reason to let them go. Openness becomes credible only when the top repeatedly shows how an admission will be handled.

Amy Edmondson, the Harvard organisational scholar, provided a research foundation for this in her 1999 study of 51 work teams at a manufacturing company. She defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, such as asking questions or admitting errors, and found it associated with learning behaviour, which in turn was linked to team performance. It describes an information problem every organisation has; it does not promise performance or replace expertise and standards. [4]

The real test comes with bad news. When someone on your team raises a delivery risk early, how you respond teaches everyone whether raising it was wise. The person who flags a dependency needs a decision, resources or an honest explanation of what cannot change; thanks alone is not enough. Professional candour grows from repeated, bounded experiences of being heard and treated fairly, and most of those happen two or three levels below the executive committee, in conversations you will never attend.

This is where trust stops being a soft subject. The timing of information changes the choices you still have. A supplier constraint disclosed before a customer commitment may allow a revised delivery plan; the same constraint disclosed after signature may mean expensive recovery and a customer who trusts you a little less. Trust gets relevant information to a decision while there is still time to use it. A better test than the mood of your last meeting is what happened after the last serious warning reached you, and how long it took to arrive.

From disagreement to accountable delivery

Useful information does not always arrive politely. Lencioni’s treatment of conflict explains why an executive team that seems harmonious can leave its most important assumptions untested. Debate still needs boundaries. Criticism of a proposal can improve it, while contempt, interruption and attacks on competence discourage the next contribution. A disciplined team keeps its evidence and decision criteria open to challenge and respects the people doing the work, and that tone is set in the room where you sit.

At senior level, the obstacle often sits in the incentives you approved. A sales team rewarded on order intake and a plant measured on utilisation can each pursue sensible goals and still make promises that cannot both be kept. No team-building session will reconcile a volume bonus with a capacity limit. That is work for the executive committee: define the shared outcome, put the trade-off on the table and decide how rewards will recognise it, so that everyone can see which enterprise result an argument is meant to improve.

Commitment then needs a visible decision. People can back execution after their preferred option has been rejected if they understand the reasoning, know who owns the decision and know what remains uncertain. Recording what was decided, who will act and when the assumptions will be reviewed saves a great deal of reinterpretation. Backing a decision still leaves room to escalate when material evidence changes, and in regulated work a safety or compliance concern needs its own route that does not depend on consensus.

Peer accountability works best around explicit dependencies. Your executives can hold one another to an agreed input, its timing and the cost of a delay, which is far more productive than judging one another’s dedication, and the same works further down once the dependencies are visible. Managers retain responsibility for repeated poor performance and misconduct; psychological safety protects the ability to discuss problems without exempting anyone from the standard. Consistency also protects your most capable people from quietly absorbing every shortfall nobody else will address.

Working together across distance and difference

Hybrid work makes these agreements more important because colleagues have fewer chance encounters to clarify them, and presence poorly measures contribution. A randomised trial at Trip.com, the Chinese travel technology company, involving 1,612 graduate employees in engineering, marketing and finance, found that working from home two days a week cut attrition by a third, with no detectable effect on performance reviews or promotions over the following two years. The trial ran from August 2021 to January 2022 and was published in Nature in 2024; one of its authors is Trip.com’s co-founder and chairman, as the paper discloses. It covers particular knowledge-work roles and cannot settle every occupation. [5]

For a European leadership team, the lesson is to test the arrangement against the work, because engineering, customer service and production carry different dependencies. A team spread across Germany, France, Spain and Poland may need shared decision records and agreed response windows more urgently than another general statement about collaboration, and adding Gulf colleagues turns the spread of meeting times into a fairness question as well. These are design questions for whoever owns the operating model.

Microsoft’s 2025 research shows why response expectations matter. Its much-quoted figure of 275 interruptions a day refers to the top fifth of users by ping volume, counts pings across a 24-hour day and excludes EU tenants from the underlying telemetry, so it would be wrong to present it as the experience of the average European employee. It is still a fair warning about volume. Somebody has to decide what counts as an escalation and what can wait, and that norm is set, deliberately or accidentally, by how senior people send and respond to messages. [6]

The CIPD’s Good Work Index 2025 for the UK is more encouraging. Employees with more positive views of their line managers were more likely to feel competent in their roles, less likely to report that their job harmed their health, and less inclined to consider leaving. These are survey associations, not proof of cause, but they support investing in management capability alongside decisions about location. Whether those managers have the time, training, and authority to coordinate priorities well is determined by those above them. [7]

AI changes the contribution a team needs

Generative AI unsettles some familiar assumptions about teamwork. In a preregistered field experiment published in Organisation Science in June 2026, researchers worked with 791 professionals at Procter & Gamble on real product-innovation challenges in 2024. Individuals using AI matched the quality of two-person teams working without it. While R&D and commercial staff working without AI tended to stay within their own disciplines, people using it produced more balanced proposals, regardless of their background. That is strong evidence that AI can reproduce some benefits of collaboration on a defined task, and a long way from showing that you can do without human teams. [8]

The same study complicates the productivity story. Teams working without AI picked their own best idea about half the time, against roughly 37% for participants using AI, although the AI-assisted work still produced better final ideas overall because the starting ideas were stronger. The authors suggest AI’s tendency to affirm rather than challenge may be part of the reason. The gap between generating options and choosing responsibly is the part to watch. A polished proposal can make agreement easier without making its assumptions more dependable, so someone still has to check the sources and question what it leaves out.

Lencioni’s virtues still apply in a new form: humility includes admitting where AI-supported analysis has not been checked, initiative includes counting the review work an improvement passes to others, and people smarts include knowing how an automated recommendation lands on those expected to act on it. Accepting a recommendation remains the responsibility of identifiable people, and naming them is a decision for the top.

There is a real trade-off here. Smaller teams may coordinate faster; they may also concentrate judgement and remove independent review. The right balance depends on the cost of an error, whether the decision can be reversed, and the expertise needed to check it. When your organisation reports efficiency gains from AI, follow the work through verification and implementation before you bank them. Time saved in drafting is worth much less if it comes back as rework or as a promise to a customer that nobody can support.

Locate the constraint before choosing the intervention

Put the two books together and a practical distinction emerges, one I would suggest any leadership team can use: is the difficulty within a person, between people or in the conditions they work under? It is an analytical extension offered in this essay, not a validated diagnostic instrument. It keeps Lencioni’s attention to individual and collective behaviour and adds the authority, capacity and incentives that make that behaviour possible.

Difficulty within a person might be a missing skill, unreliable follow-through or harmful conduct. Between people, it tends to look like unspoken disagreement, unclear handovers or commitments each side reads differently. In the conditions, it shows up as incompatible targets, too few resources or responsibility without decision authority. These explanations often coexist. Coaching someone, repairing an agreement and changing a workload may all be needed, and only the third lies fully in the hands of the people at the top.

The strongest objection is that attention to conditions can become an elaborate excuse for avoiding a hard personnel decision. It is fair when colleagues keep bearing the cost of someone’s behaviour despite clear expectations, support, and a fair chance to improve, and when some people are unsuitable for a particular role. Examining the conditions makes that judgement better grounded without obliging you to preserve every appointment.

The executive trade-off is between acting too early and waiting too long. Replace someone prematurely and you may hand the same constraint to the next recruit. Tolerate damaging conduct for too long and standards and confidence erode for everyone else, who watch closely what the top lets pass. A proportionate response sets out the expected behaviour, checks that the means to deliver it exist, provides support and fixes a review point, which keeps improvement possible and consequences credible.

What Senior Leaders Should Consider

The most useful place to begin is one consequential commitment that crossed several functions, ideally one that went wrong or nearly did. Ask your executive committee to trace it from the first promise through decision, handover and delivery: when the uncertainty became visible, who could have resolved it and where the work piled up. That is a far more concrete conversation than asking whether the team trusts one another, and it shows you, from below, what your own structure and incentives did to the people carrying the work.

Then decide what you will measure. A few outcomes illuminate those dependencies well: repeated rework, decisions left unresolved, and the time between someone recognising a risk and it reaching a person who can act. Read changes carefully, because more reported concerns may mean more candour rather than worse performance. Add whether shared work continues to depend on the same few individuals, which is a continuity and retention risk as well as a fairness problem, and keep the measures in support of judgement rather than surveillance.

Finally, match the intervention to the constraint you found. Where the issue is a person, development can target observable conduct, such as a persuasive executive learning to invite challenge before closing a discussion, judged in the next piece of shared work. Where the constraint is capacity, authority or incentives, change that condition directly, because no amount of coaching will do it for you. Treat your own behaviour as part of the evidence too. What the executive team rewards, interrupts and lets pass is the clearest signal the rest of the organisation receives.

Questions for the Boardroom

Which customer commitments depend on cooperation that our own functional incentives make difficult?
What happened after the last material risk was raised early, and what did our response teach the people below us?
Where are dependable contributors repeatedly compensating for missing capacity or unclear authority?
As AI changes team size and work allocation, who retains independent judgement and responsibility for verification?
Could we explain our last underperformance decision in terms of specific behaviour, support, and operating conditions rather than an impression of “fit”?

The organisation’s side of the bargain

The phrase “team player” becomes useful when it describes a contribution that people can understand and assess fairly. Lencioni offers an accessible starting point: people willing to learn, contribute and work considerately together, supported by trust, challenge and shared responsibility. Recent research adds the conditions under which those qualities can be exercised, and distance and AI change the mechanics of cooperation, while obligations remain with people.

If you ask your organisation for candour, you owe it a credible response to inconvenient news. If you ask for commitment, you owe clarity about priorities and the means to act on them. Neither obligation lowers the standard or spares anyone a difficult choice. Together, they make the standard legitimate because the people at the top accept responsibility for their own contribution to the work they expect everyone else to deliver. That part of the bargain is yours, and nobody below you can keep it on your behalf.

References

About the Author

Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. Andy writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.

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