The data tells a story of another year of missed opportunity—another year where too many organizations took the familiar path of expecting managers to do more in less time with restructured teams. We expect everything from our leaders and we never stop to fix the real problem. We do too little to elevate the performance of our teams.
Data from Gallup shows 51% of U.S. managers said their organization restructured or reorganized teams in 2023. Gallup’s research with Fortune500 CHROs suggests that as layers of middle management were also being stripped out, meaning those restructured teams were getting bigger. Bigger but not necessarily better.
In 2024 we finally need to focus on what drives the exceptional performance of the world’s organizations: they don’t win because of leadership alone, they win because of dream teams.
Our data on team performance from more than 3,000 diagnostic assessments shows that most do not believe they are fulfilling their potential.
- 81% of team members admit they collectively fall short of what they can achieve together.
- 71% do not believe they collaborate with their peers on their organization’s most important business problems.
Upgrading teams is one of the least curated and under-leveraged opportunities for accelerating business outcomes today.
But the innovation and growth trapped in a team can begin to be sustainably unlocked in as little as six months. We cannot wait for behavior change to happen by chance. The volatility and performance pressure in the world around us call for extreme and collective purposefulness and leave no time for the traditional chance exploration of individual leaders on a team. We need a new working culture rooted in agile and bold innovation, and broader co-creation to happen in an accelerated way. It needs to be forged into being. We must not fall back on reliance on familiar old, comfortable ways of working.
The first shift is awakening team members to the hope and possibility of a new level of performance—that they can become a Dream Team! The team needs to shift to a new social contract that moves their traditional hub-and-spoke structure to peer-to-peer accountability, candor and collaboration and co-creation. Leaders don’t have the time to be coaches—team members must become each other’s coaches.
This is a story of hope for 2024 and one I’ll be telling in detail as the year unfolds. It’s more than team mindsets, it’s about agreeing collectively to adopt new behaviors and elevate each other’s performance. Every team can become a dream team.