Superteams and the Gap Between Framework and Capability

We’ve watched executives read leadership frameworks with genuine engagement, nod at every page, and revert to opposite behaviors the first time real pressure hits. The seven practices in Ron Friedman’s new HBR cover piece, “How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better,” are all great pieces of advice. The Oklahoma City Thunder case, a 58-loss team that climbed to an NBA championship in three seasons, is a genuinely useful illustration of what sustained improvement can look like. What the article leaves largely open is how a leader actually develops the capability to execute those seven practices when the stakes rise beyond the seminar room.

Friedman surveyed more than 6,000 knowledge workers, compared behaviors on teams rated exceptional against the rest, and landed on seven practices that separate the top from the middle: more frequent experimentation, more willingness to acknowledge knowledge gaps, meetings that surface problems rather than hide them, active involvement in the work, feedback that supports rather than punishes, investment in growth without immediate payoff, and a connection to shared meaning. The framework maps cleanly onto decades of organizational research — psychological safety, intellectual humility, learning orientation, coaching presence—and his examples from Spotify, Microsoft, Adobe, and others show the practices operating across industries. His observation that leaders often mistake detachment for delegation, as captured in Brian Chesky’s return to “Founder Mode” at Airbnb, reframes an error we’ve repeatedly seen executives make.

We agree on the destination. Where we want to extend the conversation is one layer below, on the pathway.

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Take Friedman’s second practice: making curiosity contagious by acknowledging knowledge gaps. In calm conditions, most experienced executives can model this. In front of a board demanding answers, during a quarterly shortfall, or in the minutes after a significant mistake, those same leaders tend to default to projecting certainty. Arnsten’s research on stress and prefrontal function tells us why. Under acute pressure, the brain reverts to habitual responses, and the practices Friedman identifies are among the first behaviors to collapse. This is the gap between knowing what works and doing it when it counts. Closing it, in our experience, requires three pieces that the article doesn’t put forward.

The first is timeline. The seven practices aren’t switches to flip. They’re capabilities to build, and the build takes longer than most leadership programs allocate. Research on sustained behavior change suggests that only about 20% of evidence-based interventions achieve real-world adoption, and those that do tend to involve an extended horizon of 18 to 24 months of progressive practice rather than a two-day offsite. Programs that expect transformation in three days are working against the brain, not with it.

The second is habits sized to survive pressure. “Ask what are you stuck on” is a behavior that requires willpower when a leader is stressed, frustrated, or running late, and behaviors that require willpower tend to fail when willpower is depleted. What we’ve found works instead is designing the smallest possible version of each practice: one deep breath before responding to criticism, a three-second pause before answering a question, a single weekly conversation with one person about something genuine. Each habit gets built to automaticity before the next is added.

The third is measurement that reaches beyond self-report. The superteam classification in Friedman’s study rests on workers rating their own teams, which he acknowledges directly, and it’s a reasonable proxy for a survey at scale. But perception and behavior tend to diverge under pressure, particularly on the dimensions that matter most. The leading indicators we track aim to capture that divergence: the depth of manager check-ins, the frequency of voiced disagreement in meetings, the number of developmental conversations per month, and the alignment between stated values and actual behavior. These tend to predict turnover, innovation, and attrition weeks before satisfaction surveys register the problem.

None of this contradicts Friedman’s framework. His seven practices are the right target behaviors. What we’d add is the developmental infrastructure—extended timeline, habit-sized building blocks, and pressure-tested measurement—that helps leaders actually reach them.

The synthesis matters because each piece covers what the other doesn’t. Friedman’s work answers the question of how a superteam differs. Our work picks up where that question ends, with the leader who reads the seven practices, agrees with every one, and still can’t execute them when the CFO misses numbers, or the top engineer resigns. The article tells leaders what a superteam looks like. The build tells them how to develop one when their team starts from where most teams actually start, which is roughly the 2022 Thunder rather than the 2025 champions.

The competitive edge, in our experience, tends to go to organizations willing to build the developmental infrastructure that makes those seven practices executable when pressure rises.

Ron Friedman, “How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better,” Harvard Business Review (May 2026). Adapted from Friedman, R. (2026). Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams. Simon & Schuster.