The Myth of the Superteam

Ron Friedman’s new HBR piece identifies what the best teams do differently. His research is solid, and the findings hold up. The problem is what executives do with them, which is often to read the profile of a rare performer and set “become a superteam” as the organizational goal.

That goal is both unrealistic and counterproductive. Unrealistic because exceptional is, by definition, a narrow slice of the distribution. In Friedman’s own study of more than 6,000 knowledge workers, only those who rated their team a 10 out of 10 relative to industry peers were counted as members of “superteams.” That’s a small population, and it has to be.

The real question for most organizations is how to be measurably better than six months ago, and six months better after that. The bar is incremental improvement against a credible baseline. It’s less glamorous than “top of the league,” yet far better at producing compounding returns over a five-year horizon.

The pursuit of super status distorts behavior in predictable ways. Teams optimize for the visible markers of excellence—innovation theater, dramatic pivots, hero narratives—at the expense of the quieter work that builds durable capability. Leaders fund the offsite, the rebrand, and the strategy refresh, and underfund the slow work of monthly coaching conversations, weekly leading-indicator reviews, and closing gaps between stated and actual values. McKinsey’s longstanding finding that roughly 70% of change initiatives fail to achieve their intended objectives is not unrelated to this pattern. Organizations that fund the ambitious transformation rarely fund the infrastructure that would let a transformation stick.

The case for incremental improvement rests on four established findings that line up with uncommon consistency.

First, the compounding math favors steady progress. A team that improves 5% per quarter against its own baseline gains roughly 22% in a year and 47% in two. A team that jumps 30% in a quarter and regresses the following two quarters nets less than half that over the same period. This pattern shows up across fields where sustained improvement has been measured rigorously, from British Cycling’s “aggregation of marginal gains” under Dave Brailsford to Toyota’s kaizen production system to the clinical quality improvements documented in Atul Gawande’s work on surgical checklists.

Second, neuroscience confirms that behavior change is slow by design. Phillippa Lally’s research at University College London found that habit formation averages 66 days, with a range of up to 254 days for more complex behaviors. Amy Arnsten’s work on stress and prefrontal function shows that under pressure, the brain reverts to habitual responses—which means any behavior not yet automatic will collapse precisely when leaders need it most. The only behaviors that hold up under stress are those that have been practiced beyond the point of conscious effort. That practice takes months, not days.

Third, implementation research is unambiguous about adoption rates. Roughly 20% of evidence-based interventions achieve sustained real-world adoption across organizational settings. The ones that do share a common profile: extended horizons of 18 to 24 months, narrow focus on a small number of behaviors, active measurement of adoption rather than satisfaction, and senior leader modeling of the target behaviors. The interventions that fail tend to do the opposite: broad scope, short timeline, satisfaction-based measurement, and executive exemption from the practices being taught.

Fourth, cultural change research points in the same direction. Cameron and Quinn’s meta-analytic work on organizational culture found a 79% success rate for evolutionary change approaches versus 30% for revolutionary ones. Karl Weick’s foundational paper on small wins makes the mechanism plain: small, visible successes build the political and psychological momentum that larger changes require. Organizations that skip the small wins and go straight to transformation lose roughly 7 out of 10.

A team that wants to be better six months from now doesn’t need a new framework. It needs a single targeted behavior change, a way to track it weekly, and the organizational discipline to resist layering on a second initiative before the first has reached automaticity.

The practices that compound are things like taking a deep breath before responding to criticism, pausing for 3 seconds before answering a difficult question, and having a weekly 15-minute conversation with a direct report that isn’t about a task. These rarely make the keynote circuit. They’re what actually moves a team from the 40th percentile to the 55th, and from the 55th to the 70th, over the horizon most executives underestimate.

Measurement follows the same logic. The indicators worth tracking aren’t satisfaction scores. They’re the depth of manager check-ins, the frequency of voiced disagreement in meetings, the number of developmental conversations per month, and the visible alignment between what leaders say the organization values and what actually gets rewarded. These predict turnover, innovation, and attrition weeks before the engagement survey picks up the signal. They also answer the only question the middle 95% of teams can usefully ask: are we incrementally better than we were last quarter?

Exceptional performance labels don’t distribute randomly across an organization. They attach to teams with the most autonomy, the most resources, the highest-visibility projects, and the fewest demands from compliance, reporting, and organizational maintenance work. Support functions, operations teams, and the middle layer of management—where much of the actual work of running a company gets done—rarely show up in the “superteam” conversation, regardless of their actual performance. The team closing the books cleanly every month is likely doing harder work than the innovation lab that gets the cover story. Any executive using the superteam idea to set expectations needs to account for this.

There’s a second equity consideration worth naming. Friedman’s second practice, modeling curiosity by acknowledging knowledge gaps, carries different costs for different leaders. Research on authority and identity shows that admitting uncertainty from a position of presumed expertise lands differently than admitting uncertainty when one’s expertise is already being questioned. A leader whose competence isn’t yet presumed in the room will pay a different price for “I’m not sure” than a senior executive whose authority is unquestioned. The practice is sound. The implementation has to account for who’s doing the practicing and what the room is prepared to grant them.

Four moves for executives taking this seriously.

Set the baseline before designing the intervention. Measure the four leading indicators above honestly for one month. You cannot know whether a team is improving unless you’ve established where it started. Skip this step, and every subsequent measurement is theater.

Pick one behavior change. Size it so small it would survive your worst week. If the practice requires willpower to execute when you’re stressed, frustrated, or running late, it will fail in exactly the conditions you need it most. One deep breath before a hard conversation holds up. “Be more curious” does not.

Audit reward systems for their bias toward visible heroics. If your promotion criteria reward the dramatic save more than the quiet year in which nothing broke, the system is working against the culture you say you want. Promotion decisions, bonus structures, and recognition rituals reveal what the organization actually values. Fix those before the next all-hands speech about values.

Give the intervention eighteen months before evaluating it, and longer before scaling. Anything shorter is working against the brain. Anything shorter is also why the last three initiatives didn’t stick.

Most teams won’t become superteams, and that’s fine. Every team can be measurably better a year from now than they are today. The bar is honest progress against a credible baseline, sustained long enough for compounding to take over. The organizations that figure out how to do that quietly and repeatedly will beat the ones chasing the superteam label almost every time.

This work synthesizes research from organizational psychology, behavior change neuroscience, and implementation science — drawing on Edmondson, Weick, Lally, and Arnsten, among others — to argue that durable team improvement runs on protocols, not aspirations.

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