The best teams make it look easy. They perform together so well and so consistently that it appears as if they are one single organism instead of a group of disparate personalities with varied backgrounds. It can look, from the outside, as if skilled and talented people came together and blended their skills and talents effortlessly.

If that were the case, however, that no effort was necessary, building a high-performance team would be as simple as pulling smart people together and saying, “Go.” But that’s not the case. Haven’t all of us seen a sports team with the most talented athletes implode long before the playoffs? And maybe we’ve even served on a team of extraordinary individuals who came together and failed, sometimes spectacularly. The missing ingredient—the difference between the high flyers and the failures—is more than luck or good timing. The best teams are built with intention and we can tell you how.

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