From High Performers to High Performing Teams
You can hire stars, but you still need a formation that lets them play together
There is a famous story about the England football team in the 2000s. They had world class talent across the pitch. Lampard, Gerrard, Rooney, Beckham, Terry, Scholes. A lineup any manager should be thrilled to work with. Yet the team never delivered on its potential. They played like a collection of talented individuals who never fully became a unit. Everyone had ability. The problem was how they played together.
In tech and in many modern organizations we love to repeat the phrase “hire great people and get out of the way”. It is simple and attractive. It taps into the idea that autonomy fuels creativity and that smart people can figure things out on their own. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole story.
Getting out of the way works when the person you hired is doing work that depends heavily on individual contribution. A developer deep in a piece of logic. A designer working through a tricky flow. A researcher analyzing data patterns. These moments benefit from focus. You do not need a manager standing over someone’s shoulder telling them how to do their craft.
But once the work shifts from individual execution to team outcomes the equation changes. Building software, running a product organization or driving a strategic change is not an individual sport. It looks more like football. Complex interactions. Shared dependencies. Decisions that cross boundaries. People with different skills trying to solve one problem together.
This is the point where “get out of the way” stops being helpful. You can hire ten brilliant people, give them no direction and end up with ten different interpretations of the goal. You get duplicated effort, competing priorities, unclear ownership and frustration. Talent without alignment is noise.
Leaders have a real job here. Not to micromanage and not to control every detail. Their job is to create the structure that allows talented people to operate as a team. This sounds simple. It rarely is.
It means getting clear on the purpose of the work.
It means agreeing on what success looks like.
It means setting constraints that focus the team rather than restrict them. Constraints like scope, priorities, time horizons, decision-making rules and how teams hand work over to each other.
This is the same lesson England learned the hard way. You can fill a pitch with stars and still struggle if the formation does not make sense. If the players do not understand how to work off each other. If the system does not support the way they naturally operate. Talent is only useful when the environment turns that talent into something coherent.
A leader’s job is to shape that environment. To design how the team works. To make sure people understand the strategy and the direction. To create interfaces between roles so that collaboration feels natural rather than forced. To remove blockers. To prevent thrash. To help the team make good decisions quickly instead of waiting for clarity that never comes.
There is another layer to this. Great people often carry strong opinions about how to work. In a team setting those opinions can collide. A leader needs to help the team navigate those disagreements. Not by picking sides, but by guiding the team toward shared principles. This is part of the formation. It is how you turn individual strengths into collective strength.
So yes, hire skilled people. Hire people who care about the craft. Hire people who bring ideas and energy and depth. Then put just as much care into helping them function as a real team. The magic is not in the résumés. It is in how the people connect. It is in how they move together. It is in the system around them.
High performance rarely appears just because you assemble high performers. It appears when leadership builds the conditions where collaboration becomes a force multiplier. That is the job. That is the impact. And that is when work starts to feel less like coordination and more like a team playing to its strengths.