Your top team is a financial performance variable

Everyone agrees teams matter. Nobody quite believes it belongs in the same conversation as capital allocation or market entry.

McKinsey's Center for CEO Excellence published something in 2025 that makes that position harder to hold.

What they found

Working from engagement with nearly 200 global chief executives and former chief executives, they report that companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance. They also report that transformations built around team-centric approaches deliver a substantial improvement in organisational efficiency.

"Team performance is not just the sum of individual capability. It is shaped by the quality of the team's shared behaviours."

That is a precise claim, and it cuts against how most organisations actually operate. If performance were the sum of individual capability, the sensible strategy would be to hire the strongest individuals you can and let the arithmetic take care of itself. Most executive development budgets are built on exactly that assumption.

Why it matters

Because of who is persuaded by it. The peer-reviewed literature on teams is deep, and it's where we'd point first. But it circulates among researchers and HR leaders, and the decision to fund team development is usually made by someone reading neither.

There's also a signal in what CEOs themselves say. The large majority of those in McKinsey's CEO Excellence programme named building, retaining and growing an effective top team as a priority. That's a statement about where experienced operators think the leverage sits, and it lines up with what the research says.

Two maps, drawn separately

When we read their description of what aligned top teams actually do — clear shared direction, constructive challenge, shared accountability, the capacity to adapt — we recognised it, because it's the territory the PLUS model covers: Purpose, Unity, Shared Leadership and Learning. We built that model from practice and had it independently validated by the University of Newcastle, where the four dimensions together explained 60% of the variance in team effectiveness. McKinsey arrived from consulting engagements with two hundred CEOs. The maps match, and neither copied the other.