Every now and then, a piece of research comes along that makes you quietly nod along as you read it. Not because it says something wildly new. More because it gives language and weight to something you’ve been seeing in the work for years.
That was my response to McKinsey’s recent article, “Demystifying top-team performance: What every CEO needs to know.” It explores what distinguishes high-performing executive teams from the rest, and the findings line up very closely with what we’ve built into the PLUS model — and with what we found through our own research partnership with the University of Newcastle.
TeamHive's view, based on our experience and our research, has sometimes felt a little bit contrarian. We’ve argued that if you want better performance, engagement and adaptability, you can’t just keep developing individual leaders and hope that somehow flows through to teams.
Of course leadership matters. A lot. But teams don’t improve just because one person gets better at leading. Teams improve when the group develops better patterns of working together. That is the heart of TeamHive. And it is very much the heart of what McKinsey is pointing to as well.
The shift: from individual leaders to collective performance
McKinsey’s article focuses on top teams — CEOs and their executive groups. But the broader message applies well beyond the C-suite. Their research suggests that the best-performing senior teams are not necessarily the ones with the most impressive individuals in the room. They are the teams that have developed the conditions to work well together. They have clarity. They challenge each other constructively. They make better decisions. They take shared responsibility. They learn and adapt. That might sound simple, but anyone who has worked with teams knows it is not always easy.
A group of smart, experienced, well-intentioned people can still get stuck in poor team dynamics. They can avoid the real conversation. They can retreat into silos. They can leave the leader carrying too much of the load. They can be busy and capable, but still not especially effective together. This is why I think the McKinsey article matters. It reinforces something we need to keep saying: team performance is not just the sum of individual capability. It is shaped by the quality of the team’s shared behaviours.
How this aligns with TeamHive's PLUS model
The PLUS model looks at four drivers of team effectiveness:
Purpose
Learning
Unity
Shared Leadership
These are not abstract culture words. They are practical, observable team behaviours, which emerged from both our practice and our research. They show up in how a team makes decisions, handles pressure, talks about mistakes, works through disagreement, and shares ownership for outcomes. And they map very closely to the themes McKinsey identifies in high-performing top teams.
Purpose: not just alignment, but shared meaning
One of the strongest themes in the McKinsey article is the importance of alignment around direction and priorities. High-performing top teams are clear on what matters most. They are not just individually busy or locally effective. They understand the collective agenda. That is very close to what we mean by Purpose in the PLUS model. Purpose is not just having a strategy statement. It is not just knowing the organisation’s vision. It is the team having a shared understanding of:
Why the team exists
What value it is here to create
What matters most now
How individual contributions connect to the bigger picture
When Purpose is strong, people tend to feel less like they are simply completing tasks and more like they are contributing to something coherent. Our collaborative research with the University of Newcastle also found that strong Purpose is connected to important human outcomes — including stronger emotional attachment and a greater sense of belonging. That matters, because performance is not only a technical issue. People do better work when they understand the point of the work, and when they feel part of something they want to contribute to.
Learning: the team’s ability to adapt
McKinsey also highlights the way effective top teams regularly reflect on how they are working. They do not just focus on business performance; they also pay attention to the team practices that are helping or getting in the way. This lines up with the Learning driver in PLUS. Learning-oriented teams are able to pause, reflect and adjust. They can talk about what is working and what is not. They are more likely to treat mistakes as information, not as evidence that someone has failed. This sounds obvious, but it is often missing in busy teams. Many teams move from one meeting, deliverable or crisis to the next without ever asking:
How are we working together?
What are we avoiding?
What are we learning?
What do we need to change in our habits, not just in our plans?
Our research with the University of Newcastle found that Learning is strongly connected to a team’s ability to innovate, solve problems and stay resilient in complex environments. That feels especially relevant now. Hybrid work, AI, shifting expectations, leaner structures — most teams are operating in conditions that keep changing. In that environment, the ability to learn together is not a nice extra. It is part of the work.
Unity: constructive communication, not false harmony
Another theme in McKinsey’s article is the importance of open, constructive challenge. High-performing teams are not teams where everyone agrees all the time. They are not teams where conflict disappears. They are teams where disagreement can be used well. This is an important distinction. A lot of teams mistake harmony for health. They keep things polite on the surface, but the real conversations happen afterwards — in side chats, one-on-ones, or not at all. That can feel easier in the moment, but it is expensive over time. Decisions get watered down. Misalignment lingers. Frustration builds quietly.
In PLUS, this sits within Unity. Unity is not about everyone being the same. It is not about avoiding tension. It is about the team having enough trust, clarity and respect to work through the tension in a useful way. Strong Unity means team members can:
Communicate honestly
Raise concerns early
Listen properly to different views
Challenge ideas without undermining people
Stay connected, even when the conversation is difficult
Our research findings support this too. Teams with stronger Unity are better able to make decisions, navigate conflict and maintain the trust needed for sustained performance. And again, this is very consistent with McKinsey’s findings: the quality of the conversation matters enormously.
Shared Leadership: moving beyond the heroic leader
The final connection is perhaps the one I care about most. McKinsey describes the importance of top teams taking enterprise-wide ownership, rather than operating as a collection of functional leaders defending their own patches. That is a classic team challenge. People can be excellent leaders of their own function and still struggle to act as members of a true enterprise team. The same thing happens at other levels too — in project teams, cross-functional teams, leadership teams and operational teams. When ownership stays too concentrated in one person, the team becomes dependent. The leader becomes the bottleneck, the problem-solver, the emotional regulator and the keeper of accountability. That is not sustainable for the leader, and it does not build the team.
This is why Shared Leadership is such an important part of PLUS. Shared Leadership is about the team distributing responsibility in a healthy way. It means people do not wait for the formal leader to hold every conversation, make every call or notice every issue. Instead, the team builds the capacity to lead together. That might look like:
Team members taking ownership beyond their role boundaries
Accountability being shared, not delegated upwards
Decisions being made closer to the work
People stepping in to support team effectiveness, not just their own tasks
The leader creating conditions for others to lead, rather than carrying everything alone
Our University of Newcastle research found that this kind of shared ownership is linked to stronger empowerment, agility and performance. And it connects directly to one of the biggest shifts we are seeing in leadership and team development more broadly: moving from leader-led performance to team-enabled performance.
How organisations, leaders and teams can take action
If you are responsible for leadership, culture or performance in an organisation, I think this raises a useful question: Are we investing enough in the team as the unit of performance? Not instead of leaders. Alongside them.
Because individual leaders will always matter. But in complex organisations, performance can’t depend on heroic effort from a few key people. Teams need the language, data and habits to take more ownership of how they work together. That does not have to be heavy or over-engineered. Sometimes the most useful starting point is simply helping a team see itself more clearly. Where are we strong? Where are we getting in our own way? What is one behaviour we could shift that would make the work easier, clearer or more effective? These are exactly the questions the TeamHive 360 was designed to answer!
