Why Great Teams Need Less Leadership

“I’ve hired a team of stars, but I really need them to work like a constellation,” a CEO once said to me. It’s a great line and captures a frustration I’ve heard so often over the last 20 years of coaching the world’s top teams. This particular CEO did what most leaders think impossible: he was chasing down a moonshot 10x growth goal while freeing up 30% of his time. The breakthrough came when he realized that despite hiring exceptional talent, his hub-and-spoke leadership style was creating a bottleneck. The moment of transformation came when he shifted from traditional leadership to what I call peer-to-peer teamship. He found the key to pursuing both ambitious growth and time for innovation simultaneously.

Through 20 years of coaching the world’s top teams, I’ve seen the highest-performing organizations – the top 15% who have cracked the code of extraordinary performance – succeed not through heroic leadership but by fundamentally reimagining how teams operate. In my new book, Never Lead Alone, I reveal how this transformation occurs and why it’s critical for survival in today’s business environment.

The Hidden Cost of Hero Leadership

The data is clear: traditional hub-and-spoke leadership, where information and decisions flow through a central figure, leaves vast amounts of potential value unrealized. Research from the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute’s study of over 3,000 teams shows that organizations that shift from conventional leadership to peer-to-peer “teamship” see dramatic improvements: a 79% increase in candor, 46% higher collaboration, and 44% greater accountability.

Yet despite these compelling numbers, only 15% of teams currently achieve this elevated standard of performance. Most remain constrained by an outdated leadership model that inadvertently creates bottlenecks and stifles innovation.

The Rise of Teamship

Teamship represents a fundamental reimagining of how teams operate, driven by two key elements:

1. Co-elevation behaviors – teammates committed to lifting each other up and pushing each other to greater heights
2. Modern collaboration practices and tools that enable bolder innovation and faster decision-making

This isn’t just delegation or empowerment – it’s a complete transformation of how teams work together. The most disruptive companies today succeed because teamship behaviors are embedded in their DNA from day one.

Making the Shift

The transformation from leadership to teamship requires systematic change across multiple dimensions, including:

• Moving from conflict avoidance to radical candor
• Building purposeful rather than serendipitous relationships
• Shifting from individual to collective resilience
• Embedding peer-to-peer coaching and accountability

While this may sound daunting, our research shows it can be achieved through simple, targeted practices that turn abstract cultural goals into concrete daily habits. You need to make culture change a daily assignment.

The Future is Peer-to-Peer

In today’s complex business environment, no single leader can have all the answers or bandwidth to drive every initiative. The organizations that will thrive are those that can harness the collective wisdom and capability of their teams through both behavioral transformation and modern collaborative tools.

The era of the hero leader is over. The future belongs to those who understand that true leadership means creating the conditions for peers to elevate each other to extraordinary performance. Once my friend, the CEO’s team embraced teamship, they didn’t just maintain performance, they accelerated toward their ambitious goals while freeing their leader to pursue new innovations. This isn’t an isolated success story. It’s a blueprint for the future of organizational performance.

The question facing every organization today isn’t whether to make this shift, but how quickly they can accomplish it. In a world of constant disruption and change, teamship isn’t just an option, it’s an imperative for survival and success.