Why Smart Leaders Make Poor Teams

Your approach to teamwork could be killing team culture

David Clode/Unsplash

The unexpected call shattered David Moyes’ dream. Just ten months into what was supposed to be a six-year job, he was being fired.

Moyes succeeded Sir Alex Ferguson to manage Manchester United—a global powerhouse with 13 Premier League titles and 38 trophies. Under his leadership, the team suffered one of the most spectacular collapses in sports history. They finished seventh. Seventh. Their worst performance in a quarter-century.

But here's the thing that should terrify every leader: The players didn't suddenly forget how to play football. The talent was still there. The powerful Manchester United machine was still there. Yet somehow, in just a few months, a winning team had become a group of frustrated individuals.

What happened?

The rot started with arrogance, not in the locker room, but in the manager's office.

Moyes, determined to create his own imprint, made a fatal assumption. He disregarded team culture as if it were just Ferguson's old way of doing things. This wasn’t a change of tactics, but the total dismantling of the team’s foundation, even attacking it. Moyes stated publicly that Manchester should aspire to be like their rivals. He treated proven champions like they were losers.

And doubt, it turns out, is extremely contagious.

Successful players began questioning themselves. Communication broke down. Trust evaporated. Individual survival replaced collective purpose. A team culture built over decades crumbled in months.

Most leaders, intentionally or not, do this exact same thing. They treat team culture as an afterthought—something soft and dispensable rather than the invisible foundation for success.

Until it’s too late.

Here are five signals to watch out for, as well as what you can do about it.

Five Reasons Your Team Culture Is Failing

1. Your Team Lacks a Clear Purpose

We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Research shows that 76% of people think work matters most when there's a sense of community—one of the three Cs of meaningful work. A strong team culture predicts strong results. Those who work mainly within a team are more than twice as likely to be fully engaged.

Purpose is the source of meaning and motivation that drives us to do our best work together. Most companies know that having a clear organizational purpose is essential. However, having a team purpose is just as important—actually, even more.

Accounting firm KPMG discovered this when they invited teams to share stories about their work—to find meaning in their work. Accounting feels cut and dry. It’s not that employee engagement was low; on the contrary. But for most, their work seemed to lack meaning. Until they began to connect the dots by looking at the impact of their work. Teams found they were actually championing democracy, helping farms grow, fighting terrorism, and even protecting democracy by certifying the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

People connect more powerfully to their immediate tribe—the colleagues they work with daily, sweat with on deadlines, and celebrate victories alongside—than to some distant corporate statement.

Work doesn't have meaning—we make it meaningful. A team purpose gives members deep meaning, shifting the focus from doing a job to creating impact.

2. You Reward Individual Behaviors, Not Collective Ones

You get what you reward. It's that simple. Companies praise teamwork at every meeting, but then design systems that reward individual behavior. Performance reviews, bonuses, promotions, employee-of-the-month programs—everything celebrates the solo performer—the player who scored the goal, not the team who made the play.

Your team culture is defined by what you reward and punish. People will believe your actions more than your words. When standing out matters more than lifting others up, teamwork becomes collaboration theater.

If you reward heroic behavior, don't expect people to play together. If you reward firefighting over prevention, you'll get more fires. If you practice individual performance instead of collective feedback, don’t expect blame to go away.

The Ohio State Buckeyes football team learned this the hard way. Despite having talented players, they were stuck in mediocrity for years. Until Jim Tressel, their new coach, made one crucial change. He stopped rewarding individual statistics and instead celebrated only collective wins. The result? A national championship the following year and sustained success that followed.

Your reward systems don't just influence behavior—they shape identity. When you consistently reward individualism, people will stop thinking about what’s best for the team in order to please the system.

3. You Silence Productive Tensions

Harmony is overrated. The best teams aren't the happiest—they're the ones that know how to fight well. Research on orchestras found that "grumpy" musicians played together slightly better than those where everyone was cheerful.

Tension, when channeled properly, drives high performance.

Most leaders see conflict as dysfunction and rush to smooth things over. They want everyone to get along, avoid difficult conversations, and maintain artificial peace. However, a workplace without tensions is a workplace without truth.

Real teams understand that addressing conflict works both ways—even when it means pushing back against leaders who aren't modeling the behaviors they preach.

The New Zealand All Blacks learned this during a crucial period in their development. The team had established high standards for punctuality and preparation, but those standards meant nothing if only some abided by them. When coach Steve Hansen began arriving late to team meetings, tension built in the room. Finally, once it happened again, a player stood up and said, "Coach, you can't be late. Not again, please." The room went silent. Hansen bit the bullet and apologized—that was the end of both the story and his tardiness.

Groupthink promotes mediocrity. Productive tension encourages people to challenge ideas, raise standards, and hold each other accountable. When teams prioritize performance and great work over harmony, they become unstoppable.

4. Asking for Help Feels Like Failure

We have a fundamentally broken relationship with asking for help. That’s why collaboration fails—not because people don’t want to work together. In most workplace cultures, asking for help feels like admitting weakness, incompetence, or failure.

Research shows that experienced managers tend to overestimate their leadership effectiveness compared to their colleagues' perceptions. This overconfidence prevents people from seeking input that could actually improve outcomes. Even when people recognize they need help, asking for it requires swallowing their pride.

Design firm IDEO discovered this when they made asking for help a core cultural value. When designers get stuck on a problem, they're expected to stop and call an informal "huddle"—a quick brainstorming session where they ask colleagues for advice and input. Everyone participates willingly because they know they'll need help themselves at some point. In their survey, 89% of employees showed up on at least one colleague's list of top five helpers. There's no shame in asking for help because "making others successful" is an explicit company value.

Most people don’t ask for help even if their job is at risk. They need to be sure about three things: that you’re competent, you have their backs, and you’ll consistently show up. That feels like such a high standard that most people opt to figure things out on their own.

When people don't know who to ask for help or whether their input will matter, collaboration becomes confusion rather than connection.

5. Everyone Is Accountable (So No One Really Is)

When everyone is accountable for everything, no one is accountable for anything. This is the dark side of inclusive cultures where everyone feels part of everything and gets involved in decision-making, but they lack clear, individual roles.

Nice, inclusive teams often avoid the hard work of defining clear responsibilities because it feels exclusionary. They want everyone to feel ownership, so they make everything everyone's problem. The result? Critical tasks fall through the cracks because everyone assumed someone else was handling them.

The 2010 French national team perfectly illustrates this dysfunction. When striker Nicolas Anelka was sent home for insulting the coach, the team revolted and went on strike. Senior players like Thierry Henry and Patrice Evra blamed the federation, the media, and each other. But when asked who was responsible for the team's collapse, fingers pointed everywhere except inward. Players felt wronged, but no one owned their part in the disaster.

This is the perfect example of diluted accountability: When everything becomes everyone’s problem, no one is actually responsible. Clear roles and accountability prevent this buck-passing. Collective ownership needs to be supplemented with individual accountability.

Clarity isn't cruel—it's kind. When people know exactly what they're responsible for, they can pour their energy into excellence instead of wasting it on confusion about who should do what.

How to Stop Your Team from Falling Apart

David Moyes thought he was just updating tactics and bringing in fresh ideas. He had no clue his arrogance was actually dismissing—and dismantling—the culture that had made Manchester United unstoppable for decades.

The scariest part? You could be doing the same thing to your team right now.

Every time you reward individual heroics over collective success—every time you smooth over productive tensions to maintain artificial harmony—you're harming team culture.

When you get it right, and when your systems actually support the invisible mechanisms that bind teams together, something remarkable happens. Individual excellence fuels collective triumph.

Need help building a team culture that actually lasts? Let's talk.