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Tuesday Briefing 路 No. 36 路 13 Oct, 2026
The shift from leading individuals to leading the team as a unit
Most leadership tools are built for one person at a time, which trains us to see a team as a collection of individuals rather than something that functions between them. If you've led each of your people carefully and still sensed the group could be more, you're not doing it wrong. You just haven't been handed the right frame yet. Think like a coach.
Emily Rust
Founder, Stones
Featured
The tools we're given train us to miss the gap
The one-on-one, the individual goal, the performance review, the development plan. These are good tools, and they do something quietly unhelpful: they train us to see a team as a set of individuals who each need leading well.
So if you've led each of your people carefully and still sense the group could be more than it is, you're in very ordinary company. Most of us were promoted for the quality of our own work. Nobody sat us down to say that the thing we were now responsible for had changed.
The shift worth making is from leading each person's work to leading what happens between them.
Think like a coach
- 1
Choose for strengths
A coach picks players for what they do well and for how they fit with the others. Composition is a decision, not a given.
- 2
Put people in position
Each player has a role that suits them and makes sense alongside the roles either side. In a work team that means matching the work to people's strengths, their ambitions, and what they're ready to learn, because effort comes much more easily to someone doing work they're good at and care about.
- 3
Agree what winning is
Everyone on the field knows the goal and would describe it the same way. Shared direction isn't assumed - it's established.
- 4
Build trust between the players
When a player passes, they need to know a teammate is expecting the ball. That trust lives between the players, not between each player and the coach, and creating the conditions for it is the coach's job.
- 5
Run the learning loop
After the game the team looks at what happened. A fumbled pass is something to learn from, and nobody gets a telling-off for it. Then they practise.
The research
What the evidence supports
J. Richard Hackman spent most of his career studying teams at Harvard. In Leading Teams (2002) he identified five conditions that make it more likely a team will perform well: a real team with stable membership, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organisational context, and expert coaching. His argument was that a leader's main influence comes from getting those conditions in place, more than from managing behaviour as the work happens. Put his list beside the coach's five jobs and they are close to the same list.
Amy Edmondson's 1999 study of 51 work teams at an office furniture manufacturer adds weight to the last two jobs. Teams whose members felt safe to ask for help, raise problems, and admit mistakes did more learning together, and that learning was linked to how well the team performed.
Self-check
Your team against the five
Take ten minutes and answer these for your team as it is today.
Most teams are strong on two or three of these and thin on the rest. The thin ones are where to begin.
- Strengths: Could you name what each person is best at, and would they agree with you?
- Position: Is anyone spending most of their week on work that doesn't suit them?
- The goal: If you asked each person separately what the team is trying to achieve this quarter, would you hear the same answer?
- Trust: When someone hands work to a teammate, are they confident it will be picked up?
- The loop: When did the team last look together at how a piece of work went, with the aim of learning from it?
You might be thinking you didn't choose this team
That's fair. Most leaders inherit their players, and most are still on the field themselves, carrying work of their own. A sports coach has neither problem.
Two adjustments make the picture hold. Where you can't select, you can still position, because who does what is usually far more open to change than who is on the team. And where you can't leave the field entirely, you can step off it at set times. An hour a fortnight spent looking at how the team is working together, with the work itself put to one side, is a sideline of sorts.
Three things you can do today
- 1
Run the self-check
Ten minutes, on your own. Work through the five questions above and choose the one that looks thinnest. That's where to start.
- 2
Ask one positioning question
In your next one-on-one, try: "What part of your work do you think you're best at, and are you getting to do enough of it?" It takes two minutes and tells you whether people are playing where they should be.
- 3
Book a short team review
After the next piece of shared work, put twenty minutes in the calendar before the work is due so it reads as routine. One question is enough: "Where did one of us need something from another and not have it?" It looks at the pass between people, so nobody has to defend their own piece.
Leading a team is mostly design work, done ahead of time and from a step back, and it can be learned like any other part of the job.
That's all for this week's briefing.
Emily Rust 路 Founder, Stones
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