Editor’s Note: Grace Ueng, leadership coach and founder of Savvy Growth, is the author of The Work of Happiness. She advises CXOs and their teams, helping them reach their goals at work and in life.
Friday night, I finished Episode 4 of the new season of Ted Lasso and immediately picked up my phone.
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I had just spent part of my afternoon coaching a leader through a challenge that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked on a growing team: smart, capable people who are all working hard but aren’t necessarily working together.
Different functions had different information. People were communicating in separate Slack channels. One person was frustrated that another was withholding information. Problems that should have been solved collaboratively were instead bouncing between individuals.
Everyone was supposedly playing for the same team.
But to an outsider looking in, they weren’t always acting like it.
Then I watched “Ted Lasso.”
Without spoiling the episode, one of its themes is the damage cliques can do to a team — and what can happen when people stop dividing themselves into camps and remember that they are all trying to win the same game.
At the end of the show, I smiled at the coincidence. Then I texted the leader I had coached earlier that day:
Btw, sorry to send a text at this hour, but I just finished Episode 4 of Ted Lasso’s new season. It’s right on point with your situation and what we discussed today. (Getting rid of cliques to be on the same — winning — team.)
When we hear the word “clique,” we may think of the school cafeteria: the cool kids at one table, the athletes at another.
But workplace cliques are usually subtler.
They can look like engineering versus sales. Sales versus marketing. Headquarters versus the field. Senior leadership versus everyone else.
Or simply: my people, my information, my priorities.
Cliques at work don't always look like cliques
When that happens, perfectly reasonable behavior at the individual level can become dysfunctional at the organizational level.
Someone protects information because they believe it belongs to their function.
Someone bypasses a colleague because it seems faster.
Someone asks a different person the same question because they didn’t like the first answer.
Someone solves a problem privately instead of documenting it where everyone can learn from it.
None of these actions alone destroys a company.
Collectively, however, they create friction, duplicate work, slow decisions and, most damagingly, erode trust.
The question I kept coming back to
During my coaching conversation that afternoon, I found myself asking some version of the same question again and again:
What would be different if everyone really believed they were on the same team?
It sounds so simple.
But think about it.
If I believe your success contributes to my success, I am more likely to give you the information you need.
If we share an objective, I don’t need to win the argument. We need to find the best answer.
If a colleague sees something I don’t, that’s not a threat to my expertise. It’s additional information that can help us make a better decision.
And if another function succeeds, I don’t lose.
We win.
Alignment changes behavior
Leaders sometimes respond to collaboration problems by focusing on the problematic behavior:
Share more information.
Communicate better.
Stop working in silos.
Those interventions can help. But I think there is a more fundamental question:
What is causing reasonable people to behave as though they are on different teams?
Sometimes it’s incentives. Sometimes it’s organizational structure. Sometimes responsibilities aren’t clear. Sometimes information isn’t accessible. Sometimes leaders inadvertently reward individual heroics more than collective success.
And sometimes the organization has simply grown faster than its culture and operating practices.
That is why telling people to “collaborate more” rarely solves the whole problem. Leaders have to create the conditions that make collaboration the natural way to win — moving from “me” to “we.”
There is also a happiness@work dimension to this. One of our fundamental human needs is belonging — the feeling that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
At our best, a team gives us exactly that. We know what we’re trying to accomplish. We understand how our work contributes. We trust that other people will help us when we need them, and we do the same for them.
That doesn’t mean we always agree.
High-performing teams can disagree vigorously. They can and should have positive friction. But there is an enormous difference between disagreeing with a teammate and treating a teammate like an opponent.
The best teams know the difference.
So here’s a question to consider this week: Are the people in your organization merely working at the same company, or do they genuinely believe they’re on the same team?
And perhaps an even more revealing one:
What are you doing as a leader that makes it easier — or harder — for them to play that way?
Because whether it’s football, soccer or business, individual talent can only take you so far.
You win as a team.