How to curate a winning team
What are the qualities of a great team? You’ve probably been taught that team success requires building trust, fostering psychological safety, and cultivating a unified mindset. Seems logical. You might have learned that consensus is important and hierarchies are bad. Okay. You’ve undoubtedly been given that old chestnut, “There’s no I in team.” A classic. Team building 101. It’s conventional wisdom, and yet it completely misses the paradox of teams: While companies often focus on merging everyone into a single homogeneous entity, truly great teams embrace the distinct, diverse roles and talents of their team members.
Every high-performing group in an organization will have someone who takes the lead on making decisions (the Director), somebody who produces work and achieves results (the Achiever), another who keeps the group on track and on schedule (the Stabilizer), another who keeps the relationships healthy (the Harmonizer), and someone who challenges the group with ideas outside the norm (the Trailblazer).
What’s the ideal mix of roles on a team?
To answer that all-important question, we asked thousands of executives and managers to measure their “best” and “worst” teams. And we uncovered some fascinating patterns.
A whopping 97 percent of the best teams had all five roles filled. On the flip side, only about 21 percent of the worst teams filled every role.
There’s a reason why great teams have someone in every role: It’s tough to be successful without each of those talents being represented. You’ve probably experienced teams with a bunch of Directors, all competing with each other to be the decision-makers, and no Achievers to actually do the work. You might have experienced the opposite: a team with no Directors and a striking inability to make any decisions. Maybe you’ve seen a group without a Trailblazer, a team where creative ideas go to die. And the list goes on. Of course, not every team is going to contain exactly five members, so where can you have more people and still be wildly successful? The short version is that the best teams in our research were able to easily handle more Harmonizers and Achievers, and too many Trailblazers was rarely a problem. And here’s more detail about the distribution of people for all five roles:
Harmonizers
Having more than a few Harmonizers, a role that focuses on fostering collaboration and resolving conflicts, can help a team with improved communication and teamwork, reducing internal conflicts and enhancing cooperation. As long as all of the other roles are covered, having too many Harmonizers isn’t typically a problem. Without coverage of the other roles, however, having a group that prizes interpersonal harmony over achieving results, hitting deadlines, etc., could quickly become a recipe for what former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns called “terminal niceness.” You might experience a lack of healthy debate, potentially leading to groupthink or a failure to consider diverse perspectives. While cohesion is important, too much emphasis on harmony could hinder the team’s ability to innovate or tackle challenging problems effectively.
Achievers
When it comes to an abundance of Achievers, again assuming that all the other roles are covered, having a bunch of people who want to do great work without needing to be in charge seems like a dream. More people identify as Achievers than any other role, so it’s likely your team will have more than a few. If you’ve got a team of Achievers and nothing else, you’ll likely excel in executing tasks but lack in other areas like decision-making, innovation, or interpersonal dynamics. There’s also a risk of competition rather than collaboration, as multiple Achievers vie to demonstrate their individual productivity, potentially at the cost of overall team cohesion and effectiveness. But when balanced with the other roles, loading up on Achievers won’t typically be much of a problem.
Trailblazers
It’s not hard to imagine the problems that would occur with a team replete with Trailblazers and no one else: brilliant, out-of-the-box ideas and absolutely no execution. Such a team might struggle with follow-through, jumping from one innovative concept to another without fully developing or implementing any of them. And an excess of Trailblazers might create an environment that’s too chaotic or unpredictable, lacking the stability needed for consistent performance. In reality, however, there just aren’t that many Trailblazers walking the halls of the typical organization, so you’re more likely to struggle finding one than you are to grapple with an overabundance.
Stabilizers
That brings us to Stabilizers, a role that appears frequently in most organizations, so you do face some risk of overload. The risk you face concerns, well, risk— specifically the avoidance of it. A team with too many Stabilizers might become overly rigid, focusing excessively on processes and procedures at the expense of innovation and quick responses to changing circumstances. This could lead to a team that’s highly organized but slow to adapt, potentially missing opportunities or failing to address evolving challenges in dynamic environments. Many innovations require some risk- taking and deviating from existing protocols, not something that Stabilizers love, so you’ll need a Trailblazer to offer some counterweight to the Stabilizer’s natural risk aversion.
Directors
This is another role that appears often in organizations. Too many Directors can result in power struggles, conflicting decision-making processes, and a lack of unified direction. This can create an environment where there are “too many cooks in the kitchen,” leading to constant debates over strategy and leadership, potentially paralyzing the team’s ability to move forward effectively. The absence of followers in a Director-heavy team can also mean that decisions, once made, may lack the necessary support for successful implementation.
The takeaway here is clear: diversity in roles is key to providing the right balance. You need a mix of skills and perspectives to really make your team shine. All things being equal, on a team of eight people, you might want one Director, one Stabilizer, one Trailblazer, two Harmonizers, and three Achievers. Of course, all things are rarely equal, so if your Director and Stabilizer are a bit meeker, you can have two of each and be fine. The same goes for your Trailblazer.
Ultimately, it’s less about the number of people in each role and more about ensuring that the talents and voices of the Director, Stabilizer, Achiever, Trailblazer, and Harmonizer are well represented.
Excerpted from TEAM PLAYERS: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build a Winning Team. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Murphy. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
