“Alex, should I build a team made only of A players?”
A leader asked me this a few weeks ago. Almost word for word the same question I heard years ago, and then didn’t hear for a long time. When a question comes back like that, it’s a pattern worth paying attention to.
In this week’s episode of the podcast, I talked about why an all-star team might be your biggest risk. This article is the practical follow-up: what the research actually says and what you can do on Monday with the team you already have.
And let me be clear from the start: I’m not telling you to stop hiring great people. Hire them. Just stop assuming that more stars automatically means a better team.
More Talent Helps. Until It Doesn’t.
In a study published in Psychological Science, Roderick Swaab and Adam Galinsky’s team first asked people how talent relates to team performance. Most believed the relationship is simple: more top talent, better results, and it never turns negative.
Then they looked at real data from professional football and basketball. Talent helped, but only up to a point. After that, adding more stars made teams perform worse because coordination broke down. In baseball, where players depend on each other much less, the effect never appeared.
Now look at your engineering team. Code reviews, shared architecture, incident response, handovers. That’s not baseball. That’s basketball.
This isn’t new, by the way. In the 1970s, Meredith Belbin put the brightest, most analytical people he could find into the same teams during management simulations. These so-called Apollo teams kept finishing near the bottom. Endless debates. One-upmanship. Nobody willing to give in. And here’s the detail I love: people tended to pick colleagues just like themselves, so they ended up competing in the same arena instead of complementing each other.
Two more pieces of the puzzle:
- Boris Groysberg and his colleagues followed more than 1,000 star analysts in The Risky Business of Hiring Stars. After a star moved to a new company, not only did their performance drop, so did the effectiveness of the group they joined. A big part of what looked like individual brilliance was the platform and the team around them.
- Anita Williams Woolley’s research on collective intelligence found that how well a group performs is not strongly linked to the average or the highest individual intelligence in it. What mattered more was social sensitivity and whether people took turns in the conversation.
A star is not a person. A star is a person inside a system.
The Work Nobody Puts in Their Promotion Packet
Every tech team runs on work that doesn’t look impressive. Dependency upgrades. Flaky tests. Documentation. On-call. Answering the same client question for the tenth time.
In star-heavy teams, I see the same scenario again and again. Nobody wants the boring stuff. Sometimes it gets done badly (and yes, sometimes on purpose, so nobody asks again). And very often the leader ends up doing it, “so you can focus on the brilliant stuff.” That’s not leadership. That’s a composition problem landing on your calendar.
Kim Scott describes this beautifully in Radical Candor. She separates superstars (excellent people on a steep growth trajectory) from rock stars (excellent people on a gradual one, who love mastery and stability). Both are high performers. A team that rewards only one of them will lose the other. I wrote more about this in How to Lead Engineers Who Don’t Want Your Career Path.
What to Do Instead: Map Contribution, Not Seniority
Here is the part you can use this week.
- Run a 30-minute contribution map. List every person on your team. Not by title or years of experience, but by what they actually do when things get hard. Who pushes? Who questions? Who maintains? Who finishes? Who holds the team to a decision once it’s made? Look for the crowded columns and the empty ones. Most teams find a gap they never noticed.
- Be honest about performance, too. Steady and underperforming are not the same thing. Sometimes the map shows that someone is simply not in the right place, and the kind thing is to have that conversation.
- Write the gap into the role before you write the requirements. Next time you hire, ask your team first: “What does this team need that nobody here provides right now?” A brilliant candidate who duplicates a strength you already have in abundance may add less than a solid one who fills a real gap. (I learned this one the hard way, and wrote about it in 3 Leadership Lessons I Learned from Bad Recruitment Processes.)
- When friction shows up, ask one diagnostic question. Is this a competence problem or a composition problem? Is someone underperforming, or is the team simply missing a kind of contribution that nobody currently makes? The fixes are completely different.
- Make steady work visible. If maintenance, reliability and knowledge sharing never show up in performance conversations, you’ve told your team exactly what you value, whether you meant to or not.
Name the Values Conflict Out Loud
One more thing from the CQ Leadership Method perspective. Underneath “we only hire stars” there is very often not a competence question at all. It’s a values conflict wearing a hiring policy costume.
One belief says individual brilliance wins. The other says complementary contribution wins. Both are legitimate. But most organizations never actually discussed which one they believe in. They inherited the first one from startup folklore and never questioned it.
So put it on the table with your leadership team. Not as a debate to win, but as a decision to make together, explicitly. Because a value you never talked about will still drive every hiring decision you make.
The Bottom Line
An all-star roster looks amazing on paper. Under pressure, when people are tired and the release is late, the team that wins is the one that’s built to work together, not the one with the most impressive CVs.
So, here’s my question for you: which column on your contribution map is empty right now?
Want the full conversation? Listen to episode #203 of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. If you want tools like this every Sunday, join the free Leadership Pulse. And if you’re building your team from the ground up, grab my book From Code to People.
