Team one

In leadership, one of the most critical shifts you can make is identifying who your “first team” truly is, and it’s not your direct reports. Your first team is composed of your peers. Prioritizing these relationships is essential for creating alignment and fostering collaboration at the highest levels of the organization. The challenge lies in being willing to disappoint your own staff at times in order to operate effectively with your first team. To work well with this group, you must develop certain key skills and understand the dynamics involved.

Awareness of each other’s work

For a leadership team to function, members need to be familiar with each other’s work. Understanding your peers’ goals, challenges, and work streams allows for more informed decision-making and cross-functional collaboration. It also allows you to represent this to others if required, and also to be a source of insight into challenges in those verticals.

From characters to people

When we don’t know someone well, it’s easy to reduce them to a character in a mental narrative of our own making, often based on assumptions rather than reality. Collaboration is built on understanding, not assumptions. The more time you spend learning about your peers on a personal level, often through team offsites, regular check-ins, or even through debate, the more they transform from abstract characters into real people. This personal connection fosters trust and makes it far easier to optimize for the collective.

Refereeing defection

In any team collaboration, there comes a point where self-interest can conflict with collective goals. Game theory teaches us about dominant strategies, where individuals prioritize personal gain over collective benefit. However, true collaboration requires all team members to participate in good faith. The hard truth is that you only truly have a “Team One” when you’re willing to disappoint your direct reports in order to support your peers. If a team member defects by prioritizing their own interests over the team’s, it can trigger a ripple effect, leading others to follow suit.

This is where leadership must step in. Whether it’s the manager or a respected peer, someone must serve as the referee, holding team members accountable and ensuring alignment with the collective mission. Without this refereeing, the team’s cohesion can quickly break down, leading to fragmented efforts and diminished results.

Ultimately, being a part of “Team One” requires making difficult decisions, sometimes choosing to support your peers over your direct reports for the greater organizational good.

Avoiding zero-sum culture

In some organizations, success is perceived as zero-sum, where gains must come at the expense of others. This mindset fosters competition, not collaboration. Leaders need to create positive cultures that focus on mutual recognition, support, and if possible, compensation. In such environments, success is not about capturing resources but about impact and collective growth, allowing widespread success across teams.

Making the shift explicit

Even if the ingredients for collaboration are present, awareness, personal connection, accountability, and positive culture, the shift toward prioritizing your peers as your first team rarely happens organically. It requires explicit conversation and intention. As a leader, you need to guide your team in shifting their identity from their functional group to the leadership group. This change in perspective is critical for long-term success at the organizational level.

Getting to trust

Note that getting to a place where you can consider having a “first team” or “team one” requires that you’ve established a sufficient level of trust with the team, to a point where disputes are resolved in the open between everyone and not privately or via lobbying with the boss. Likewise, it’s important to make it explicit, when I use the word trust, I don’t mean “blind trust”; you are acting as if you are one team, and all of your collective direct reports, priorities, efforts are co-owned by all leaders. This is non-trivial to achieve, and it will challenge your ego if you have one. It requires deliberate vulnerability with each other to achieve, and I do not recommend you underestimate the work required to reach this level.

If you are interested more in this concept, I recommend you read The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.