What are the qualities of a great team? You have probably learned that team success requires building trust, promoting psychological safety and cultivating a uniform mindset. Seems logical. You may have learned that consensus is important and hierarchies are bad. Okay. You undoubtedly got that old chestnut: “There is no me in the team.” A classic. Team Building 101. It is conventional wisdom, and yet it lacks the paradox of teams completely: although companies often focus on merging everyone into a single homogeneous entity, really great teams embrace the different, different roles and talents of their team members.
Every well -performing group in an organization will have someone who takes the lead in making decisions (the director), someone who produces work and achieves results (the Achiever), another who keeps the group on the right track and on schedule (the stabilizer), another who keeps the relationships healthy (the Harmonizer) and someone who with ideas with ideas).
What is the ideal mix of roles in a team?
To answer that most important question, we have asked thousands of managers and managers to measure their “best” and “worst” teams. And we have discovered some fascinating patterns.
No less than 97 percent of the best teams had all five roles filled. On the other hand, only about 21 percent of the worst teams filled every role.
There is a reason why great teams have someone in every role: it is difficult to be successful without each of those talents being represented. You have probably experienced teams with a couple of directors, all of whom compete together to be the decision makers, and not performers to actually do the work. You may have experienced the opposite: a team without directors and a striking inability to make decisions. Maybe you have seen a group without a pioneer, a team where creative ideas die. And the list continues. Of course, not every team will contain exactly five members, so where can you have more people and are still enormously successful? The short version is that the best teams in our research were able to easily handle more harmonizers and performance, and too many pioneers were rarely a problem. And here is more details about the distribution of people for all five roles:
Harmonizers
Having more than a few harmonizers, a role that focuses on promoting cooperation and resolving conflicts, can help a team with improved communication and teamwork, reducing internal conflicts and improving cooperation. As long as all other roles are treated, having too many harmonisators is usually not a problem. Without coverage of the other roles, however, having a group that praises interpersonal harmony about achieving results, touching deadlines, etc., can quickly become a recipe for what former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns is called ‘terminal kindness’. You might experience a lack of healthy debate, which may lead to group thinking or failure to consider different perspectives. Although cohesion is important, too much emphasis on harmony can hinder the capacity of the team to effectively tackle challenging problems.
Performance
When it comes to an abundance of performance, assuming that all other roles are being treated, it seems that having a bunch of people who want to do great work without being in charge of the leadership. More people identify themselves as performers than any other role, so it is likely that your team will have more than a few. If you have a team of performance and nothing else, you will probably excel in performing tasks, but not in other areas such as decision -making, innovation or interpersonal dynamics. There is also a risk of competition rather than cooperation, because multiple performance is competing to demonstrate their individual productivity, possibly at the expense of overall team cohesion and effectiveness. But when it is in balance with the other roles, loading performers is usually not really a problem.
Trail blazers
It is not difficult to imagine the problems that would occur with a team full of prailblazers and no one else: brilliant, out-of-the-box ideas and absolutely no performance. Such a team can struggle with follow-through, jump from one innovative concept to another without fully developing or implementing one of them. And an excess of pioneers can create an environment that is too chaotic or unpredictable, without the stability needed for consistent performance. In reality, however, there are simply not so many trail blazers that run through the corridors of the typical organization, so you have the chance to find one to find one than you are to struggle with an abundance.
Stabilizers
That brings us to stabilizers, a role that often occurs in most organizations, so you do run a risk of overloading. The risk that you are worried, well, risk – in particular avoiding it. A team with too many stabilizers can become overly rigid and focuses on processes and procedures at the expense of innovation and rapid reactions to changing circumstances. This can lead to a team that is highly organized but slowly adapts, possibly missing opportunities or unable to deal with evolving challenges in dynamic environments. Many innovations require that some risks and deviation from existing protocols, not something that stabilizers love, so you need a pioneer to offer some counterweight to the natural risk aversion of the stabilizer.
Drivers
This is another role that often appears in organizations. Too many directors can lead to power struggle, conflicting decision -making processes and a lack of uniform direction. This can create an environment where “too many chefs are in the kitchen”, which leads to constant debates about strategy and leadership, which may paralyze the ability of the team to move forward effectively. The absence of followers in a director-heavy team can also mean that decisions, once taken, can miss the necessary support for a successful implementation.
The collection meals here is clear: diversity in rolls is the key to offering the right balance. You need a mix of skills and perspectives to make your team really shine. Everything that is equal, in a team of eight people, you might want a director, one stabilizer, one pioneer, two harmonizers and three performance. Of course all things are rarely the same, so if your director and stabilizer are a little bit me, you can have two and be good. The same applies to your pioneer.
Ultimately, it is less about the number of people in every role and more to ensure that the talents and voices of the director, Stabilizer, Achiever, Trailblazer and Harmonizer are well represented.
Extract from team players: the five critical roles you need to build a winning team. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Murphy. Available at Basic Venture, a print of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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