Team Intelligence by Jon Levy How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius

What's it about?

Team Intelligence (2025) exposes a paradox: great leadership isn’t about the leader at all – it’s about building teams that operate as something greater than the sum of their parts. In its exploration of what makes a team intelligent, it reveals why teams of superstars often underperform and how figures like Steve Jobs achieved extraordinary results without traditional leadership qualities. It also outlines the specific habits that allow collective genius to emerge.

What makes a team truly successful? Experience, star talent, proven strategies. At least, that’s what the teams behind some spectacular business failures believed.

The collapse of the streaming service Quibi illustrates this perfectly. The company raised nearly two billion dollars with Hollywood heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg at the helm and former HP CEO Meg Whitman running operations. Even with premium content and massive marketing spend, the service folded in just six months.

Then there was Google Glass. It featured advanced technology and celebrity endorsements, yet the fifteen-hundred-dollar prototype became a punchline, banned from venues and earning wearers the nickname “Glassholes.”

As these failed ventures show, assembling the smartest people doesn’t always lead to success. More than individual brilliance, what’s needed is team intelligence, a group’s ability to perform diverse tasks together, effectively interacting, communicating, and coordinating thinking to deliver powerful results.

This lesson will break down the principles of team intelligence: what it is and how to leverage it. Ready? Let’s begin.
Neanderthals are often the butt of “stupid cavemen” jokes. But they were actually stronger and smarter than early humans. So, why did we survive while they didn’t? The answer lies in group size. Neanderthals lived in small bands of ten to fifteen individuals, while early humans formed communities of one hundred to one hundred and fifty people. Forming large groups and working collaboratively has always been humanity’s superpower.

That evolutionary advantage persists in modern business. Startups with cofounders are 30 percent more likely to secure funding than solo ventures. Yet most organizations fail to fully leverage the power of teams.

The conventional leadership model follows a waterfall approach – invest in elite training at the top, and excellence trickles down. Sometimes it works. But there’s a better approach. When Eisenhower introduced America’s interstate highway system, inspired by Germany’s autobahn network, he wasn’t just building roads – he was creating connections. The system linked metropolitan areas, industrial centers, and resources across the entire country, transforming the economy.

The same philosophy applies directly to team structures. In a traditional waterfall structure with nine direct reports, there are only nine relationships – everything flows through the manager as gatekeeper. But when team members connect with each other like a national highway system, you create forty-five unique relationships. Information flows where it’s needed without bottlenecks. The team functions like a brain, with neurons firing in all directions.

How do leaders build these connections? Through trust, which is integral to collective intelligence. Trust allows information to flow freely between members rather than bottlenecking through a manager, enables people to coordinate without constant oversight, and creates the psychological safety where team members actually share knowledge and admit mistakes.

Two specific mechanisms help generate this trust. The first is the IKEA effect. This psychological principle states that we place a higher value on things we have helped create. Think of the pride you feel for a piece of furniture you assembled yourself, simply because you put in the effort. That same sense of ownership transfers to the workplace. When team members actively collaborate on a project, they become more attached to the outcome – and to each other.

The second mechanism is the vulnerability loop. This occurs when one person admits uncertainty or mistakes and another responds with their own vulnerability rather than judgment. Research shows that vulnerability doesn’t come after trust. It precedes it. As a leader, acknowledging your own limitations and mistakes creates an atmosphere of trust and psychological safety from the top down.
So, we’ve established that trust builds team intelligence. Now let's look at composition. Is there such a thing as too much talent? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Counterintuitively, research suggests a team can suffer from an excess of ability. When more than roughly 60 percent of a team consists of top-level performers, overall performance starts to decline. Even World Cup football teams have been shown to play worse when loaded with too many elite players.

The real predictor of success? Something called task interdependence – the degree to which team members must coordinate and rely on each other to complete their work. In football, this means players passing, positioning themselves to receive, and creating space for teammates rather than constantly trying to score individually. High task interdependence requires collaboration – low task interdependence allows for solitary success.

But here’s the rub. Effective task interdependence often requires individuals to sacrifice personal glory for team objectives. For collective intelligence to flourish, people must frequently forgo status and rewards. They also need to feel they have a voice and psychological safety to express it, regardless of their position in the hierarchy.

That means valuing the glue players – a term borrowed from the NBA for athletes who do the unglamorous work that makes everyone else better. Their statistics aren’t impressive. But they do the work that elevates other players: they set screens, play defense, and pass to open teammates.

There’s a powerful parallel in evolutionary biologist William Muir’s experiments with chickens. Muir tried breeding “superchickens” – the most productive egg layers – together. After six generations, the results were catastrophic: only three birds survived, having pecked each other to death in their competitive aggression. Meanwhile, another group bred for prosocial behavior – birds that got along well – thrived and dramatically increased productivity. The aggressive superstars destroyed their flock, whereas the cooperative birds lifted everyone up.

The lesson translates directly to teams. By rewarding collaborative behavior and recognizing unquantifiable team contributions – the timely assist, the morale boost, the conflict resolution – even a collection of superstars can transform into a superstar team.
Trust and “glue players” provide the raw ingredients for a high-performing team. But ingredients alone do not make a meal. We need to know how to combine them to create action.

Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University has spent years studying this question through fascinating experiments. She brings groups of strangers together and assigns them complex tasks – everything from solving visual puzzles to brainstorming business strategies.

Her research proves that collective intelligence derives from interaction patterns rather than individual IQ. The highest-performing groups share three characteristics: members take roughly equal conversational turns, they demonstrate high social sensitivity through reading each other’s cues and emotions, and notably, they often include more women, who tend to score higher on social perceptiveness.

These interaction patterns develop quickly, often in the first few meetings. As a leader, you shape which habits take root. Sometimes, the best move involves stepping back entirely. When one person dominates or power struggles emerge, team intelligence suffers. Ever had your boss leave for a few days and noticed how everyone suddenly steps up? That’s the effect of distributed leadership.

Of course, most organizations still require designated managers. If you hold that role, you’ll need to adapt your style to foster this intelligence.

Your primary responsibility becomes mission alignment. An estimated 60 percent of employees don’t know their organization’s mission, and this lack of clarity reportedly costs US organizations around four hundred and fifty billion dollars annually. To fix this, borrow the military concept of commander’s intent – a clear statement of the operation’s purpose that allows soldiers to improvise when plans fall apart.

You create this clarity through repetition. Instead of a single mention at a kickoff meeting, weave objectives into regular conversations until the mission becomes second nature. You might even designate an “alignment champion,” someone specifically tasked with connecting daily work to the larger purpose. This becomes especially powerful when you link the team's efficiency to personal goals, such as work-life balance. When you spot alignment in action – someone making a decision that clearly serves the mission – acknowledge it publicly. After all, when you’re all in alignment, that’s cause for celebration.
In the 1930s, a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen started making wooden toys. He called his company Lego. Within a few decades, the company pivoted to interlocking plastic bricks and struck gold. By 1999, the company had sold approximately 203 billion Lego bricks worldwide.

Then came trouble. Video games were captivating kids everywhere, and Lego panicked. The response? Diversification on steroids – new product lines every few months, theme parks, electronic toys, movie tie-ins. The company had developed what can only be described as corporate ADHD. By two thousand and four, Lego was hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

This collapse teaches a brutal lesson. If you want to make a smart team stupid, simply spread their attention thin enough.

Intelligent teams avoid the trap of constant contact. Instead, they use what the author calls bursty communication. This involves intense, focused collaboration sessions followed by long stretches of uninterrupted individual work. Think scheduled daily stand-ups or dedicated collaboration windows which free the rest of the day for deep focus.

It sounds paradoxical, but the most effective teams actually make communication harder. They block out no-email hours and expect people to exhaust their own problem-solving resources before firing off a message. They ruthlessly cut meetings to only what’s absolutely essential.

Lego’s turnaround relied on this exact philosophy. A new CEO resisted the temptation of quick fixes and returned to basics, slashing product lines by 30 percent. By 2005, the company was profitable again with over a billion in revenue.

But Lego added something else: “Firesides” – one-on-one conversations anyone could request with anyone in the company. The rule? The listener cannot interrupt. They can only offer what Lego finally recognized as their most precious resource: complete, undivided attention.
Now, while it’s best to discourage stealing millions in priceless diamonds, there are some key takeaways worth lifting from Leonardo Notarbartolo. He was the mastermind behind the Antwerp diamond heist, and his work offers a masterclass in team construction that we can actually use.

In 2003, Notarbartolo and his crew pulled off what’s been called the heist of the century. Their target: the Antwerp Diamond Centre, a vault protected by ten layers of security including heat detectors, motion sensors, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with one hundred million possible combinations.

To breach this impenetrable fortress, Notarbartolo ignored generalists in favor of hyper-specialization. There was the King of Keys, an expert lock picker. The Genius, who could disarm complex alarm systems. The Monster, who handled logistics and muscle. Each person brought a singular, irreplaceable skill. They studied, they rehearsed, and in a single weekend, they bypassed every security layer and vanished with over one hundred million dollars in diamonds, gems, and gold.

The lesson here is clear. If you want to accomplish something difficult – or seemingly impossible – assemble a team with clearly defined, complementary roles.

Teams with diverse skill sets demonstrate higher collective intelligence. When everyone brings different expertise to the table, the group can tackle problems from multiple angles. A software team needs both the architect who designs elegant systems and the debugger who hunts down obscure errors.

But skill diversity is only part of the equation. Demographic diversity – differences in race, gender, class, and background – also elevates team intelligence. Varied life experiences mean varied perspectives, reducing blind spots and challenging assumptions that homogeneous groups miss entirely.

Notarbartolo’s crew succeeded because each specialist knew their role and trusted the others to execute theirs. The same principle applies to your team – minus the felony.
Finally, it’s time to address that question that might have been nagging at you this whole time: what if someone on your team just isn’t a team player? We’ve all dealt with toxic team members – the colleague who takes credit for others’ work, undermines decisions in passive-aggressive asides, or creates an atmosphere of anxiety wherever they go. It’s not pleasant. But, with the right management, this toxic team-mate won’t undermine team intelligence.

First thing to note: someone who once took your sandwich from the communal fridge or snapped at you during a stressful deadline isn’t a toxic team member. We all have off days and behave in ways we regret.

True toxicity usually involves the so-called Dark Triad: a narcissistic need for admiration, a sociopathic lack of empathy, or Machiavellian manipulation. Here is the uncomfortable truth: these people often drive team success precisely because of these unlikable qualities. Their ruthlessness, relentless drive, and unchecked ambition can force progress where others might hesitate.

Take Steve Jobs, for example. By many accounts, he was a textbook narcissist – abusive, dismissive, impossibly demanding. In 1985, Apple’s board had enough and pushed him out. What happened? Apple nearly collapsed. When Jobs returned in 1997, the company rebounded spectacularly. His vision and intensity, the very traits that made him difficult, were inseparable from his genius.

This leaves leaders with a difficult dilemma. How do you manage toxic team members without losing their contributions or letting them corrode the culture?

The strategic move involves what’s known as buffering. This means building balance into your team composition from the get-go. When hiring, shift your criteria to prioritize prosocial people who demonstrate genuine skill at collaboration. During interviews, watch for those who ask thoughtful questions about team culture. Pay attention to candidates who describe achievements using “we” rather than “I” – and who can articulate how they’ve helped colleagues succeed.

A team with enough connectors, diplomats, and glue players creates a kind of immune system. These individuals don’t just tolerate difficult personalities – they can actually redirect toxic energy toward productive outcomes, insulating others from the worst effects.

The goal isn’t purging every abrasive personality. Some friction generates heat that forges better ideas. The goal is ensuring that one caustic element doesn’t poison the entire system. Balance is everything.
In this lesson to Team Intelligence by Jon Levy, you’ve learned that collective genius relies on the quality of interaction rather than the raw IQ of individual hires.

True team intelligence manifests through equal participation, high social sensitivity, and the discipline of “bursty” communication – intense collaboration followed by deep focus. Effective leadership requires engineering an environment where this intelligence can flourish. This means establishing psychological safety, ensuring every personal goal aligns with the clearer mission, and valuing the “glue players” who bind the group together. The best teams operate as networks. Trust and information flow directly between members, bypassing the bottlenecks typical of rigid hierarchies.