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The world’s best teams perform at the highest level while being player-led. While leadership from the top matters, it’s not a bottleneck to decision-making or performance. Elite teams bring this way of working to life in how they select members of the team, how they operate and work together, and how they develop themselves over time.

Selection: Whom Elite Teams Choose

Like all teams, elite teams admit new team members based on a combination of assessed judgment, cultural fit, potential, and skillfulness. Unlike other teams, though, elite teams work hard to ensure strong selection of new team members across three attributes:

1. Team Culture Fit 
2. Peer Leadership Ability
3. Standards of Excellence

Operations: How Elite Teams Work

Elite teams perform differently. They exhibit greater agility in a changing environment, leadership can emerge from any member of the team given the demands of the situation, and they foster the climate of trust, respect, and accountability that this type of performance demands. They do so by creating distinctive ways of working in three areas:

1. Agility. Elite teams respond with speed to emergent opportunities and threats, and they recognize that no plan survives contact with reality. As a result, they cultivate networks and ways of engaging the world around them that foster strong situational awareness, and they cultivate conversations and routines by which they can continually assess and reassess their priorities, routines, and assumptions.
2. A player-led ethos. Elite teams operate with the understanding that peer accountability to high standards is the highest form of accountability. This means a willingness to defer to colleagues, respecting collegial territory, and the ability to lead as first-among-equals when the time is right. For the team leader, this means knowing how to create an environment of strong psychological safety and empowerment and acceding leadership when the time is right.
3. Trust. Members of elite teams operate with high levels of trust in each other and in the outcomes they can create, and they are marked by trust in what colleagues can do AND who colleagues are and what they stand for. This trust is not an accident – it’s hard-won through an ongoing pattern of conversation, shared experience, and rituals.

Development: How Elite Teams Improve

Elite teams recognize that getting better is central to their ability to continually outperform others, and as a result, they make team development a central component of their culture and routines. They foster this developmental environment in three ways:

1. Frequent, difficult practice. Elite teams spend significant time preparing for and practicing their work as a unit rather than as individuals and do so under circumstances more challenging than what they typically face. They also create a much higher frequency of practice than other teams, making routine team practice a norm of their operating motion rather than something that is done when needed.
2. High individual standards of self-development. “Always getting better” is a maxim of the individuals on elite teams, and team members establish structured annual developmental goals, backed by practical developmental plans, focused on keeping strengths contemporary and improving weaknesses.
3. A feedback and learning culture. Consistent, practical feedback is not only present in elite teams, but also nearly constant. In addition to providing feedback in informal settings, elite teams also have formal routines by which they can mine structured improvement from their performances and strong cultures of learning away from structured feedback routines.