What Makes the Best Teams? Understanding the Power of Cohesion.
What is the best team you’ve ever been on?
What made it the best?
Was it the performance you achieved together? The meaningfulness of the work? The people you shared it with? Maybe it was all those things woven together into a rare, energizing experience—the kind of team you still think about years later.
So, what actually makes the best teams? When you look at some of the most iconic teams in recent history, what do they share that elevates them above the rest?
Think about teams like:
- The Chicago Bulls of the late 90s
- NASA’s Apollo 11 mission team
- The 2019 U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team
- Pixar’s Braintrust
- The New England Patriots of the early 2000s
- Elite military units like SEALs, Special Forces, and Rangers
These teams spanned different industries, missions, and eras. Yet they share one powerful ingredient: cohesion.
Cohesion is a leadership concept we all intuitively understand but rarely talk about explicitly, let alone intentionally cultivate. This week, we’re exploring what cohesion is, why it matters, and how leaders can build it. To make this actionable, we’ll use a simple three-element model that helps us understand, build, and strengthen cohesion in real teams doing real work.
Defining Team Cohesion
Cohesion is the collective set of forces that draw, bond, and keep people together for meaningful purposes.
A few clarifying points to emphasize and help bring this definition to life:
First, cohesion is morally neutral. It can be used for good or for harm. The Confederate States of America, the Nazi Party, and Enron were all arguably cohesive teams, but their cohesion served destructive ends. There’s also the Wells Fargo banking sales team quotas of the early 2010s, the Abu Ghraib prison guard teams in 2003-2004, and the Volkswagen “dieselgate” engineering teams in the early 2010s as well. These teams were not designed for or really even intended destructive ends, but their cohesion and performance emphasis over socially and morally acceptable norms led to the same result. Cohesion amplifies whatever values and goals to which it is attached.
Second, “keep people together” signals team viability. Many leaders can grind a team to short-term success. Cohesion is different; it keeps people together because they want to stay together. It enables endurance, not just performance.
Third, cohesion only matters when it serves meaningful purposes. A long-lasting fantasy football league may be cohesive and meaningful to some, but likely less so to others. Also, its impact is limited. Like beauty, meaning is likely in the eye of the beholder. However, for cohesion to actually matter, it needs to serve a meaningful purpose.
Lastly, cohesion is not a one-time achievement. It’s not a box to check. It’s a living process that requires nurturing, pruning, and time. Like culture, cohesion grows when leaders invest in it and withers when they don’t.
The Impact of Cohesion
Cohesion may seem like a “nice to have,” but its impact on team effectiveness is profound. Here are three reasons leaders should care deeply about it.
To start, cohesion accelerates performance. Cohesive teams move faster, adapt more quickly, and execute better. They don’t waste energy on internal friction, ego battles, or clarifying basic expectations. Instead, they operate with shared mental models, trust, and fluid coordination. This frees cognitive bandwidth for solving hard problems, innovating, and performing under pressure. Cohesion becomes a force multiplier where the sum becomes greater than the parts.
Additionally, cohesion builds resilience. Highly cohesive teams withstand stress, uncertainty, and extreme contexts far better than fragmented ones. Members feel psychologically safe, supported, and committed to one another. They regulate stress collectively, absorb shocks, and recover faster. In crisis environments—think of combat, emergency response, high stakes missions—cohesion is often the difference between teams that fracture and teams that adapt, improvise, and succeed.
Lastly, cohesion strengthens team viability and commitment. Cohesion fuels intrinsic motivation, long-term commitment, and a willingness to put the team above oneself. When people feel deeply connected to their teammates and the mission, they stay longer, invest more, and bring discretionary effort that can’t be commanded. Belonging reduces turnover, preserves institutional knowledge, and allows teams to compound their strengths over time. Cohesion quietly transforms “me” into “we,” prompting individuals to sacrifice comfort or recognition for the good of the group. In cohesive teams, people don’t just show up—they lean in.
These aren’t abstract ideas. They are the lived realities of high performing teams across industries and eras. Cohesion is not soft. It is structural, strategic, and a leader’s responsibility.
The Three Elements of Team Cohesion
Cohesion is complex, but leaders need a model that is simple enough to act on. The most practical way to understand cohesion is through three distinct but interconnected elements: task cohesion, social cohesion, and collective cohesion. Let’s break each one down.
Task cohesion: the person-toā€‘goal bond. Task cohesion is the shared commitment to achieving meaningful team goals. It’s not about liking each other; it’s about aligning around the mission and working together effectively.
Social cohesion: the person-toā€‘person bond. Social cohesion is interpersonal attraction—the degree to which team members enjoy working together. It doesn’t mean the team is frictionless; it means the team can navigate friction well.
Collective cohesion: the person-toā€‘team bond. Collective cohesion is the degree to which members identify with the team. It’s team pride and the willingness to be known for being part of this group.
Getting Practical: Ten Considerations for Leaders
Cohesion is a leadership responsibility. We don’t stumble into a cohesive team by luck, nor are we cursed when we inherit a dysfunctional one. Cohesion isn’t fate, but the product of deliberate leadership. So how do we actually build it? Below are ten practical considerations to help leaders translate the concept into real, everyday action.
1. Invest in all three elements. Task, social, and collective cohesion are distinct forces. They work together to create a healthy, sustainable team, but each must be developed intentionally. Strengthening one does not automatically strengthen the others, so leaders must give attention to all three.
2. Start with the desired outcome. Cohesion is a means to an end, not the end itself. Leaders must first define what the team is trying to accomplish—the what, how, and why—and then use cohesion as the engine that drives the team toward those meaningful outcomes.
3. Strengthen task cohesion. Task cohesion improves clarity, processes, and performance. Leaders can build it by:
- Implementing clear management systems, processes, and tools
- Clarifying the mission and regularly reinforcing why the work matters
- Cocreating goals so people understand success and feel ownership of it
When people know what they’re doing, why it matters, and how to win together, task cohesion grows.
4. Grow social cohesion. Social cohesion boosts satisfaction and creates healthier team dynamics. Leaders can nurture it by:
- Establishing productive conflict resolution norms. Cohesive teams aren’t frictionless, but skilled at navigating friction.
- Treat people with kindness, express gratitude, be humble, and avoid “anti-humility” traps. These are all leadership characteristics often explored on this platform and all contribute to nurturing our team’s social cohesion.
Social cohesion makes the team a place people want to be.
5. Build collective cohesion. Collective cohesion strengthens team identity and long-term viability. Leaders can cultivate it by:
- Crafting and communicating a compelling team identity. Give people a clear sense of who we are, what we stand for, and why it matters.
- Creating rituals, traditions, and artifacts that reinforce belonging (this point is huge and worth investing in learning more about).
- Modeling visible pride in the team. Leader energy is the most powerful means to inspire others to care about the team and its identity.
Identity becomes a magnet that draws people in and keeps them committed.
6. Gather the team (even when it’s less efficient). In day-to-day work, smaller groups may feel more productive, but cohesion requires shared experiences. Regular team gatherings—social events, rituals, or well-designed meetings—keep people connected and reinforce the sense of “us.” And, yes, well designed meetings can be positive and an actual source of team cohesion.
7. Cohesion leads to winning and winning leads to cohesion. This is a chicken-or-the-egg situation; cohesion fuels winning, and winning fuels cohesion. Leaders should intentionally identify, communicate, and celebrate team wins—big and small—to keep this positive cycle spinning.
8. Use competition and shared hardship wisely. Thoughtfully designed challenges give teams something to push against together. When people struggle, strive, and stretch as a group, they build trust, respect, and a sense of earned pride. Shared hardship creates the powerful narrative of “we’ve been through something together.”
9. Balance the forest and the trees. Leaders must care for the team as a whole without losing sight of individual needs. Sometimes you zoom in to support a person; other times you zoom out to strengthen the collective. Cohesion thrives when both levels receive attention.
10. Diagnose your team using the model. The beauty of this three-element model is its simplicity. Leaders can quickly assess where the team is strong and where it needs development. Lean into your cohesion strengths and intentionally address the gaps using the strategies offered.
Conclusions: Cohesion Is a Choice, So Make It Deliberate
Cohesion doesn’t happen by accident. It is built slowly, intentionally, and consistently through the everyday actions of leaders who understand its power. If you want a team that performs well, endures stress, and stays committed to one another and the mission, cohesion must be part of your leadership investment.
But cohesion also carries a moral responsibility. Highly cohesive teams can drift into groupthink, suppress dissent, or rally around harmful norms. Cohesion amplifies whatever values it is attached to, which means leaders must anchor it in noble purpose, moral integrity, and ethical clarity.
Here’s our call to action: Choose to build cohesion and choose to build it well. Invest in the bonds that make teams strong, resilient, and proud. Ensure those bonds serve meaningful, ethical, and socially responsible ends. There’s no “right” way to build cohesion, but thoughtful leader attention and investment is the first step to making your team the best team.
