Nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, according to a Harvard Business Review study of 95 teams across 25 leading corporations. Yet according to research by neuroeconomist Paul Zak, people at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity and 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies. Everyone wants AI to make them faster, but speed runs on trust, and most organizations skip that step.
Building a high-performing team isn't easy, and it's best not to move from idea to execution without a clear vision for the team you want to create. But what does it look like to build a team that can truly accelerate delivery? In my experience, four areas have the greatest impact on creating an environment where your team can move from alignment to acceleration:
- One Team: building trust, partnership, and shared ownership
- Commitment over Contract: adapting together as the team learns, so you make better decisions together
- Value over Volume: ruthlessly prioritizing the work that creates the greatest business value
- Accelerate What Matters: executing with speed, transparency, decisive action, and clear focus
In this article, I'll focus on why becoming One Team—a single, integrated team working toward a shared outcome, has to come first, and why something that sounds so simple is so often overlooked. Whether you're launching a new digital product or leading the next transformation, you'll almost always depend on cross-functional, matrixed relationships to deliver. For example, building a digital product may need people inside your org (engineering, QA, architecture, UX), while the broader initiative may need support from business, marketing, sales, legal, and compliance. In larger organizations, your stakeholder group is likely expansive. Navigating that complexity is difficult enough for run-the-business work. When you're taking on a large modernization or transformation, it becomes even more complex. That's why trust, partnership, and shared ownership are critical.
A team is only as fast as its shared sense of the outcome. So what does One Team look like in practice? It is a team motivated by the outcomes the organization defines to solve a market or business problem. It doesn't care which functional silo you report into. It cares about the problem you're solving and how you can contribute to making an impact. Easy enough, right? It can be. But when you're ramping up a new team, building a new organization, or working across many functional silos, there are several other dynamics to consider, and AI adds another layer, blurring roles and raising new questions about who does what. I could spend the rest of this article listing them, but I suspect most readers already have a pretty good list. Instead, I'll talk about the dynamics of coming together as a team, and how a leader can shape the focus that drives acceleration.
Start with the problem
Whether you're building a product or leading a transformation, a good leader must always start with a deep understanding of the problem they're setting out to solve. So the first step is to fully and intuitively understand that problem. This means research, talking with customers, and everything else you'd expect a good leader to do. If you can't explain the problem you're trying to solve in a simple way, take another look. Only once you understand the problem can you create a clear vision for solving it.
Create the vision together
A vision the leader writes alone is a directive. A vision the team shapes together is a commitment. Once you understand the problem, bring the right voices into the room- business, technology, and the other functions you'll depend on - and define together what success looks like. This doesn't mean you don't already have a compelling vision in mind to work from. It just means you're gaining buy-in from those who will make it a success. A good leader understands the value of giving team members the opportunity to question and contribute to the vision. More often than not, they make it better.
Build shared ownership
Next, you need strong partnership and alignment with the business. Every organization structures its digital product teams differently, but wherever yours sits, the work, and your reason for doing it, need to resonate inside your organization as much as they do with your customers. That means building shared ownership into the work: joint planning, shared metrics, and business and technology in the same room, making decisions together.
Clarify how everyone contributes
Shared ownership doesn't mean everyone owns everything. A fully integrated team still needs clarity on how each person contributes to the outcome and who makes which decisions. Without it, "we're all in this together" can quickly turn into confusion, duplicated effort, or people quietly protecting their turf. AI makes this even more important. As tasks shift and roles blur, people start to wonder where their value lies. Part of a leader's job is to answer that question before it becomes a source of anxiety: make each person's contribution visible, be clear about decision rights, and revisit both as the work evolves.
Evangelize the vision
Once you've achieved alignment, your job becomes communicating the vision. And not just communicating, but evangelizing. To evangelize means you lead from the front on what it means to work as one, and you do so with conviction, confidence, and passion. It means we share successes together. But it also means we experience setbacks as one. We don't place blame; we work through it together. If we miss a timeline, we all miss it together.
Some of my best lessons in teamwork came from the stage. I play guitar and spent my college years in a band. In a band, every musician can be excellent on their own, but the performance only works when everyone listens, adjusts, and plays toward the same piece of music. When someone misses a note, nobody stops the song to point fingers. The rest of the band covers, and you keep playing. And when the arrangement changes mid-set, the bands that trust each other adapt. The ones that don't will fall apart. That's what AI is doing to our teams right now: changing the arrangement. The teams that have learned to play as one will adapt. The rest will struggle to keep time.
Celebrate as one
I learned this lesson the hard way. Too often, we get so focused on delivery that we forget to celebrate. Once, in a meeting where I was asking about blockers and readiness for our next milestone, a team member stopped me and asked, "Can we first celebrate what we just shipped?" Ouch. Of course we could, and shame on me for not starting there. And celebrate not just within the team, but across the organization. Leaders and high-performing teams set the bar for the rest of the organization, so don't forget to take a moment to show everyone what good looks like.
Being a fully integrated team isn't about an org chart that puts everyone in the same bubble. It means the culture of the team matures from a collection of functions and individuals into one whole. One that experiences the ups and downs of success and failure together, but always stays focused on the outcome. Driving that cultural evolution takes a leader who understands that people are the magic ingredient of high-performing teams. A leader who leads by example, shows the team what change looks like, and guides them toward the outcome.
You'll know you've become One Team when people stop saying "my team" and "their team" and start saying "we." Great bands don't sound like a collection of soloists. Neither do great teams.
Trust gives a team permission to adapt. In Part 2, I'll explore how Commitment over Contract turns that trust into better decisions.
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