What does it really mean to have the ‘perfect team’ and why should you care?
Nobody is perfect. But your team can be.
What makes a perfect team?
It’s a question we’ve been exploring for years.
After working with thousands of individuals across hundreds of organisations, one thing has become increasingly clear.
A perfect team isn’t a collection of perfect people.
It is a group of different people whose strengths complement one another, whose weaknesses are compensated for by others and who become capable of achieving more together than they could independently.
That sounds obvious.
In practice, it’s surprisingly difficult to achieve.
DIFFERENT PEOPLE SEE DIFFERENT WORLDS
Every team is made up of different characters.
People absorb information differently. They communicate differently. They make decisions differently. They respond differently to pressure, opportunity, uncertainty and change.
Perfect Teams® distils those differences into 12 distinct characters, built around three core ways of processing information and seeing the world.
No character is inherently better than another.
The important question isn’t:
Who have we got?
It’s:
What happens when we put them together?
Because that’s where a collection of individuals either begins to become a team — or doesn’t.
FROM SELF-AWARENESS TO INTERDEPENDENCE
Building a more capable team requires three things.
1. Understand yourself and one another
Self-awareness is the starting point.
When people understand their own character, they begin to recognise their natural strengths, motivations and blind spots.
But team awareness takes us further.
Suddenly I can begin to understand why the person sitting opposite me doesn’t approach a problem the way I do.
Perhaps they’re not being difficult.
Perhaps they’re seeing something I’m missing.
That shift can transform relationships.
Difference stops being something to overcome and starts becoming something to use.
2. Understand where you’ll gel and clash
Put different characters together and there will inevitably be friction.
That’s not necessarily bad.
Teams don’t become stronger by eliminating difference. They become stronger by understanding and harnessing it.
Profiling allows us to see where relationships are likely to flow naturally and where greater awareness, communication and adaptation may be required.
The objective isn’t harmony at all costs.
It’s productive interdependence.
3. Ask the most important question: What’s missing?
This is where team profiling becomes particularly powerful.
A team can contain extraordinarily talented people and still be incapable of delivering what the organisation needs.
Why?
Because individual talent and collective capability are not the same thing.
Perhaps everyone is excellent at delivery but nobody provides commercial urgency.
Perhaps there are plenty of ideas but nobody drives them into action.
Perhaps everybody thinks similarly, sees the same opportunities — and misses the same risks.
So rather than asking only:
Who are our strongest people?
we ask:
What’s missing in this team?
TWO TEAMS. SAME BUSINESS. DIFFERENT RESULTS.
We saw this particularly clearly while working with a major engineering organisation.
Two London teams operated within the same company.
One was performing strongly.
The other wasn’t.
The lower-performing team was perfectly capable of delivering the technical work in front of it, but there were concerns around urgency, business focus and commercial awareness.
The higher-performing team had something different.
Its character profile revealed a stronger concentration of people naturally bringing drive, energy and commercial focus — including its leader and second-in-command.
That didn’t mean one team contained good people and the other contained bad people.
It meant their collective capability was different.
Once we could see the teams as systems rather than simply collections of individuals, the performance difference became much easier to understand.
And once you understand what’s missing, you can do something about it.
SHOULD A GROUP OF FOOTBALLERS JUST RUN ONTO THE PITCH AND PLAY?
Imagine assembling eleven individually talented footballers and simply sending them onto the pitch.
No thought about positions.
No understanding of one another.
No strategy.
No consideration of what’s missing.
No common direction.
We wouldn’t expect them to become a great team simply because they were individually talented.
Yet organisations do the equivalent surprisingly often.
They recruit capable individuals and assume that capability will somehow aggregate into a capable team.
It doesn’t.
Teams are systems.
And systems need balance, relationships, complementary strengths and a shared understanding of what they’re trying to achieve.
That’s why you should care about building the perfect team.
Because when a team isn’t working, the answer isn’t always to find better people.
Sometimes you need to understand the people you’ve already got.
Sometimes you need to change how they work together.
And sometimes you need to identify the capability that simply isn’t there.
NOBODY IS PERFECT. BUT YOUR TEAM CAN BE.
Perfection doesn’t mean eliminating weakness.
It means creating a team in which different strengths combine to compensate for individual weaknesses.
That’s interdependence.
And it leads to a much more useful question than:
Who’s the problem?
Ask instead:
What’s missing in this team?
That’s where Perfect Teams® begins.
You can’t download capability.™
What’s missing in your team?
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand the characters around the table, identify strengths and gaps and build greater team capability.
Originally published 9 October 2020. Updated August 2026.
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