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# The State of Teaming: Most are bad. Some are really, really good
- URL: https://www.cpj.fyi/essays/state-of-teaming-most-are-bad-some-are-really-really-good/
- Published: 2023-01-04T15:00:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-02T12:23:59.000Z
- Description: Researchers examined +200k teams to see how performance is distributed. There's a LOT of poor-performing teams, and a lot more exceptional teams than expected!
- Author: Clay Parker Jones
- Tags: Essays, Teams, Culture, Roles

Here's some awesome new scholarship on the state of teaming.

Team Performance: [Nature and Antecedents of Nonnormal Distributions](https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2022.1619?ref=cpj.fyi#%5Fi14) – by Kyle J. Bradley & Herman Aguinis, published in *Organization Science* September 8, 2022 (my birthday!)

This paper covers performance distributions across 200,825 teams. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/a9/73a90ce4-1663-4169-a7cb-efdf906b6b25/content/images/2022/12/normal-team-performance-1.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/73/a9/73a90ce4-1663-4169-a7cb-efdf906b6b25/content/images/2022/12/power-law-distribution-team-performance-1.png)

Most teams aren't in the middle of potential outcomes. That sucks! We can change that!

Some takeaways.

🚀 The distribution in team performance isn’t normal – it looks more like a Power Law. **That is, a lot of teams are bad, and a lot more teams than you would expect are very, very good.** Generally speaking, this tracks with my experience. What I've observed is that most people have never worked on a high-performing team at work, and for most executives, if they've worked on one, it's a distant memory (according to [this](https://www.amazon.com/Senior-Leadership-Teams-Center-Public/dp/1422103366/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314545848&sr=8-1&ref=cpj.fyi), only 21% of leadership teams are outstanding, 37% are mediocre, and 42% are poor).

So introducing the benefits of *real teams* to people, especially those that work at larger, more established firms without a history of this way of working, will more often than not sound preposterous or naïve. *You're not wrong, and they're not either – they've just never even seen it done, let alone experienced it.*

📈 Teams that are more likely to be come “star teams”:

1. Most importantly: they stick together over a substantial period of time, and have limited turnover.
2. Also important, but less so: they have a “star leader” – one that is exceptional both at the job the team is performing, and the teaming functions necessary to keep the team together, to help them learn, etc.

⏰ Time. It all comes back to *time*. I suspect there is some relationship between "star leadership" and teams' ability to stick together over time: by creating halo effects that prevent others from breaking things up; by reinforcing good behaviors within the team that hold them together over time; by giving teammates a good example of high performance that they can learn from; other things.

[Team Performance: Nature and Antecedents of Nonnormal DistributionsDownload the PDForsc.2022.1619.pdf1 MBdownload-circle](https://www.cpj.fyi/content/files/2022/12/orsc.2022.1619.pdf "Download")