You’ve got a new team. Maybe it came out of a reorg, maybe you inherited it, maybe you hand-picked every person on it yourself. On paper it’s stacked — smart people, real experience, the kind of roster you’d brag about in a leadership meeting. And it isn’t working. Or maybe yours is the other version: the reorg fused two groups with very different cultures, and now they’re clashing hard and collapsing fast.

Either way, you’ve probably told yourself the thing every leader tells themselves in that moment: they just need time to gel.

Most of us default to one of two instincts here, and both cost more than they look like they do. The first is to wait it out — you’ve made the introductions, shared the reporting lines, maybe built a RACI chart nobody has opened since, and now you trust proximity to do the rest. That can take two quarters, and you pay for every week of it in duplicated work and uncovered gaps. The second instinct is to force it socially. Drinks, an offsite, two truths and a lie. That’s not a bad evening, it just isn’t aimed at the thing that’s broken.

Here’s what the thing that’s broken actually is. In the 1980s, a NASA team led by H. Clayton Foushee put twenty two-person flight crews into a simulator to study fatigue. Some flew hours after a grueling three-day duty cycle. Some flew after three days off. The exhausted crews were rated significantly better by an expert observer, and flew significantly more stable approaches. When the researchers re-sorted the crews by a different variable — whether the two pilots had actually flown together during their most recent duty cycle — that split explained far more than fatigue did. Crews with recent shared flying time made less than half as many errors. And the ingredient was recency, not friendship: most of the pilots who hadn’t flown together recently still knew each other perfectly well.

It was never the hours. The hours were just the slow, accidental way a team acquires two specific things — knowing who knows what, and knowing how each other operates. Call them clarity and empathy. Clarity is the structure; empathy is the relationship. When both close, the team clicks. And both can be built on purpose in a week instead of accidentally over six months.

Here’s how to build them deliberately:

• Get uncomfortably specific about roles. Spend a full meeting on decision rights, not titles — what each person can decide without asking you, what they own end to end, who they pull in and when — then find where two people claimed the same territory and where nobody claimed territory that clearly belongs to someone.
• Hand out a “Manual of Me.” Have each person complete and share four sentences — I’m at my best when ___. I’m at my worst when ___. You can count on me for ___. I need you to ___. — and go first yourself, because the honesty you model becomes the ceiling for everyone else’s.
• Build empathy through the work, not the icebreaker. Give the team a real but low-stakes shared problem, then debrief it — the output isn’t the point, watching each other think, disagree, and land somewhere while nothing is on fire is the point.
• Run a pre-flight briefing. Sixty to ninety minutes at the start of a project, three questions — what we’re accomplishing and how each person connects to it, what we need from each other, and what norms we’ll operate by — and write the answers down, because norms that live only in a conversation are just a nice memory of a meeting.

The captain and first officer who met this morning don’t get six months to gel. They get a briefing, and by pushback they’re coordinating high-stakes decisions like they’ve been doing it for years. Your team’s problem was never that they haven’t been together long enough — it’s that nobody has built the conditions they’ve been waiting to see appear. I walk through the full NASA study and all four practices in this week’s video, worth a watch if any of this sounds like your team right now.

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Here's some more resources I recommend:

Every Leader Gets Things Wrong Eventually: Whether it's a bad decision, a broken promise, or a moment when you didn't really listen. Research on trust, psychological safety, and corporate apologies suggests the apologies that work don't explain away responsibility. They acknowledge what happened, own what needs owning, and make clear what changes next. In last week's video, I break down nine apologies every leader will eventually need to make, including the harder ones like owning your team's mistakes, addressing layoffs, and apologizing on behalf of an entire organization. The mistake isn't the real test. Your response is. Click here to watch.​

Making Teamwork Work: Most leaders can describe what a high-performing team looks like. Far fewer know how to actually build one. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I walk through the two drivers that matter most—clarity and empathy—and how they shape everything from team priorities to collaborative culture. You'll learn how to spot what's actually holding your team back, how to set priorities that stick even as things change, and how to build the kind of shared understanding that makes collaboration feel natural instead of forced. If you're ready to move your team from good to high-performing, this one's worth your time. Click here to get started.​

Building Trust as a Team: Most teams treat trust as something that just happens over time. But trust is actually built through specific, repeatable behaviors—and teams that leave it to chance usually end up with people who quietly hold back their best ideas. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I break down the two types of trust every team needs, the trust-respect cycle that keeps collaboration strong, and practical ways to build it—from finding commonalities to modeling vulnerability. If you manage a team—or you're part of one—this is worth your time. Click here to get started.​

Getting Teams Aligned: Most dysfunction in organizations comes down to one thing: a gap between the big-picture strategy and what individual teams are actually incentivized to do. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I show you how to close that gap—using your organization's purpose to set team priorities that genuinely connect to the broader mission. You'll learn how to organize and prioritize your team's work, test your goals against real success criteria, and build a communication rhythm through regular huddles that keeps everyone focused, even when conditions change. When every team is aligned, everybody wins—teams, leaders, customers, and stakeholders alike. Click here to get started.​

Navigating Change as a Team: Change isn't the problem—unmanaged change is. When teams face rapid change without a clear plan, the emotional and logistical strain adds up fast, and performance suffers. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I walk through how to build a shared vision and clear priorities for change, how to reassign roles and responsibilities to support the effort, and how to set communication norms that keep things transparent instead of chaotic. You'll also learn how to gauge your team's capacity and resilience so you can sustain performance for the long haul. If your team is navigating change right now, this one's built for you. Click here to get started.​