What if the reason your team isn’t performing has nothing to do with talent?
Jon Levy, a behavioral scientist and New York Times bestselling author of Team Intelligence, has spent 15 years having dinner with Nobel laureates, Olympians, and astronauts to find out. Over 431 dinners, he’s gotten a front-row seat to how the most accomplished people in the world think, connect, and build things together.
What he finds doesn’t match what the leadership industry has been selling. In his conversation on the Mindvalley Book Club with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani, Jon makes a case that quietly dismantles almost everything we assume about what makes a great team.
Watch the full interview:
The leadership development industry has been solving the wrong problem
The leadership industry has been built on a single assumption: that if you develop better individual leaders, better teams follow. However, according to Jon, that assumption is the problem.
Individual leadership ability is not what drives team performance. What drives it is team dynamics, like how people connect, communicate, and work together.
The leader was never the variable that mattered most. The team was. And yet everything we’ve built an entire industry around developing the individual leader—business schools, consultancies, corporate training programs, leadership classes, you name it.
“Management is human interaction,” Jon tells Kristina, “and there’s about a billion different ways human beings can be a pain in the butt, and you can’t prepare for something like that sitting in a classroom.”
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, and researcher Christina Fong’s analysis of MBA outcomes shows that graduates don’t outperform non-MBAs at the one, three, or seven-year mark. What’s more, Future Market Insights’ Leadership Development Program Market Forecast and Outlook (2026 – 2036) found that, globally, companies are projected to spend nearly $100 billion on leadership development in 2026 alone. But according to Barbara Kellerman’s research at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the industry has produced no meaningful or measurable improvement in the quality of leadership.
The deeper problem, Jon argues, is that we’ve been measuring the wrong unit entirely. As he points out in his book, “The smallest unit of effectiveness at work isn’t a leader or an individual. It’s a team.”
What Jon Levy says is actually causing it, and how to fix it
Jon has a name for what most organizations have accidentally built: a culture of super chickens.
What? That’s right. Chickens.
You see, in the 1980s, an evolutionary biologist named William Muir ran an experiment with chickens. He took the highest-producing individual chickens (the stars) and bred them together, generation after generation.
The result was a disaster. Because when you reward pure individual productivity, the only way to get more is to take from everyone else. The chickens turned violent, pecking each other to death to access more resources.
So Muir tried something different. Instead of selecting the most productive individual chickens, he selected the most productive teams. Six generations later, his prosocial super teams demolished the individual super chickens in head-to-head competition. They worked together, and that made all the difference.
Jon’s point with sharing this metaphor is that most modern workplaces have accidentally run Muir’s first experiment. We measure what’s easy to count and reward accordingly.
“When we incentivize people on personal bonuses and personal status,” Jon shares with Kristina. “At a certain point, they can only achieve that by taking away resources and status from other people.”
And when that happens, talented people end up competing against their own teammates instead of alongside them.
There’s no “I” in “team”
The fix starts with understanding what actually makes a team intelligent. Because here’s the thing: the highest IQ on a team, according to Carnegie Mellon researcher Anita Williams Woolley’s work, doesn’t predict performance. Neither the average IQ, nor how much people like each other.
What does predict it? The dynamics between people:
- Whether a team has alignment around a shared goal,
- Knows what to focus on and when, and
- Can access the full range of hard and soft skills its members bring.
And that’s the importance of having, what Jon calls, a glue player. These are the people who know “how to create stronger connections and camaraderie between people.”
In his book, he highlights Shane Battier, a two-time NBA champion who played alongside LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh on the Miami Heat. Shane touched the ball only 2% of his time on the court, yet the Heat won back-to-back championships with him on the roster.
What was he doing in the other 98% of the time? Reading the room, asking the question no one else would ask, and making sure his teammates understood the play—everything that never shows up in a box score.
“Shane is a glue player, someone who may not have any specific technical skill that stands out at the superstar level but is so good with group dynamics, bonding, building trust, and elevating everyone’’ game that the team outperforms because of his participation,” Jon explains. “Glue players might not be the stars that shine the brightest, but their gravity is so strong that they pull everyone else in.”
The unfortunate thing, though, is that the glue player is the hire most leaders never make. Why? Because nothing in a standard performance review makes them visible.
But according to Jon, the leader’s job isn’t to be exceptional. Rather, it’s to build conditions in which everyone else can be.
Jon Levy on what team intelligence really requires
Team intelligence, as Jon explains on the Mindvalley Book Club, is the collective ability of a group to reason, focus, and draw on its full range of skills to solve problems faster than any individual could alone. And most leaders miss it because they confuse leadership with accountability.
They’re not the same thing. The fact of the matter is, you might be the most senior person in the room and still be following someone else’s lead.
One example Jon gives is, let’s say, you’re a senior vice president. You’re accountable for a result, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re leading at all times.
“You might have a marketing manager that’s giving you advice and defining strategy,” Jon explains. “You might be in charge and accountable for the result, but you’re actually following them.”
His point is, the moment you stop confusing your title with your role, you stop feeling pressure to be good at everything. The skills you don’t have aren’t a weakness if someone on your team has them. And Jon’s advice is simple: find the person who already has what you need and ask for their help.
That same principle extends to how Jon thinks about AI for business. Rather than seeing it as a threat to human leadership, he sees it as another resource a team can draw on.
“I think it will allow leaders to augment their skills, such as let’s say we’re in a meeting right now and I, let’s say, didn’t have very high emotional intelligence,” he says. “A good AI agent would support me.”
The question, he argues, was never how to replace people but “how do we make teams as smart as possible to solve problems quickly.”
That’s the question Team Intelligence is built around. And if the conversation Jon has with Kristina on the Mindvalley Book Club is any indication, the answers will make you rethink almost everything you thought you knew about what it means to lead.
(Disclosure: This is an affiliate link. If you make a purchase through it, Mindvalley Book Club may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
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