I spent most of my early career believing that great teams happened through lucky chemistry—the right mix of technical skills that somehow clicked naturally.
This belief nearly destroyed what should have been my breakthrough project as a team lead.
I had been tasked with building a new development team for a critical system modernization project. Legacy mainframe applications needed to be rebuilt using modern architecture, with tight integration requirements and zero tolerance for downtime during migration. The technical complexity was enormous, and the business impact was massive.
Traditional approach
My approach was straightforward: hire the best technical people I could find. Senior developers with deep experience, database specialists who knew optimization, infrastructure engineers who understood scalability. I focused on individual expertise, clear technical specifications, and assuming that professional competence would naturally translate into team performance.
Within two months, we were struggling despite having exceptional individual talent. The database team was designing schemas that made the application architecture unnecessarily complex. The infrastructure engineers were building systems that didn’t align with the development team’s deployment needs. The senior developers were each solving problems in isolation, creating integration nightmares.
Despite having genuinely brilliant technical minds, our collective output was fragmented. Code reviews were becoming arguments about approach. People were working around each other’s designs rather than with them. We were behind schedule and heading toward a system that would work in pieces but fail as a whole.
I was failing at the one thing I thought would be automatic: turning individual technical excellence into collective system success.
Turning point
The turning point came when one of my senior developers quit, frustrated by the constant friction. Instead of just posting another job req, I asked the remaining team: “Who do you think would fit well with how we work together?” They gave me specific names: people they’d worked with before who understood both the technical requirements and how to collaborate effectively.
That simple question changed everything. I started chasing those recommended people, and when they joined, the team dynamics shifted dramatically. These weren’t necessarily the most technically impressive candidates on paper, but they were people my team knew could contribute to collective success.
I learned that great teams aren’t born from assembling the best individual contributors. They’re built through deliberate choices about how people work together technically and personally.