# Building High-Performance Teams Through Strategic Alignment

**Podcast:** HBR IdeaCast
**Published:** 2026-10-13

## Transcript

I'm Adi Ignatius.
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
Alison, how important is it to actually need to like the people you work with?
Are you fishing for a compliment?
No, no.
I will assume that you at least tolerate me.
Of course, Adi.
I love working with you.
You make me laugh every day.
And I do think that that's incredibly important to go to work with people that you enjoy being with.
It's one of the things that has kept me at HBR for 16 years and counting.
And of course, it's possible to work with people that you don't really like, that you disagree with a lot, but it's definitely not as fun.
I think it's probably less productive.
I do get the sense that groups that get along perform better together.
So that's what I had always assumed.
But I think it's fair to ask the question, are we focusing on the wrong things when we talk about building great teams, right?
It might be less about liking each other and feeling like family and more about simply getting aligned.
So about the vibe being right.
Not in a touchy-feely way, but in order to get things done.
So vibe, that is the word that our guest today uses.
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and the author of Vibe, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, his new book about how we build and sustain meaningful human connections.
He argues that strong teams don't need to be made up of friends.
They need a shared purpose.
productive disagreement, and relationships that help people do better work.
And I imagine leaders play a huge role in creating that kind of environment.
Yeah, definitely.
From hiring to onboarding to everything else.
So we will cover all of that and why the friction that comes with real relationships may be something we should be embracing and not avoiding.
So here's the conversation.
Let's set it up.
You know, give us a sense of what the book is trying to do, what you're trying to address.
Well, I think we live in a world that's just starving for connection.
People feel like they're isolated from their teams.
They often feel disconnected from their bosses, certainly from their CEOs.
And so I'm really excited about trying to understand how we can build and maintain and even scale our connections.
As I've dug into that topic over the last few years, I've discovered basically we need four kinds of people in our work and our lives.
And I've come to think of them as associates, allies, pals, and companions.
So Adia, your associates are people who fulfill your needs.
It's a pretty transactional relationship.
Your allies are the people who share your goals.
You're on a mission together.
Pals are people who share your interests and hobbies and you just have fun together.
And then companions are people who share your values and you have deep affection for each other.
And I have watched so many leaders make the mistake of saying, look, if we want to strengthen our bonds in our company, if we want to build stronger cultures, then we all need to be friends or pals.
Or we need to build a company that's a family, which is about being companions.
And those are not necessary steps.
Sometimes they're even counterproductive.
A great team and a great organization is made up of allies, but being pals or companions is optional.
What really matters then for teams to function effectively?
Well, it's not affection or even agreement.
It's alignment that matters the most.
And I think the evidence on this is so clear.
If you look at the research on...
team cohesion.
Turns out there are two types of cohesion.
There's social cohesion, which is what most of us think of when we think of cohesion.
It's about singing Kumbaya and wanting to hang out together after work and do happy hours.
And then there's task cohesion, which is we say we share a purpose and we're not necessarily bonded within a group.
We are bonded to the group.
And if you look at the data, what you see in work teams and also in sports teams is that task cohesion matters more than social cohesion for performance.
And so I think that a leader's first job is not to get people to enjoy each other's company.
It's to get people to say, look, we're bought in to a common direction and we have a set of values that unite us.
So if alignment is what matters, how do you encourage that if you're a leader, if you're an executive?
Well, I think the table stakes is to have a meaningful purpose that people think matters.
And the way I like to start on that is to ask executives, if your company didn't exist, if the work you do weren't happening, who would be worse off?
And the people who come to mind, they are the reason your work matters.
They're why you make a difference.
They're the mission that you want.
I've actually found in my research that when leaders articulate the impact of their mission on clients, customers, patients, end users, it doesn't have nearly as strong of a motivating effect as when you actually bring in the customers, clients, patients, or end users directly.
Because people know that leaders have an ulterior motive.
You are trying to convince people that their work is important so that they will work harder, smarter, and longer.
When the beneficiary comes in, the person who's directly affected by the work, you feel a real connection between what you do and the effect on that person's life.
And so I actually think that a first step for leaders is to outsource their inspiration to the people who ultimately rely on the work you do.
So another thing you say in the book is that great gatherings are choreographed rather than spontaneous.
And that also goes a little bit against conventional wisdom, you know, that we...
You know, work from home, we miss the spontaneous interactions that are supposed to be very valuable.
You know, make the case that the gatherings, the meetings should be choreographed, that that's an advantage.
Well, I've heard a lot of CEOs complain in the last five years, we've lost our creative collisions in the hybrid and virtual world of work.
And I do think most people are missing creative collisions, but it's not spontaneity that actually drives the power of those.
There's nothing about creativity that requires us to just bump into each other.
The reason that creative collisions worked and the reason that Steve Jobs designed the Pixar headquarters for people to run into each other on their way to the bathroom or the cafeteria was you end up having new ideas when you interact with people you don't normally have access to because they bring you fresh perspectives.
And when you have informal interaction because you're not just stuck to a rote agenda.
And so there's no reason why we can't structure more unstructured interaction.
Probably the best data I've seen on this show that if you take salespeople and you just have them do a simple 30-minute activity every week, four months later, their individual revenue has spiked by 24%.
That is a tremendous return on a 30-minute weekly investment per pair.
And all they've been assigned to do is they've been randomly paired up, one salesperson with another who didn't know each other, to just have lunch for 30 minutes.
You could do that in person.
You could do that virtually.
Guess what happens when two salespeople have lunch together?
They start to compare notes.
They exchange tips.
They learn from each other and they get better at their jobs.
And so I think any leader who's not just inviting people who don't know each other to chat informally is missing out.
Now, another interesting idea in the book is that people can form truly meaningful connections.
relatively quickly.
And I'm wondering, you know, so what does that tell us about, you know, onboarding, team formation, you know, bringing strangers together inside organizations?
Are we thinking the right way about these things?
I don't think we are.
I think we're making two systematic mistakes when we do onboarding and socialization.
The first is we wait too long.
One of my former doctoral students, Konstantinos Kutiferis, studied this, and he found that There's this waiting period between when somebody accepts a job offer and when they start where they're just in limbo.
They're not formally a member of the organization yet, but they feel like they want to connect and they want to learn.
And he found that if you accelerate your onboarding and do what he calls pre-boarding and just have the hiring manager reach out two weeks before the start date to clarify the culture, to say, hey, here's why I think you're going to add a lot of value here and give them a sense of belonging.
that that accelerates their learning of the culture and it ultimately makes them more proactive and more effective in their job.
And so I think we should not wait until day one to begin onboarding.
And then the other mistake is once people do arrive, we are all about, as my colleague Dan Cable found in research he led, we're all about breaking people in.
We say, look, we want you to absorb our values.
We want you to internalize our norms.
We're going to serve you the Kool-Aid.
Your job is to drink it.
That is less effective in connecting people to a meaningful contribution than if instead of trying to help them fit in, we invite them to stand out.
So I love this experiment done at Wipro where people, when they are new hires, instead of just going through standard on-the-job training or getting sort of indoctrinated into the organizational culture, they're asked to come up with a personal highlight reel.
Come up with your career peak moments.
and share that with your new team.
Six months later, they have higher performance reviews and they are significantly less likely to quit because they were able to bring their distinctive strengths to the table.
They felt seen and they felt valued.
Well, so that gets into the question about do employers truly want people to bring their full selves to work?
Several years ago, I think I would have said, and HBR would have written, of course you want that.
That's how you build strong teams.
That's how you get the most out of your employees.
There's a backlash to that.
And I think it was Mark Andreessen who said, you know, why would I want people to bring their whole selves to work?
I just want them to do the job.
You know, where do you come down on that question?
Well, I think in an ideal world, instead of bringing their full selves to work, people would just bring their best selves to work.
If we could stop there, we'd be in good shape.
But the reality is we're dealing with human beings.
Nobody is going to be at their best.
from the majority of their waking hours every single day.
I think what's much more realistic is to say, bring your professional self to work.
And that means two things.
Number one, I want you to deliver on your job.
We've got a set of expectations for that.
And number two, I want you to live by our values.
We should have behavioral guidelines for what it means to uphold our principles and also what it looks like to violate them.
I think fundamentally, professionalism is about delivering results, maintaining good relationships.
And if you pay attention to what's in your job description and you follow the organization's values, you should be in good shape.
Let's talk about the best friend question.
So Gallup famously, in its workplace survey, asks, do you have a best friend at work?
Which they say tracks with things like engagement and satisfaction.
Does that make sense based on your research?
I don't think we need a best friend at work.
But my colleague Segal Barsade found that just having one friend at work is enough to prevent people from feeling lonely.
So you don't necessarily need a strong connection to your entire team or multiple departments to feel like you're not isolated.
And I think Gallup's data on, you know, do you have a best friend at work?
We're probably picking up, do you have a friend at all?
I think, you know, this really goes back to the question of, you know, are we associates or allies?
Or do we need to be pals or companions too?
And I think that really depends on the kind of work that people are doing and the stability of the team they're in.
The longer that a team is going to stay together, the more it becomes useful to have a personal connection outside your professional interactions.
And so if you're building long-term teams that are going to spend months or years working on hard problems together, there probably is the case to be made that you want them to occasionally eat together or socialize together outside of the office so that they can get to know each other on a more human level.
I think, though, that that is very much a secondary consideration relative to, are we coming together, knowing what our individual contribution is, and creating a line of sight between that and what the team or the organization is trying to accomplish?
So I want to talk about conflict.
And I think you make the case that conflict can strengthen relationships.
You know, most leaders spend a lot of energy trying to reduce that, you know, hiring for nice people.
Should they be doing the opposite?
I don't think you should be hiring for jerks, but I have in a lot of my research over the years, I found that what we're really asking about is not, is somebody nice or not?
We should be focusing on, are they givers or takers?
Givers are people who are trying to figure out what can I add for you?
What can I contribute?
Takers want to know, what can I get out of this relationship?
They're all about me.
And I found that a lot of people...
They basically stereotype givers as friendly, agreeable, warm, polite, nice Canadian.
And they think about disagreeable people as really unpleasant and they want to avoid them.
And what they forget is there are agreeable takers in every organization.
They are great fakers, Adi.
They kiss up and kick down.
Watch out.
Why did you mention that?
I mean, I'm not pointing fingers here or anything.
I think that the higher you climb in your career, the harder it is for you to gauge which agreeable takers are actually fakers because they are highly motivated to impress you.
If you have power and status, they will put their best foot forward with you.
It's actually their peers and subordinates who get to see their true colors.
So you can't always rely on your own judgment.
On the other side of this, we forget that there are also disagreeable givers who are vital to any workplace.
If you're a Ted Lasso fan, they're the Roy Kent's of the world.
They are dishing out tough love.
They're asking hard questions.
They're giving the critical feedback that people don't want to hear, but they desperately need to hear.
And I do think we under hire, we under reward, we under promote disagreeable givers because we overreact to the kind of crunchy exterior and we don't realize they're challenging because they care and they're trying to make us better.
And that is behavior we need to reward and incentivize.
Yeah.
So the model for the person who is obsequious up and stomps on people down for me is John Cleese, Basil Fawlty and Fawlty Towers.
He perfectly exemplifies that.
But okay, so maybe more nuanced.
I mean, we hire for something called cultural fit, right?
Is that a trap?
Does that end up not giving us the kind of complementary skills and talents?
And what do you think about hiring for cultural fit?
I think it's a double-edged sword.
I think on the one hand, we know that early on it can be helpful.
So there's a 15-year study of biotech startups, for example, where the ones that prioritize cultural fit over just looking for skills or star potential, they had dramatically lower failure rates and they were faster to IPO.
And if you stop there, you think, okay, bringing people in around culture fit is a great way to promote alignment and ultimately performance.
But then post-IPO, those companies grew at slower rates.
They basically were too homogeneous and they didn't have people who were going to stretch anyone else's thinking and they were at risk for groupthink in a nutshell.
I think the antidote to that problem is to identify your core cultural values.
My colleague Drew Carton has found that you want a maximum of four.
If you start getting a longer list of values, people can't remember them all.
They don't define them the same way, and they also don't agree on the relative importance of them.
So we want a small number of core values.
And what we want to do with those is we want people to fit on those.
So if your core values, for example, are excellence, integrity, generosity, those should be non-negotiable.
You should never hire somebody or promote somebody who violates those values.
But outside of those core principles, instead of culture fit, you should be looking for culture add.
The question is not, is somebody going to clone every single norm that we have here?
But rather, are they going to enrich our culture by filling gaps and bringing things that are missing right now?
So you worked with the U.S.
Women's National Soccer Team, and they came up with a really interesting short list of values.
Can you talk about sort of how you sort of drew that out of them and what they were and what they said about, you know, what was of value to that particular team?
Yeah, I got called in to help them improve their vibe, which some of their superstars just thought was not even necessary.
They said, look, we should be focusing on our skills on the field, not our culture and our team's dynamics.
I think over time, they began to believe that culture actually drives how much you get out of your talent.
And one of the things that I did to try to help them align was I said, look, we're going to throw out the cliches and buzzwords that normally define team values.
So when I initially asked them to list their values, they said winning, they said teamwork, they said respect, they said accountability.
And I came back to them and I said, yeah, sounds like every other team on the planet.
Nobody's going to get fired up.
Sounds like an HBR article.
I mean, it could be.
You said it, not me.
But I wanted them to come up with language that really met.
the criteria that we use for building a collective identity in my field of organizational psychology, which is you want values that are distinctive, central, and enduring to your group.
And so I challenged them to go to the stories that really define when was the culture at its best?
What were the phrases?
What were the narratives that jumped out?
And they ended up aligning on four core values that I think are much more meaningful and emotionally evocative.
So one was leave it better.
And that was essentially about, don't leave the break room a mess.
Try to make also the team better than you found it.
There was, I think, a more colorful way of capturing accountability.
They said, look, we know you don't like testing your pee, but we need to find out if you're hydrated.
We also need to make sure you're not on drugs.
This, by the way, does not sound like an HBR article.
No, I'm glad.
I do not expect to see pee testing showing up in many.
Many behavioral guidelines for corporate values.
But then if you go up to the top, so we rank order them, values should be rank ordered so that you know when there's a conflict between two, which one is more important.
The top two for them.
Number two was what they called bloodbath mentality.
And that was a complete rebranding of excellence because they said, we want to win.
We want to be the best team in the world.
We want to be the greatest ever.
That didn't really capture what it meant to live that value.
And I said, how will you know?
And one of the players said, well, what really made this team stand out, the reason that this is the greatest women's soccer team in history, is we will play through blood even in practice, not just in games.
So what really defines our attitude of winning is we are the people who would rather bleed to death.
than walk off the field, even when the stakes are low.
And that is a completely different statement about the culture than we're here to win or dominate.
And then the last one, Adi, was my personal favorite.
They said, don't be an asshole.
You know, it's become sort of a popular approach in a lot of organizations, but they codified it.
They said, look, it means no prima donnas.
It means you don't haze junior players.
This is not a fraternity or a sorority.
It means you actually show respect to staff, not just to fellow players.
And I think that really mattered to a fair number of junior players who felt like they were not being heard.
It also made the staff feel included and welcome.
And they ended up contributing, I think, more ideas because of that.
And fast forward a few years, they've had a lot of player turnover.
They brought in a new coach who's amazing, Emma Hayes.
But they have rekindled their vibe.
And I think coming up with the values that they were really passionate about may have been a big part of that.
You have a great line in the book that's associated with that team that building a great squad is not about minimizing the differences between people, but about channeling their differences toward a higher purpose.
How does a manager try to do that, make that happen?
Well, I think this goes back to your question about conflict.
I think there are really three major kinds of conflict.
Actually, there are...
There are probably four.
But for our purposes, I think most of us, when we think about conflict, we think about what's called relationship conflict, which is the personal, emotional, I hate your guts, I wish we didn't have to work together, and also, you smell.
Not productive at all.
There are other kinds of conflict that organizations actually need.
Task conflict and process conflict are the two that I think seem to have the most consistent benefits.
Task conflict is when we disagree about decisions, visions, and strategies.
If we don't do that, we're going to miss out on opportunities and threats.
And process conflict is when we disagree about who's going to do what, when.
If we don't do that, we're going to align the wrong roles.
We're going to assign the wrong roles to the wrong people.
We're not going to have an effective workflow or cadence of getting things done.
And so I think channeling and harnessing people's differences to a higher purpose is really about saying, how do we get productive task conflict and process conflict without it spilling into relationship conflict?
And one of the, I think the easiest steps for a leader to take on this comes out of Corinne Bandersky's work.
She shows that if you just preface a disagreement by saying, hey, can we debate this?
You activate a mental model that says, look, we're actually supposed to disagree and we're okay with that and we can even have some fun with it.
So you also write about Metallica.
which essentially saved itself by learning to fight better.
Using that example, that anecdote, what are lessons in how they kind of struggled, but then came out on the other side?
What are lessons that teams and organizations can learn from that?
I think probably the biggest lesson I took away from Metallica going to group therapy, which was not something I ever expected for a heavy metal band, was they were actually failing because they were avoiding confrontation.
You know, they'd had a couple of particularly nasty fights and they insulted each other.
It even got physical at one point.
And they were so afraid of the band falling apart that they started walking on eggshells and nobody spoke their minds.
You have this very passive, aggressive dynamic.
People, you know, have real creative differences, but they're not willing to voice them or verbalize them.
And I think that what they had to recognize was when you give somebody constructive criticism.
When you raise a difficult conversation, you are doing that as an investment in improving your relationship with them.
Because relationships stagnate in silence and candor is the key to growth.
I'm not talking here about being brutally honest because as the saying goes, people who take pride in being brutally honest are sometimes just interested in being brutal.
I think the goal is to be both clear and kind.
And so one of the things that Metallica learned to do was to say, hey, I, you know, instead of this piece is crap, to say, I want us to produce the best possible sound.
I'm not sure if what we just created is going to measure up.
I know you're committed to that shared standard.
Let's talk about how to reach it.
I think this is true for all kinds of conflicts.
It's not the message that makes people defensive.
It's the motives of the messenger.
When people feel attacked or judged.
They put their guard up.
If you can clarify, I'm raising this because I want us to be better.
I'd love to find out from you how I can do better.
And I have a couple of notes for you if you're open to them.
Then we're actually allies, right?
We are on a team trying to solve a problem together from the same side of it, as opposed to pitting us against each other.
So we haven't talked about AI yet.
It seems like AI technology is taking us away from...
human interaction to a degree, that we're having intimate interactions sometimes, conversational interactions with machines.
Do you feel like we're abandoning connection or we're just redefining it?
I think there's reason to be concerned that people are starting to abandon connection.
People are spending more time alone than they have at any point on record in most Western countries.
Not just teenagers, but many adults.
say they have an AI companion.
And some of them even say they'd rather talk with their AI chatbot than with an actual friend of theirs.
And I think the reason that's happening is chatbots are really good sick events.
They like us.
They flatter you.
Yeah, they tell you exactly what you want to hear.
It's like if your dog could talk.
They're wagging their tail and sticking their tongue out and you just feel loved all the time.
And human relationships are messy.
They are full of friction.
But that friction makes us stronger.
And ultimately, it can bring us closer too.
Because a relationship that cannot be tested is just a charade.
Every time you have an argument with someone or you have a fight with someone or you take some tough feedback from them.
You are making an investment in saying this relationship is important enough to us that we're going to keep committing to it.
And that builds your shared resilience over time.
It allows both of you or all of you to know we are all in on this relationship.
We're going to do whatever we can to preserve it.
And I think we should be more willing to embrace the messiness of human interaction because after all, human connection is one of the few things that AI cannot replace.
So, you know, I have worked for companies that viewed themselves as sort of politeness cultures and never in a complimenting way.
I mean, that we're a politeness culture and therefore we're not questioning the status quo.
We're not, you know, we're sort of just kind of going along.
There's something nice about a politeness culture.
There's something debilitating about it.
How do we know if we're in a politeness culture?
And if so, how do we move toward something a little bit more real?
I think the clearest test of a politeness culture is do people say different things behind each other's backs than they say to their faces?
So are people constantly having a meeting after the meeting where they reveal what they really think?
If so, you might be in the middle of a politeness culture.
And I think the danger of that is that you are only saying what makes people feel good today instead of communicating what's going to help them do better tomorrow.
And I think that's where disagreeable givers have a really powerful role to play.
I think the first thing I would want to do is I would find the people who are good at challenging the status quo, but are doing it because they care about the group or the organization.
And I would empower those people.
I would tell them, look, I don't think we have enough dissent around here.
I think we have too many people keeping the peace.
I want you to challenge me.
When I've seen leaders do this, it's extremely powerful.
So Konstantinos and I...
did an experiment and also some longitudinal CEO surveys where we showed that it's one thing for leaders to ask for criticism.
People don't really know if you mean it.
Are you going to take my concern seriously?
Are you going to be too busy to pay attention?
Or are you going to get threatened and shoot the messenger?
And most people decide it's just safer to stay silent.
What we found often works better.
is instead of just asking for criticism, to criticize yourself out loud.
When CEOs say, here's something I'm bad at, or here's what I've been told I need to work on, or here's what my 360 revealed is a weakness of mine.
They're not just claiming that they're open, they are actually proving that they can handle the truth.
And I think that leaders role modeling that behavior has two effects.
One is that...
Other people do then speak up to you and you start hearing the critiques and you get out of the politeness culture.
But also other people become more open about their own limitations too.
And you start to cascade a culture where people are really invested in not just trying to look good, but actually improve.
And I think what's so important about that is a lot of leaders say, you know, I get the effect.
I've had this conversation with more CEOs than I can count.
Very often what they'll say is, I see the power of admitting your flaws, but I don't want to do it because then everyone's going to find out.
And I'm like, they already know.
You can't hide your shortcomings from the people who work around you.
They are acutely aware of everything you suck at.
So you might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see your own foibles and the humility and integrity to admit them out loud.
If somebody's listening to this and thinks, yeah, I want to do a lot of this stuff, it's a lot.
We talked about a lot of things, like something they can do immediately to try to improve the culture, improve the functioning of their teams.
Any sort of quick starter advice that you might have?
Well, one place I'd love to see leaders start is, we were just talking about shooting the messenger.
And I think the obvious advice is don't shoot the messenger, thank the messenger.
I would go a step further.
and say, it's not enough to thank the messenger.
You really want to make a statement?
Promote the messenger.
Even Steve Jobs understood the power of this.
So if you go back to the 80s, the Mac team gave out an award for the person who most courageously challenged Jobs himself.
And Adi, when I first learned about that, my assumption was, okay, you're about to get fired.
They wanted to praise you on your way out the door.
But what's remarkable is, every year, the winner of that award was promoted by Steve Jobs himself.
He understood that he could have a chilling effect on the culture.
He knew that he needed people to challenge him.
And he thought the best way to make it clear that he valued that was to actually elevate the person who did that productively.
I think it's worth looking around your organization and asking who are the culture carriers who aren't just championing the status quo, but are actually looking for the tensions between who you claim you are and who you actually are.
who are pushing the organization to evolve, give those people a megaphone, give them a promotion, give them a bigger title and an opportunity to spread what they're doing.
I think that's a great way to figure out how to improve the vibe in your workplace.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
Adam, thank you for joining us on IdeaCast.
Good luck with the book rollout.
Thank you, Adi.
It's been fun.
That was Adam Grant, psychology professor at Wharton and author of Vibe, The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World.
Next time, Allison speaks with Dr.
Stacey Kim about why envy might not be as toxic as we think.
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And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast.
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I'm Adi Ignatius.