Hello {{first_name}} ,
Were you ALSO on the edge of your seat watching the astronauts come home this year?
I don’t mean just the splashdown… I also mean what happened after.
Watching the press tour and interviews, you could see how these four people had become something more than colleagues on a mission.
They finished each other's sentences and deferred to each other's stories with genuine pride. One crewmember, Commander Reid Wiseman named a crater after his late wife, Carrol, and you could see it meant something to everyone on that team - not just him. They moved through every conversation like people who had been through something hard together and come out of it more connected, not less.
That's what a real team looks like. And it's rarer than we think.
Superteams aren't born. They're built.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately - partly because of the astronauts, and partly because of a night seeing Hamilton a few months ago where I had the same feeling from a completely different vantage point.
Front-row seats, close enough to see the sweat on people's faces.
Hamilton steps up onto a table and jumps…
At that exact instant, a company member slides the tablecloth out from beneath his feet. One wrong movement, or one microsecond too late, he falls.
I know they've rehearsed it hundreds of times - and yet still, watching it live, I held my breath.
What I keep coming back to isn't the precision, rather it's the trust, connection and all the work that happened during 100’s of hours of practice that makes the precision possible. These performers weren't just executing well, they were executing together - and that is a completely different thing.
Two superteams: one in orbit, one on Broadway. Both sharing the same qualities of Superteams:
Performance (at an exceptionally high level) + Positivity (strong relationships and engagement with each other).
What I’m Seeing Right Now
In a recent conversation with a new client, she said to me:
“We have a new CEO and several members of our leadership team are new. We’re all passionate high performers and yet we aren’t as coordinated and accountable to each other as we need to be right now.”
This is a common challenge right now: Fast growth, high rate of leadership turnover, new org structures. The turnover isn’t always a negative thing - in fact, it’s often a sign of organizational growth and renewal. Yet, the challenge is - how does an organization facing rapid growth and change create a stable leadership team culture at the top (which then models that culture throughout the organization)?
✶ FROM IDEA TO IMPACT ✶
The superteams I'm seeing navigate this well have one thing in common: they carve out a regular cadence of facilitated time to talk about how they're working together - not just what they're working on. They ask questions like:
✶ Who are we at our best?
✶ What are we here to do?
✶ What are our individual and collective/team strengths we can lean on?
✶ What values and norms do we want to guide us?
✶ How do we hold ourselves and each other accountable?
✶ How do we create a culture of support, trust and connection?
✶ How do we individually and collectively manage stress and unexpected disruption?
✶ What does winning together look like?
Teams that make space for those conversations stop being a group of leaders. They become a leadership team.
What I’m Reading Right Now
These pieces have shaped my thinking this month:
✶ How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better (Harvard Business Review Article): The central argument: great teams aren't collections of talented individuals. They're systems that continuously improve by building trust, learning together, and creating conditions where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. What resonated most with me is the emphasis that this is an ongoing practice rather than a destination. This perspective aligns closely with my recent work in team coaching and the Team Performance Assessment.
✶ How Stella Saved the Farm (by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble): A deceptively simple business fable about a farm facing disruption. As I think about the theme of superteams, this book reminds us that innovation is fundamentally a team sport, one that requires both the courage to try something new and the trust to navigate uncertainty together.
✶ An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (by Chris Hadfield): Extraordinary achievements rarely come from individual brilliance alone, rather they emerge from teams that prepare relentlessly, trust each other deeply, and perform under pressure with both precision and humility. This book is a powerful reminder that even astronauts reaching for the moon depend on exceptional teamwork here on Earth.
If any of this lands - moon landing pun intended - or if you're leading a team right now that could use some of this thinking - just reply. I'd love to hear what's happening in your world.
In partnership,
P.S. The most effective way to start building a superteam is to give it a mirror.
An assessment creates a shared language - a baseline of collective strengths and growth areas the whole team can see and talk about together. Without it, teams are often solving for symptoms ("we have a communication problem") without seeing the system underneath.
If you're curious what this looks like in practice, I'm offering a complimentary conversation and Team Leader assessment and debrief. Set up a call →