Great Individuals, Broken Handoffs: The Hidden Cost of Team Misalignment

Most companies pour their energy into hiring exceptional individual performers. But talent alone rarely wins the race — what determines success is how well that talent works together when it counts.

Consider the U.S. Olympic men's 4x100m relay team. On paper, this should be the most dominant relay squad in the world — American sprinters have claimed six individual 100m medals across the last five Olympic Games. Yet during that same stretch, the team has walked away from the relay event empty-handed. Not once.

The explanation isn't athletic ability — it's teamwork. Countries that consistently medal in the relay spend months training together as a unit. The U.S. team, by contrast, tends to assemble its roster shortly before competition, betting on individual speed over the baton-passing chemistry that only comes from sustained practice together.

If a breakdown in coordination can cost a team gold in something as straightforward as handing off a baton, consider what it costs inside a business — where the handoffs are constant, the objectives are tangled together, and the stakes are much higher than a single race.

A Warning Sign in the Data

Our State of Engagement 2026 report surfaced a troubling shift: sentiment around team relationships is sliding, with "My Team" registering one of the sharpest year-over-year declines of all eight engagement factors we track.

And the real damage isn't happening within individual teams — it's happening in the space between them:

• Cross-team friction: One of the lowest-scoring statements in the entire survey was agreement with "Some departments/teams in this organisation don't work well with each other" — a clear signal that cross-functional collaboration is breaking down in costly ways.
• Fear of speaking up: Equally concerning was low agreement with "People are afraid to express their true feelings in team meetings" — a red flag for psychological safety. When people don't feel safe being candid, feedback dries up, decisions slow to a crawl, and problems fester quietly instead of getting solved.

Where Organisations Need to Go From Here

The fix isn't building better individual teams in isolation — it's building genuine alignment across the whole organisation, underpinned by psychological safety.

That means:

• Dismantling silos by directly addressing the friction that arises when departments are chasing conflicting or poorly aligned goals.
• Building real psychological safety by giving people leaders the tools to encourage honest disagreement and productive conversations about competing priorities.

Is your organisation quietly trading collaboration for individual wins? Could invisible silos already be eroding your competitive advantage?

This is only a glimpse of what our full State of Engagement 2026 report uncovers. Download the complete report to explore the "My Team" decline in depth, understand the real cost of weakening inter-departmental collaboration, and get the strategic roadmap for rebuilding a genuinely cohesive, high-performing organisation.