At a time when organizations, particularly in government and public sectors, face increasingly complex challenges such as digital transformation, interagency collaboration, and crisis response, effective leadership hinges not on individual charisma but on harnessing the power of groups. Prof. Colin Fisher, Associate Professor at the University College London School of Management and author of The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, distills decades of research into practical strategies for optimizing group performance.
During my recent interview with Colin on The Business of Government, he sharedtimelyinsights from his book that emphasized how leaders can foster synergy, navigate dysfunctions, and create thriving teams. Fisher reveals that effective group leadership is more about systematic attention to the fundamental mechanics of human collaboration.
This essay explores key leadership lessons from Fisher's work. These lessons underscore that high-performing groups are not accidental but the result of deliberate structure, timing, and psychological safety, offering actionable guidance for leaders in any sector.
The Hidden Forces Shaping Every Interaction
Group dynamics are omnipresent yet often invisible forces that shape organizational behavior. As Colin explains, "Group dynamics are everywhere. They're all around us. They're influencing us all the time. It's the little voice that's whispering to us to conform to what we perceive to be the will of the group. It's the times we don't speak up, even when we privately disagree."
This insight challenges leaders to recognize that every meeting, every project team, and every collaborative effort operates within a complex web of social influences that can either accelerate or undermine performance.
The pervasive nature of these dynamics means that leaders who ignore them do so at their organization's peril. This foundational insight suggests that technical competence and strategic vision, while necessary, are insufficient for organizational leadership without a deep understanding of group psychology.
The Surprising Simplicity of Great Group Leadership
With over two decades of research on group dynamics, creativity, and improvisation, Fisher posits counterintuitive findings: exceptional leaders are not omniscient "Jedi Masters" but inquisitive listeners who ask questions and prioritize basics like understanding perspectives.
This finding stresses a critical leadership principle: the power of inquiry over assertion.
The implications of this discovery extend far beyond individual leadership style. Fisher observes that "people miss the very basic things about groups so often" because of competing demands for attention and our tendency to "experience the world as individuals."
Effective leaders combat this tendency through "simple acts that we need to do to understand other people's perspectives to get a group of people on the same page to make explicit these things that are otherwise assumed and unstated."
This emphasis on making the implicit explicit represents a fundamental shift from leadership as performance to leadership as facilitation. Rather than needing to have all the answers, the most effective leaders create conditions where the collective intelligence of the group can emerge through systematic inquiry and active listening.
The Architecture of High-Performing Teams
Fisher's research identifies specific structural elements that distinguish high-performing teams from their struggling counterparts. The first critical factor is thoughtful team composition, which requires leaders to think systematically about "what are the knowledge, skills, and perspectives that are necessary for accomplishing this task" and then ensure those capabilities are represented on the team.
This approach stands in stark contrast to the political considerations that often drive team formation in bureaucratic organizations, where membership is determined by departmental representation rather than task requirements.
The second structural principle and equally critical is team size. Fisher recommends three to seven members, backed by research on transactive memory—knowing who knows what. Larger groups hinder participation: "if you're in an hour-long meeting with 10 or more people, the chance that everyone is going to contribute what they know becomes more difficult, if not impossible."
This lesson is particularly relevant for government leaders forming interagency teams, where oversized groups can stifle collaboration.
By prioritizing expertise and compactness, leaders can enhance synergy, as exemplified in Fisher's discussion of design firm IDEO, which uses dedicated, diverse teams of two to six members focused on single projects.
The Critical Importance of Timing in Leadership
Fisher's doctoral research on the timing of team leadership interventions reveals three crucial moments when leaders can have maximum impact.
The first is the initial team meeting, where "the norms and how we behave in teams form very quickly... those things form usually right in that very first meeting."
This creates both opportunity and risk, as "whatever happens, that first time tends to keep happening. Who sits where, who talks the most, who doesn't contribute" become established patterns that persist throughout the team's life cycle.
To leverage this critical moment, Fisher prescribes three essential actions for the first meeting. Leaders must "articulate a clear, important goal and make sure everyone understands it and they agree with the way you're phrasing it." They must establish communication norms that promote psychological safety, explicitly stating expectations that "everybody shares what they know" and creating environments where "if there's people who aren't speaking up, we double check to make sure that they're on the same page" and where "it's OK if you disagree with me, the leader." Finally, they must ensure clarity about the next steps, as "you'd be amazed how many teams fall apart because we have a launch. We started the work of this group, but then we weren't very clear on what everybody was supposed to do."
The second critical timing intervention occurs at the midpoint of any project.
Fisher recommends scheduling a midpoint review "halfway between the launch meeting and the deadline" to reflect on "what's going well. What should we change? What can we start doing differently." This timing is strategic because "teams tend to be especially open to change about halfway through any task" when they recognize "half the time has gone" and become "more receptive to change."
The third timing intervention comes at project completion, where teams should "take a moment, not just move on to the next thing, but reflect on what they learned as a team.”
This is the time to inquire about what the team did well, what it could do better next, and how it could perhaps do things differently for the betterment of the team.
Redefining Leadership as a Distributed Function
Fisher challenges traditional hierarchical notions of leadership by arguing that "good group leadership isn't just the activities of the formal leader, it's a shared process that helps the group to achieve the key functions it needs to achieve."
This perspective reframes leadership from individual authority to collective capability, where "good group leadership is shared and it's functional."
This concept is illustrated through Fisher's example from the 2008 U.S. Olympic Basketball team, where young players including LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo Anthony returned to their hotel at dawn after a night out, only to encounter teammate Kobe Bryant heading to the weight room for his early morning workout. The "hint of derision" in Bryant's greeting served as a form of peer leadership that motivated behavioral change without formal authority. As Fisher notes, "that, like kind of subtle peer pressure from people who are respected within the team. That's also leadership, that's also motivating the team."
This distributed view of leadership means that "no matter what your role is in the team, that you can be contributing to the leadership of that team."
The implication for formal leaders is that their role shifts from being the sole source of direction to creating conditions where leadership functions can emerge from multiple team members as situations require.
Building Trust Through Task-Based Collaboration
There are two types of trust that are often confused in organizational settings. "Relational trust" or "socio-emotional trust" involves personal vulnerability and emotional connection.” While important in personal relationships, this type of trust is different from what teams need to function effectively.
The trust that matters most for team performance is "task-based trust" or "instrumental trust."
This is the confidence that "when I give you an assignment and I ask you to perform it to a certain standard and I need you to give it back to me by a certain time, done appropriately well... I trust that you will do that." Fisher emphasizes that "these two things are really different" and that many team-building efforts focused on building personal relationships may miss the mark.
The most effective way to build task-based trust is through working together rather than through separate trust-building exercises. "The evidence that interventions to do team building that are based on socio-emotional trust are less effective than those that are just getting to work and when we start working together and I see you deliver something when I ask you to, that's where we start building trust."
This insight has practical implications for how organizations should approach team development. Rather than investing primarily in off-site retreats and trust falls, leaders should focus on creating "high fidelity simulations of the kind of tasks we're going to do" where team members can demonstrate reliability and competence in low-stakes environments before moving to high-stakes performance.
Addressing the Conformity-Polarization Paradox
Fisher's research acknowledges a counterintuitive relationship between conformity and polarization in groups. While conformity might seem to lead to moderate, average positions, "that's actually not what happens." Instead, conformity pressure combines with the tendency for "people who tend to speak the most and speak the loudest" to hold "more extreme" positions, leading groups toward polarization rather than moderation.
The mechanism works through false consensus: "we tend to infer that the middle is more extreme than it is, and... when we identify with the group, we actually change our own opinion, or at least we start to express different opinions that conform to this more extreme version."
This dynamic explains how groups can become increasingly extreme in their positions over time, even when individual members privately hold more moderate views.
The antidote to this destructive dynamic is psychological safety—creating environments where "people speak up and they feel free to disagree with what they see as the dominant view in the group." When dissenting voices emerge, it serves as "a wakeup call for everybody who's been imagining that they were the only ones who disagreed" with the apparently dominant position.
Lessons for Government and Complex Organizations
Fisher's insights have particular relevance for government organizations and other complex bureaucratic structures. His research on interagency collaboration reveals that these challenging environments simply concentrate familiar group dynamics rather than presenting entirely new categories of problems. Teams across different agencies struggled not because interagency work was fundamentally different, but because they faced "concentrated versions of exactly the same challenges" including different priority systems that "remained implicit”.
The solution involves treating complex collaboration challenges as "learning tasks" where teams "do little experiments and say, hey, I tried this, this didn't work. What should we do next?" Teams that "are constantly experimenting with how they work with the technologies that they're using, that they share information with others... they're probably going to overcome some of these challenges."
This experimental mindset represents a fundamental shift for organizations accustomed to standardized procedures.
Fisher advocates for teams that "are going to experiment... they're going to reflect on the results of those experiments and come up with some theories about what's working and what's not... and then they're going to feed that back into another experiment."
Preparation is key—practice more than perform, as in sports or jazz.
For government settings, this means encouraging open acknowledgment of adaptations during crises, fostering creativity in decision-making amid uncertainty.
Virtual and Hybrid Work Considerations
The shift to remote and hybrid work models presents both opportunities and challenges for group dynamics. Fisher notes that remote work enables collaboration with geographically dispersed expertise while hybrid arrangements can provide flexibility for people with different life constraints. However, these arrangements also increase "psychological distance" where "we view people as slightly less concrete and therefore more abstract entities" and "tend to treat them a little less human than we would if they were in person."
The solution requires intentional effort to "make sure that we are connecting with one another as human beings" and recognizing that "we need to spend a little extra time doing that if we're going to collaborate remotely." However, Fisher warns against hybrid meetings where some participants are co-located while others are remote, as these create the most challenging collaboration conditions.
His research shows that "teams generally figure out how to collaborate when we have a single communication medium" but struggle when mixing modalities.
Measuring Group Effectiveness
Fisher proposes a three-dimensional framework for assessing team performance that goes beyond simple task completion. Effective measurement should examine client satisfaction with the group's output, member satisfaction with their participation, and the team's viability for ongoing collaboration. This comprehensive approach recognizes that "if we, you know, win the game. But then we hate each other so much, we can't work together again the next day, that wouldn't be a very effective team."
This multifaceted measurement approach prevents the common mistake of optimizing for short-term task performance at the expense of long-term collaborative capacity. Organizations that implement this broader assessment framework are more likely to develop sustainable high-performance cultures rather than burning out their most capable teams.
Implications for Leadership Development
Traditional leadership development approaches may miss critical elements of effective group leadership. Rather than focusing primarily on individual leadership competencies, organizations should invest in "high fidelity simulations" that allow teams to practice collaboration in controlled environments. These simulations should follow a cycle of action, reflection, sense-making, and iteration—a structure that mirrors the experimental learning mindset Fisher advocates for high-performing teams.
The emphasis on timing, structure, and systematic attention to group processes represents a more methodical approach to leadership than many current development programs provide.
Leaders need training not just in decision-making and strategic thinking, but in the specific skills of group diagnosis, norm-setting, and collaborative facilitation.
Conclusion
Unlocking collective potential requires systematic attention to the fundamental mechanics of human collaboration rather than relying on individual charisma or motivational techniques. The most effective leaders understand that their primary role is creating conditions where group intelligence can emerge through careful attention to team composition, size, timing, and process. They recognize that group dynamics are always present and always influential, making it essential to shape these forces intentionally rather than hoping they will resolve themselves.
The shift from individual to collective leadership represents more than a change in technique—it represents a fundamental reconceptualization of how organizations can achieve superior performance. In an era of increasing complexity and interdependence, the leaders who master these principles will be those best positioned to navigate the challenges ahead. As Fisher's research demonstrates, the collective edge is not a mystical property that some teams possess and others lack, but a systematic result of applying scientific understanding of group behavior to the practical challenges of organizational life.