There is something deeply soothing about believing that competence alone will save us. Find talented people, put them together, and step back while excellence naturally emerges. This belief survives despite overwhelming lived experience to the contrary, mostly because competence is visible, résumé-friendly, and an easy and concrete thing to defend in a meeting.
Team functionality, on the other hand, is hard, even awkward, to point at. You can’t screenshot it. When it works, everyone sees a well-performing team with good vibes, but no one can put their finger on why it has happened. When it doesn’t, everyone suddenly discovers the well-known phrase of “alignment issues.”
Competence gets you in the room but does not guarantee anything once you’re there.
Competence is table stakes. Without it, teams fail loudly and quickly. But once a baseline is met, competence stops being the bottleneck. At that point, performance depends less on how capable people are individually and more on how well they can think, decide, and adapt together.
This is where many teams stall. They are full of smart, experienced professionals who end up spending their days undoing each other’s work, revisiting decisions, and being surprised by outcomes they technically should have seen coming.
The invisible tax of coordination, confusion, and quiet frustration
When team functionality is weak, competence doesn’t disappear. It just leaks. People solve the same problem twice, just in different documents. Risks are noticed early and mentioned late, or better yet not at all. Meetings become status updates instead of decision-making forums. The work feels heavy, not because it is hard, but because it is unnecessarily tangled.
The biggest irony is that everyone involved is capable of better. The system simply doesn’t allow their competence to add up.
The myth of the heroic expert
Many organizations still operate as if performance is the sum of individual brilliance. This works nicely in stories but awfully poorly in reality. Put enough experts together without clear ways of working, and you don’t get brilliance squared. What you get is polite disagreement, dominant voices, and everyone else quietly disengaging while thinking, “Well, this is going to be fun later. Maybe.”
Competence without structure tends to amplify hierarchy rather than insight. And the smartest idea is not always the one that survives the conversation.
“Team functionality” is not code for “let’s all be friends”
This is where things often go wrong. Team functionality gets confused with chemistry, personality fit, or forced bonding exercises. That misunderstanding makes it easy to dismiss as fluffy or optional.
In reality, functional teams are not defined by how much they like each other, or what kind of activities team members would engage in together outside office hours, but by how reliably they do a few unglamorous tasks. They acknowledge each other’s strengths. They surface problems early. They are clear about who decides what and who should do what. They share an understanding of goals and tradeoffs. They revisit how they work when things stop working.
None of this is magical. It is purely super operational.
Why hiring more talent often makes things worse
When results lag, the default move is to hire stronger people. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes recruiters forget that the stronger and more senior people they hire, the more opinions and suggestions there will be on the table. Often, it quietly increases complexity. Each new highly competent hire adds more opinions, more dependencies, and more coordination costs. Without better team functionality, the return on that added competence shrinks.
This is how organizations end up with extremely capable teams that feel permanently overloaded and strangely ineffective. The talent is real. The leverage is gone with the wind.
(And if you’re highly competent, be careful not to undervalue other people’s competence just because it doesn’t look like yours.)
Modern work: where competence goes to be stress-tested
Today’s work is cross-functional, fast-moving, and ambiguous by default. Decisions have downstream effects that no single person can fully see. Under these conditions, individual competence matters more than ever, and yet it matters less on its own.
What differentiates teams now is not raw ability, but how quickly they align, adapt, and learn together. Team functionality becomes the difference between momentum and drag.
The better question leaders rarely ask
Instead of asking whether the team has top talent, a more useful question would be whether the team’s way of working allows that talent to compound over time and whether individual competence is able to shine and be shared. Does competence create clarity or noise? Does expertise speed things up or slow them down? Are people getting smarter together or just busier?
Those answers have far more impact on performance than another impressive hire.
The unsatisfying but true conclusion
Competence is non-negotiable. Without it, nothing else matters. But once competence is present, it stops being the main driver. Team functionality takes over. It determines whether capability turns into results, whether effort produces progress, and whether smart people actually do smart things together.
Competence opens the door. Team functionality decides what happens after everyone walks in.
