Why a leadership team full of great hires still drops the ball The Brewers won the World Series Wednesday night, 4–1 over the Rays in Game 5. It’s the first title in the franchise’s 57 years. Ms. Becky and I are building our shack in Wisconsin, so we’re officially on the bandwagon. Baseball is the sport where stacking stars most reliably buys wins. Each hitter stands alone at the plate. Add a great one and the win column moves. Basketball works differently. The NBA teams with the most stars on the roster win less than their talent says they should. Ten seasons of data say so, and so does anyone who has watched a superteam forget how to pass in the fourth quarter. Your leadership team plays basketball. Most of us hired it like a baseball roster. Every superintendent and president I talk to has hired at least one person they'd call the best they've ever worked with. A finance chief who reads a budget like a novel. A chief academic officer the faculty actually trust, which is rarer than a balanced budget. An HR lead who knows every contract clause by heart. Then a hard season shows up. A budget gap, a referendum, a bargaining year, an enrollment dip. The room full of all-stars starts pulling in different directions, each one excellent, each one alone. Everybody is playing hard. Nobody is playing together. So here's a question to sit with before your next leadership team meeting: when did you last hire someone for how well they pass? THE DIAGNOSIS · A ROOM FULL OF FINISHED REPORTS Picture a Tuesday morning leadership meeting in November. Finance brings a projection. HR brings a staffing plan built on last spring's numbers. Teaching and learning brings a new intervention model that needs four positions nobody budgeted. Each report is sharp and finished, and none of them were built with the others in the room. The real meeting happens in the parking lot at 11:40, two people at a time, engines running. Nobody at that table is underperforming. That's what makes the problem so hard to name. Your evaluations say everyone is excellent, and they're right. We built it this way. Job postings, interviews and annual reviews all measure the individual, and nobody's contract lists assists. We hire for points, pay for points, and then act surprised when nobody passes. Three questions worth answering honestly: How many of your top five priorities can one person on your team deliver alone? When a hand-off between two of your leaders drops, who finds out first, you or your board? When the next three months get harder, does your team pass faster, or does everyone retreat to their own lane? I know the loneliness of being the one person at the table who sees how all the pieces connect. I've sat in that chair. For a long stretch, my teams underperformed despite being full of talented people, and I kept trying to close the gap with my own effort. That works about as well as a point guard deciding to also play center. In The TQ Advantage, I call the result the Individual Brilliance Ceiling: talented people in the wrong positions, with no shared way of working, producing average team results. 📊 60% of collective capacity: where most leadership teams run, across nearly 1,000 TQ assessments . The talent is there. The passing is missing. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. IQ is the talent you hired. EQ is the shared language that lets that talent coordinate under pressure. PQ is each leader's accurate read of where they play best and where they're covering. It's multiplication, so a zero anywhere wins. Stack the IQ, let the other two sit near zero, and the product stays small no matter how many stars you sign. A quick timeout before the research. If one of those three questions made you wince, that wince is data. Most leadership teams I work with can name their best individual performer in two seconds and can't produce a single written hand-off. Closing that gap is what our TQ Advantage workshop is built for, and I'll say more about it at the end. First, the sports science. THE RESEARCH · THE TOO-MUCH-TALENT EFFECT In 2014, researchers from INSEAD, Columbia and VU University Amsterdam published a study in Psychological Science that tested something most hiring committees treat as settled: does adding top talent always make a team better? Before they ran the numbers, they asked ordinary people to predict the answer. Most said yes. More stars, more wins, no ceiling. Then the researchers checked. They looked at three sports: two World Cup qualifying cycles in soccer (2010 and 2014), ten NBA seasons (2002 to 2012), and ten Major League Baseball seasons over the same stretch. In baseball, more talent kept paying off. Each added star moved the win column. In soccer and basketball, talent helped up to a point. Past that point the gains flattened, and at the very top the curve bent down. The most star-heavy teams won less than their talent predicted. The NBA data showed where the wins leaked out. The most star-heavy teams coordinated worse: fewer assists, lower shooting percentages, fewer defensive rebounds. Anyone who has guarded a ball hog in a rec-league game knew this already. Now there's a regression line. The deciding variable was interdependence. A baseball hitter stands alone at the plate. (Baseball is a team sport roughly the way a spelling bee is.) A point guard needs four other people for the play to work. When winning depends on coordination, stacking individual brilliance without building the coordination stops paying. One caveat, because a sharp board member will ask: the downturn at the very top comes from a fitted curve, and the coordination link is a correlation. Treat it as a strong signal about where to look. Most of us hire leaders as if we're building a baseball roster. Then we ask them to play basketball. THE FRAMEWORK · SORT, PASS, POSITION Three moves. You can teach all of them to your team in sixty seconds. Sort the game you're actually playing. Some work really is baseball. A great grant writer or recruiter can win alone at the plate, so let them. The leadership team plays a different sport. The budget, the master schedule, enrollment, the board and the bargaining table all run through each other. When one leader guards her lane, somebody else's work stalls. Build the passes on purpose. In the NBA data, the damage ran through coordination. Coordination is a skill, so a team can practice it. Most leadership teams have never written down a single hand-off: who gives what to whom, by when. They run on goodwill and email. Goodwill holds up fine until February. Email holds up fine until someone hits reply-all. Put people where they play best. I was recruited to play catcher in college and spent four years calling pitches and talking with my pitcher between nearly every one. Now and then my coach moved me to right field to rest my legs. I could play it. I was never brilliant out there. Plenty of leadership teams have catchers playing right field, and nobody has said so out loud. The TQ framework maps five types of thinkers: HEART, SOUL, STRENGTH, VOICE and MIND. Every team leans hard toward a few. Among the leaders we've assessed, HEART shows up 43% of the time and MIND just 7% . If nobody on your team naturally plays the MIND position, someone is covering it, and they're probably tired. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE · ONE DROPPED PASS Here's the pattern I see most often. Finance flags a deficit in October. HR waits on enrollment projections before starting the staffing plan. Finance assumes teaching and learning is producing those projections. Teaching and learning assumes HR has them. Nobody dropped the ball on purpose. Everybody assumed someone else was holding it. Three excellent leaders, one dropped pass, and the reduction conversation slides to April, when every option is worse. Map that team's thinking and the reason usually takes about ten minutes to see. Nobody naturally plays the long-range, systems-checking position, so the superintendent has been covering it herself, at 10 p.m., for years. The fix is two moves. Write the six most important hand-offs as one-sentence agreements with names and dates. Then give the systems check to the leader whose profile leans that way, with permission to slow a decision down when the numbers don't connect. Same people. Different sport. TQ IMPLICATION → If most of your priorities need two or more leaders moving together, your development plans can't all be batting practice. THE DRILL · 20 MINUTES AT YOUR NEXT MEETING Sort the work (5 minutes). List your team's top five priorities for the year. Mark each one B for baseball, if one person can win it alone, or H for hoops, if it takes two or more of you moving together. Count the H's. If most are H's and every development plan on your team is individual, you've found the gap. Find the passes (5 minutes). For each H, write the hand-off as one sentence: who gives what to whom, by when. "Finance gets the enrollment projection to HR by February 1 so staffing can start." Name your positions (5 minutes). Go around the table once. Each leader answers: "Where on this team do I play catcher? Where am I playing right field?" No rebuttals on the first lap. Fix one pass (5 minutes). Pick the hand-off that dropped most often this fall. Agree on one change and one owner. Open your next meeting by checking it. "We don't have time for this." Count the decisions this fall that came back to the table a second time because someone wasn't looped in. Multiply by the people in the room and the minutes each one took. You're already paying for the drill, in rework. "My people are too senior for this." So were the NBA's most stacked rosters, and coordination was still where they lost games. Twenty minutes usually surfaces one hand-off everyone quietly knew was broken. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "We need to hire another star." Mature leaders think: "We need the stars we have to pass." Immature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent, so my team is excellent." Mature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent. Now we build the team." Immature leaders think: "Put the best person on the biggest problem." Mature leaders think: "Put the right position on the problem, and protect the hand-offs around it." YOUR TURN Finish this sentence in the comments: "The pass that keeps dropping on our team is ______." One line is plenty. Then read a few of the others. You'll see fast that you're not the only one, which is either comforting or alarming, depending on your board. THE NEXT MOVE Quick gut check. If you ran the drill tomorrow, how many of your top five priorities would come back marked H? And how many of those have a hand-off anyone has written down? If the honest answers are "most" and "none," you're in good company. It's the most common pattern in our data. It's also the one that costs the most in a hard season, because dropped passes show up right when the margin for error disappears: the budget gap, the bargaining year, the board meeting where three of your leaders describe three versions of the same plan. If the drill surfaced more dropped passes than you expected, let's talk it through. Thirty minutes, your team's real hand-offs, no slides and no pitch. Start with a 30-minute conversation: BOOK IT HERE When you're ready to go further, the TQ Advantage workshop puts your whole leadership team in one room for two and a half hours. Everyone completes the TQ assessment first. In the room you see your team's map side by side: who plays catcher, who's covering right field, and which positions nobody holds. You leave with the hand-off and decision protocols you'll use the next morning. Workshop details: higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence Know a colleague whose leadership team is in a hard season? Send this their way. And if you're new here, hit subscribe so next week's issue finds you. SOURCES & FURTHER READING Swaab, R. I., Schaerer, M., Anicich, E. M., Ronay, R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). The too-much-talent effect: Team interdependence determines when more talent is too much or not enough. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1581–1591. Read the study Plain-language summary: Association for Psychological Science The book: The TQ Advantage by Dr. Joe Hill Behind the 60% figure: HPG research on nearly 1,000 TQ assessments