Teamwork has changed profoundly with the spread of hybrid and remote models. Teams have not disappeared, though: they simply work differently. In this new environment, their performance depends more than ever on how well organisations understand personalities, collective dynamics, what holds a group together and the behaviours liable to surface under pressure.
This article explores the fundamentals of modern team development: what actually defines a team, the three essential dimensions of its performance, balance, derailers and leadership, and the part personality assessment plays in building engaged, complementary and durable teams.
For executives, HR directors and talent management professionals, the stakes are strategic: understanding individuals and their interactions better improves collective performance, and also strengthens engagement, retention, psychological safety and leadership potential across the organisation.
Teamwork has changed considerably in recent years, as a great many professionals have adopted hybrid or remote working models. But teams have not disappeared: they simply work differently. In this new professional landscape, modern team development has become an essential lever for building high-performing teams.
Recently, on the podcast The Science of Personality, co-hosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp were joined by Kyle Cermak, who heads business development at Hogan Assessments, to discuss team development in the modern era.
"I spent about half my career leading very high-performing sales teams," Kyle explains. "Team development is a subject close to my heart."
What actually defines a team? Which key areas should you work on to encourage its development? And what strategies can organisations put in place to build teams that perform over the long term?
On the Hogan approach, a team is a set of people with cross-cutting expertise working towards a shared objective.
"Generally it means at least three people who share a common objective and a common leadership, and who regard themselves as belonging to a team. That mental picture of belonging shapes how each person sees their contribution to the collective effort," Kyle Cermak explains.
The success of team members depends intrinsically on one another, and also on their leader. In the same way, the various teams making up an organisation are interdependent.
Even though each has its own speciality, finance, human resources or operations, for example, everything it does has repercussions for other parts of the business. Each person therefore has to shoulder their individual responsibilities in a way that serves the collective interest. It falls to leaders to encourage a culture built around a shared purpose.
Kyle Cermak's expertise in team development was forged in part when he was promoted into a management role in his late twenties. He describes his first experience of leadership as an outright failure: at the time, he had not yet developed the leadership capacities needed to build and sustain a high-performing team.
"How do you come to understand what genuinely matters to each member of the team and help them realise their full potential?" he asks. "My responsibility as a leader is to make sure the team truly gives its best, while helping to form tomorrow's leaders."
Like a talent management strategy, team development is constantly evolving. Companies today are under considerable pressure: they have to improve collective performance quickly while facing high turnover.
"Having good practices in talent acquisition and employee development is a considerable competitive advantage when those practices encourage people to collaborate, to communicate well and to keep moving the business forward," Kyle points out.
On his view, three areas are particularly decisive in developing a team:
A team's balance rests first of all on the right combination of skills, experience and personalities, allowing both a high level of performance and satisfaction among its members.
Take a basketball team made up entirely of centres: its performance would probably fall short of a team in which all five positions were properly represented.
Diversity of skill therefore makes for balance. As Kyle explains: "We need a balance between very high performers and people in supporting roles. We do not want a team where everyone operates in exactly the same way."
This complementarity is one of the foundations of a high-performing team. In HR strategy and talent management, then, the point is not simply to add individual talents together, but to understand how those talents will work together.
How do team members tend to react under pressure? And what impact can those reactions have on engagement and on how the group functions?
Hogan calls these stress-triggered behaviours derailers, because they can stop a person from expressing their full potential and succeeding.
Derailers can be grouped into three broad behavioural categories:
In more everyday language, these responses to conflict can be associated with flight, confrontation and the need to be right.
Kyle gives an example of what can happen once a team enters a derailing dynamic:
"If you have a team where people tend to move away from each other as soon as a problem arises, everyone retreating into their own office, that is not going to move conflict resolution along. And it will not encourage effective communication."
Team members therefore need to be able to identify how each person contributes to collective success, and also what might happen when things get harder.
Put another way, they have every interest in understanding their own derailers as well as those of their colleagues.
All of them also need to invest in building a team culture that lets them make the most of their capabilities and respond productively to periods of tension or difficult situations.
This mutual understanding is an essential dimension of assessment and development: lasting performance depends not only on what each person can do when all is well, but also on how people interact when the pressure rises.
The third essential area of team development concerns the effectiveness of leadership.
Leaders have to take responsibility for their team's balance. They also have to understand how their people are likely to react when they run into difficulty or conflict.
Finally, they play a central part in the team's cohesion and culture. That means, among other things, helping everyone understand how their colleagues operate and the values underpinning the collective culture.
An absence of shared purpose or shared objectives damages a team's performance directly. Which is why alignment around objectives is a particularly important issue for leaders.
To illustrate how an effective leader might address their team, Kyle offers a simple formulation:
"This is who we are. This is what we are trying to accomplish. And this is how we are going to get there."
He adds: "I struggle to see a more important responsibility for a leader to be aware of."
Leadership is therefore not only about coordinating work. It involves creating a shared frame, providing meaning and letting people understand both the collective destination and how they can contribute to reaching it.
Investing in people is both sound and profitable.
Organisations generally get a better return on investment by developing the talent already present than by systematically starting from scratch with new people.
In many cases, the right talent is already in the right places. Sometimes it is the group's dynamics that are not yet producing optimal collective performance.
Team development then helps people learn to work together positively and productively, taking account of their respective personalities.
"The starting point for understanding personality characteristics is personality assessment," Kyle states.
A personality assessment capable of predicting performance at work can supply particularly useful information about the personality characteristics expressed day to day, the difficulties liable to hinder performance, and the values that motivate people in their professional and personal lives.
Teams whose values are aligned, both with their leader's and with those of the organisation's leadership, also tend to feel greater job satisfaction.
Personality assessment thus becomes a genuine tool for skills development, for making sense of collective dynamics and for supporting leadership potential.
"Building high-performing teams also brings organisations many indirect benefits," Kyle explains.
Very high-performing teams generally show a high level of engagement.
"The more invested and engaged a person is in their work, the better their chances of reaching a high level of performance," he adds.
Stronger engagement also improves retention, lifts morale and raises productivity.
The positive effects can then spread across the whole organisation: higher revenue, better customer satisfaction, stronger psychological safety, among other benefits.
Developing a team is therefore not solely a matter of human development. It is also a lever for organisational performance and sustainable management.
To understand how a team, its leader included, is likely to function, Hogan draws on reliable, scientifically validated personality inventories.
Certified Hogan practitioners then deliver individual feedback sessions, allowing participants to build the strategic self-awareness they need to succeed within their team and across their career.
Modern team development sessions cover, among other things:
At the same time, leaders gain a finer understanding of how to lead their team, with all the particularities that belong to it.
The point, then, is not to apply a uniform management method to every team, but to understand the personalities, interactions and dynamics belonging to each group so as to adapt coaching and support.
Kyle stresses the importance of acting at three levels at once: the individual, the team and the leadership.
"The only real measure of leadership effectiveness is the team's performance. There is no better opportunity to improve organisational performance than investing in the performance of its teams," he concludes.
In an era of hybrid work, remote management and permanent organisational change, developing a high-performing team takes far more than gathering capable people together.
Collective performance rests on complementary profiles, on understanding the behaviours that can emerge under pressure, on alignment around shared values and objectives and, above all, on leadership's capacity to create the conditions for cooperation.
Seen this way, personality assessment is a strategic lever for talent management. It moves past visible skills to make better sense of everyday behaviour, potential derailers and what really drives people.
Paired with a structured approach to assessment and development, it helps organisations build self-awareness, strengthen cohesion, support leadership potential and transform teams durably.
Investing in team development therefore means investing simultaneously in employee engagement, in the quality of leadership and in the organisation's long-term performance.
At Authentic Talent, we believe that objective assessment of talent and potential within organisations is a decisive factor in their future success. If you would like to discuss it with us, let's talk!
This article draws on an article published on the Hogan Assessments website: Modern Team Development
