Author Talks: Building teams that thrive

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Kristi Essick chats with Daniel Coyle, best-selling author, about Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment (Bantam/Penguin Random House, February 2026). Four years after his first Author Talks interview on unleashing team potential, Coyle returns to reflect on the power of relationship building to spark fulfillment and meaningful growth. Drawing on five years of observations across disciplines and geographies, he reveals how forging connection and community fuels performance. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why did you write this book?

There were two reasons. First, we’re living through a moment of fragmentation. Things are speeding up at work and in the world. We feel more isolated. Communication across those lines is becoming more difficult.

Second, I’ve spent my career studying high performers. In The Talent Code, I wrote about individual performance. In The Culture Code, I wrote about great groups. I consistently found that many groups were achieving incredible levels of success. They were able to climb the mountaintop. Yet beneath that, if you scratched the surface and looked just below it, there was a certain listlessness, an emptiness. That made me interested, not in the mountaintops, but in the valleys, in finding places of rich growth and generativity. I felt hungry for that, both as an individual and as a journalist. I thought, “What’s the machinery beneath that magic?”

We flourish in and through our relationships with one another. That’s what I saw, especially in the workplaces that I visited, places that were the same underneath. They were all creating an atmosphere of joyful, meaningful growth, where people could continue to learn and evolve and build great things together.

How does this concept of flourishing apply to the workplace?

When I went to these flourishing places, the community of businesses, I thought I’d find that they had all the answers, that they had figured everything out. I was completely wrong.

When I visited a very high-performing professional baseball team that’s a great example of flourishing, I actually found that the team members weren’t obsessed with answers. They were obsessed with questions. They were obsessed with naming the right question, that correct, mysterious question that they could not answer, which could create space for them to explore together.

The team members were consistently good at creating conversations, small groups, and larger visions that were all “creating space.” There were [organized], specific channels of exploration. There was a rhythm that I observed. The ways we’ve traditionally approached and understood business come from the machine world. We need plans, execution, and precision.

What I observed in these places was not machines. I saw places that were skilled at creating ecosystems. It was as if they were more like gardeners—creating space and planting seeds in the right space and nurturing the energetic systems that were there. They were channeling those systems to move in a certain way. I saw a very different form of leadership in those places. It was much more open—much more alive and curious.

What would you tell executives who ask about the first step in creating this type of openness and space in their teams?

I would tell them to become comfortable with two phrases:

1. “I screwed that up.” [With this phrase, you are] actually getting used to, as a leader, creating space for other people to say, “Oh, I can relate to that. I connect to that.” That energizes people. That gives them agency. It’s a signal of vulnerability, and that can build trust.
2. “My hypothesis is.” It is a small phrase, but with it, you’re creating space and awareness that there are many ways things could be. Both of those phrases speak to the same thing.

When you try to change a workplace, it happens slowly. That’s not great news. The good news is that when change does happen, it happens in moments of connection. Relationships aren’t machines. Taking a moment with someone with whom you’ve had a very transactional relationship and just saying, “Hey, I screwed that up,” can change the balance of the entire relationship. When we admit that we screwed something up, we’re actually creating moments of vulnerability that build trust and connection.

The fundamental element here is that flourishing places have agency and awareness. The root operating system of flourishing places is creating spaces where agency and awareness can begin—to have that awareness of what’s possible, that direction, and then the agency to speak out, share, and question.

Flourishing often begins with someone taking a risk. How can people propose completely new ideas at work?

Things that appear risky on the surface, especially in a business environment where we are averse to risk, actually reflect a deep distinction that not many people understand. We typically suffer from a “straight-line illusion.” Though we think of “complicated” and “complex” as being the same, there’s a profound distinction between those two words.

Complicated things come together the same way every time. For example, I can give you the instructions for building a Ford Mustang car. If you have all the materials and you follow the instructions, you will have a Mustang at the end, without question.

Complex things change when you interact with them. The question that highlights this distinction is “Is this problem more like building a car, or is it more like raising a teen?” Obviously, there’s no set of instructions I could give you to raise a teen. That’s complex.

If you have a complicated system, the best approach is to have expertise. Find an expert who can figure out what to do.

In a complex system, there’s no expert. Instead, you must probe, then see what happens. Be responsive, then see what happens. Then probe again. Taking these risks might lead you toward more connection and flourishing—as in the book’s examples related to the soccer team and the neighborhood. They only appear to be risks if you’re looking through that complicated lens. They seem to be risks if you’re picturing the world as a game that has fixed rules. Yet the world is not built that way.

The world is a living thing, a set of relationships. For example, if you were to take a pen and paper and draw the story of your career or your life in a series of lines, would you draw a set of straight lines? Instead, would the drawing depict lines that are backward, then forward, and then looped around? Each of these turns is an example of those moments where you’re probing something new, learning, then seeing something and chasing it in one direction, then seeing something else and moving accordingly.

We’re not skilled at predicting the future. The future is much more complex than we think. Often, the smartest thing we can do is to power through. And through that process, we learn where to go next. Sometimes we fail, and sometimes we reach a new pathway. In the book, I give several examples of places where people acted in ways that appeared nutty on the surface. In the 1960’s soccer era, it seemed nutty to think that every player should play every position. That’s what Amsterdamsche Football Club Ajax [a Dutch professional football club] famously did.

They had the defenders run to the front and the center-backs play far in the back. The goalie could even attack at times. [What appeared to be] the greatest risk ever taken actually wasn’t a risk. What they were doing was getting rid of old, straight-line thinking and realizing there was much more flexibility to the system than they thought. If we can energize people to take new roles, get them to explain their way into those roles, and become skilled at interacting in that new space, we can absolutely revolutionize an entire game. That’s what the Ajax team did. That stuff is hard. But the good news is that there’s a deeper logic beneath it, and taking that risk is the only way forward.

How can companies balance such a ‘beautiful mess’ and the pressure to execute specific outcomes?

It reminds me a lot of the Cleveland Guardians [US Major League Baseball team] that I’ve worked with for 13 years. They’re very high-performing, very precise, and they’re actually in the process of building a lot of cross-functional teams in this exact landscape.

We’ve found it useful to determine where you’re growing the greenhouse and where you’re mowing the lawn—to know the area, the specific projects for a role, and the process level. Is this something where we need to be generative, creative, fresh, and new? If it is, then that’s a greenhouse. If it’s something that we need to do with precision and exactitude every time, then that’s mowing the lawn.

You bring a very different mindset to each of those things. The rhythm that I see in these places is they get good at what I think of as organizational calisthenics. The rhythm is always the same. It involves coming together in a small group, then going out and doing the job, then going away, and then coming together again. Some of the ways that they come together are over candid, caring conversations that cover what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we should do differently.

It’s almost like a heartbeat [in that the rhythm remains the same]. They’re building a shared mental model each time, bringing new information back. And one way to do that is through a regular pattern of teaming.

There’s a real temptation when you come together to do a project to jump right into the project. It’s very satisfying to say, “We’re here. There’s the mountain. Let’s go climb it.”

Flourishing teams don’t do that. Flourishing teams first get together to consider different questions: Who do we want to be together? What is this really about? What are we energized by here? What role are you going to play? How often are we going to talk? How do you like to be communicated with? What’s the best way that we can share information going forward? How will we know that we did a good job? What do we not want to do? What does success not look like? What is an ideal outcome? Let’s all paint a picture.

Flourishing teams first have those types of “teaming interactions.” Another way they do that is through after-action reviews, or AARs. They come together and say, “We just did that. We all came back with our different perspectives and experiences. Let’s get together and talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we should do differently next time.”

These teams are continually calibrating. And in that heartbeat, you end up with an organizational vision. The vision is not of some machine executing something perfectly, mercilessly, every single time. Rather, it’s something that’s a little bit messier. What you want to create is something more agile, something that’s more like a flock of birds moving through a forest, where each one is connected and sharing information. They’re calibrated with one another.

You’re trying to create the equivalent of a good pickup basketball team. The team can adapt on the fly, knows where the hoop is, and can score points when needed. It’s not that they don’t understand the game they’re playing, but they’re able to play it in a flexible way.

Hopefully, we’ve all experienced a team that really gels. But what’s the opposite of that? Why do teams break down?

Should we call it withering? That’s it exactly. It’s a de-energization. It’s isolation. It’s part of the human experience, too. The magic of leaders in flourishing teams, groups, and businesses is that they have immense patience.

There’s an immense willingness to understand the difference between setting conditions and coercing people. Coercion is effective. Coercion works for a little while. And then it de-energizes people and makes them feel isolated.

I remember that level of [immense] patience at Pixar. Pixar CEO Ed Catmull would give a team a new project. The team would spend time visiting the locales of the movie, writing scripts, and more. Yet he would wait for the team to do something surprising. One example relates to a movie that was about the outdoors. When Catmull came to work one day, he saw a tent had been pitched on the lawn of Pixar. The team was living in the tent to connect, to see what it was like to sleep outside. Seeing them made Catmull realize, “They got it.” But before that happened, he was creating conditions to give them agency.

Ultimately, that level of deep patience was the core condition to create that level of connection, cohesion, and energy. That first meeting is the other moment where things either fall apart or don’t. Are you setting up norms in that meeting? It comes back to the teaming process. Are we going to just delve into the work, or are we going to get to know each other a little? Does it matter that we know each other, that I know a little about you? Does it matter that everyone has a voice here?

If you end the first meeting, and you don’t solicit feedback from everybody or a response from everybody, that becomes the norm. “Norm” is a word we use casually, but in fact, norms represent electric fences that are established early on.

If the norm is that the boss of this group only shows up every once in a while, that’s huge. Understanding what those moments mean [is important]. There are threshold moments that establish the operating system, the infrastructure through which we will either grow together and connect or not.

The best leaders create the conditions for teams to take ownership and to self-organize. What’s one step a leader could take to evolve in this direction?

If you were to tell the archetypal ultimate leader story, it would be about very ambitious people who became leaders. As new leaders, they felt they had to do and know everything.

Chapter one involved them doing a lot of telling; they grabbed the steering wheel. Their mental model for leadership was, “I’m the captain of the ship.”

Chapter two involves a crisis. The world gets too complex. The problems get too fluid. Their limitations start to show, or perhaps they want to have a family life. They do not want to be obsessed with being the captain of a ship that’s sailing 24/7.

Chapter three always ends up being, “I learned how to create space for other people and build relationships that go from having power over to having power with.” That’s the move that good leaders make.

One doesn’t spark agency by showing up with answers and grabbing the steering wheel. One sparks agency by creating a space and a question—and giving people space to choose and explore.

That doesn’t mean people can do anything they want. There’s a space, a constraint, and they could do anything they want within that constraint. That’s the story of all these leaders.

During time-outs at National Basketball Association (NBA) games, Gregg Popovich, former coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, would do a certain thing. The players remained gathered around, waiting for him to show up, but he never did. When there’s a time-out, everyone gathers around the coach. Yet when Popovich would call time-out, he would walk away. All of a sudden, the players had a moment where they realized, “We have got to figure this out ourselves.” And they did. They began connecting and leading one another.

So I would encourage leaders to find a space where they can safely let go of the reins by conducting small experiments. Instead of delivering an answer, ask a question. Sometimes one can even withhold an answer. Let someone else say the answer, then celebrate that. Think agency, not answers.

When teams flourish, people find more connection and meaning in their actions. How is flourishing linked to better mental health?

We’re prewired for community. There’s a core need of mattering and being valued. We’re living through a very unique time. There’s a trillion-dollar industry of very smart people who want to keep us looking at screens, looking at words, typing, and being isolated. But we are not built for that. Our ancestors grew up in a community and were deeply connected to other people. That’s why the modern world can feel so shallow and empty at times.

The good news is that because we’re so prewired for community, it doesn’t take much to activate it. One story that I share in the book highlights this. One Parisian neighborhood was going to place the longest table in history in the middle of the street and invite the whole neighborhood to have a potluck. Everyone thought, “That’s so naive. That’s cheesy.”

But they did it, and then they divided up into interest groups. They self-organized. They asked questions such as, “Who’s interested in bicycles? Who’s interested in military history? Who’s interested in astronomy? Who’s interested in learning more about the stock market?”

Then they had small meetings, where the only rule was that discussing politics was forbidden. Neighbors had to gather around a “joy device,” which was food, wine, or coffee. By gathering around a joy device and their interests, avoiding politics, and self-organizing, the neighbors were creating space for people to do what we’re built to do. Most of us like people, yet we’re bad at predicting how much we thrive in community. But when we have the opportunity to create space where we can experience community, doing so lights us up. We can’t help it.

Was there anything that surprised you in the research or writing of this book?

The fact that we have ways of structuring business that we all inherit and use surprised me. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are other ways of structuring employee and colleague interactions.

There are different ways of structuring orientation. There are other ways of leading. We inherit all of these models, and the challenge to our generation is not to just blindly accept them and do that same play that they did because that play was useful.

There are better ways to use that energy and those ideas now. Some of those ideas and old frameworks feel as though they’re ripe for reinvention. I find the dazzling possibility of new frameworks and ideas coming at us to be super exciting.