Author Talks: Getting group dynamics right

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Laura Mercedes chats with Colin M. Fisher, associate professor at University College London School of Management, about The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups (Avery/Penguin Random House, September 2025). Fisher highlights the individualistic approaches and dysfunctional conflicts that hamper group achievement. He offers a framework for navigating hidden group dynamics and developing teams with higher psychological safety and stronger performance. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why did you write this book?

I wrote this book because so much of the management advice that’s out there in the world is individualistic in nature. We’re trying to get people to change their psychology. We’re trying to get them to do a lot of introspection and to change themselves before they change anything else. Now, that kind of individual change is certainly valuable. But it’s not the whole story. There’s a whole world that’s getting missed about groups and group dynamics.

If you ask many people, “What’s the thing you would want to change the most about your work life?,” their response is about group dynamics, their team, office politics. The response is about the things they want to change about the whole world, the ways in which we see intergroup problems in nations—between companies, and within their own families. So, group dynamics represent the most important but least talked about topics that we see in management or self-help genres.

Was there anything that surprised you in the research, writing, or response?

I’ve been researching group dynamics for more than 20 years. There are many surprises. One of the surprises is just how little we think about group dynamics.

There’s one study I love that shows we are unaware of the dynamics of our own groups. We see whether our group succeeds or fails, and then we reason backward from that success or failure. We say, “Oh, we succeeded. My group must have been really cohesive.”

“Oh, we failed; we must not have trusted each other.” Yet when you ask people after they know how their group has performed, they’ll give you a different answer than if you ask them as they’re collaborating. This suggests that people are not that aware of the dynamics of their own groups.

How did your background as a jazz musician affect your research on group dynamics?

Before I became a business school professor, I was a professional jazz trumpet player. One of the things that fascinated me initially was how a group of strangers can come together and create something that no one of them could’ve thought of before—something that goes beyond the ideas, the talents, the skills of any one person. That’s something you can’t even predict from knowing a lot about the personalities or skills of the component members. A great example of this is Miles Davis’s album, Kind of Blue, which inspired me to become a jazz musician and has been one of my favorites for years.

What makes Kind of Blue so special is that the musicians did not know the music ahead of time. Miles sprung it on them on the [recording] day. Also, the band was not exactly what one would’ve predicted. It consisted of musicians whose styles seemed like they might not be a great fit—bluesy, bebop-style musicians, exploratory, and more reflective and introspective musicians.

Seeing them come together is what made that album special. The situation is the same in other kinds of group synergy. It’s the coming together of people with different knowledge, with different skills, and making something that’s more than just the sum of the parts.

That’s what synergy is. Synergy is when a group comes together, and it’s not just simply adding up the contributions of each individual member. There’s something multiplicative about the joining of those particular people on that particular task.

What effect does competitiveness have on collaboration?

Competitiveness is absolutely a part of groups that achieve this kind of synergy. A lot of people think of competition as being kind of antithetical to cooperation, that if we’re competing, we can’t be cooperating. But like on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the best groups are those where members bring out the best in one another.

The reason stems from people seeing what their teammates are doing and trying to live up to it. It’s often from seeing someone do something you didn’t know was possible and then learning a little about how to do that yourself, or just being inspired to try. In the best groups, there is mutual teaching and learning, where people get better as a consequence of being in this group together.

What are strategies for expressing dissenting views in group settings?

Conformity pressure can give groups a bad name. When we’re in a group, we want to fit in. Evolutionarily, we’re programmed to be petrified of ostracism. For our prehistoric ancestors, getting kicked out of the group really was a matter of life or death. Not being accepted and facing this dangerous world, where there were saber-toothed tigers, alone, was one of the most consequential things that could happen to you. In my research, I discovered that there were giant, man-eating hyenas and kangaroos that may have been predatory.

We don’t have the same kind of predators in our environment anymore, but that fear is still there, even when we’re making minor decisions at work. It’s there even when we hear things in a meeting that we disagree with and decide not to speak up. Very often, when we see in an email chain that refers to a bad strategy or idea that is about to be implemented, we go along with it if everyone else goes along with it, too.

The best groups use psychological safety to avoid this kind of dysfunctional conformity pressure, where we’re not sharing what we know, not sharing our unique perspectives. Psychological safety means that you have the sense that it’s OK to speak up, to ask questions when you don’t know something, to ask for help when you need it, to admit that you’re making mistakes.

Some groups have very low psychological safety, and those tend to be groups that don’t learn, that don’t perform as well. Those groups end up having a much worse time than groups with much higher psychological safety, who learn and improve over time. An interesting example of that comes from the 2004 US Olympic Basketball Team, which some people have referred to as the “Scream Team,” one of the only US men’s basketball teams not to have won the gold medal at the Olympic Games.

Some of the best players on that team were quite young, like LeBron James. They returned to the Olympics again in 2008 through what they called the “Redeem Team.” There’s a great Netflix documentary about the 2008 Redeem Team. In that documentary, James speaks about a moment that changed his perspective. He’d gone out with friends, and they were out quite late, enjoying a new city.

When they returned at around 4 a.m., they saw Kobe Bryant, a more experienced player whom they all looked up to. Kobe wasn’t going to bed. He was going to the gym to work out. He greeted them, but they felt that his expression implied that they weren’t taking the sport as seriously as he was. Those small kinds of peer pressure are actually a good kind of conformity pressure.

They push the team to be its best, to say, “Hey, I don’t agree with what you’re doing; I want you to find a new level, to find a new way in which you can challenge yourself and be a better teammate.” In the documentary, the players speak about the effect the encounter with Bryant had on them. They thought they worked hard, but they saw someone who could work even harder.

And that’s something a lot of these players who were already the best in the world didn’t have much of. They didn’t have somebody who would say to them, “Hey, you can be even better.” These kinds of moments can really push a team toward synergy, where somebody speaks up, but they speak up in a way that’s saying, “Here’s something you can do to be even better.” And that can be such a powerful thing.

What are some of the most effective interventions to improve group dynamics?

One of the most powerful interventions for improving a group and getting it to reflect and change is a relaunch—starting over, as if from day one.

One reason relaunches are powerful interventions is the natural “inertial” of groups. Whatever happens—usually in the very first meeting—sets a pattern of interactions that tends to persist throughout much of the group’s life.

A good example is if you have a meeting in a certain room, the seats that everyone takes at that first meeting will probably be where they remain for a good while into the task. The person who talks the most in that first meeting will probably talk the most the whole time, and likewise for the person who remains silent.

These norms and interaction patterns tend to be very sticky in groups because of our evolutionary pressure to conform and to make sure that we feel like we fit and belong in the group.

We often need to disrupt these patterns in working environments and in the modern world. We don’t want groups that are inertial, that are just going along to get along thoughtlessly. We need relaunches to shake the group up and say, “Hey, think about how things are going.”

“Think about what the task demands. What should we be doing differently to make that happen?” Now, the best way to build relaunches into your group naturally is to schedule them from the very beginning. The best time to do that is about halfway through the first task you aim to complete together.

If you have a weeklong project, say, “On Wednesday we’re going to come in and relaunch this group. We’re going to first reflect on what’s going well, what we could do better, and what we can do about that. Then we’re going to start as if this is a new task, and we’re going to try to do that.”

If it’s a six-week project, we will schedule the relaunch after three weeks. If it’s a yearlong project, we’ll schedule it after six months. But we place the relaunch on the calendar from the very beginning. The more you can build in checkpoints where you’re both reflecting on your progress and building in the intention to update the way you’re working together, the better the group will perform. The groups that have the “reflexivity” tend to perform much better than groups that have less of it—those that don’t make time to reflect on how they work together.

What are key takeaways from the book?

The main thing I hope people take away from reading the book is a collective perspective, the ability to think and see at the group level. Understand that it’s not merely a case of bad apples and heroes driving society and the workplace. It’s actually very predictable group dynamics that you can see quite clearly when you pay attention to them. The problem is that our brains are wired so that we don’t pay attention to group dynamics. We are wired to attribute positive outcomes to the traits of individuals, to their personalities and good values.

We tend to blame failures on people’s characteristics. When they’re late, we think it’s because they’re flaky people. When they fail, we think it’s because they didn’t work hard enough and they’re not motivated.

So much of this is about the group environment they’re in, and those are group environments we create. There are things that managers actually have a lot of control over, but it’s just control we don’t exercise because we don’t think about it.

I hope everybody takes away the ability to really see the world at the group level and to see all these hidden forces of group dynamics that are pushing us around without our awareness. If we just stopped letting those forces push us, so many things would be better.

How can we shift our organizational culture to prioritize group-level thinking?

Working from home is a double-edged sword for group dynamics. Clearly, there’s a huge opportunity in our ability to form teams that are located anywhere. We can get precisely the right people for the right task from all over the world. That’s something that we couldn’t do before. It also allows people to avoid commuting time. It gives them the ability to integrate work into their lives more flexibly, sometimes in ways they choose.

Those are really positive things. But again, evolutionarily, we’re not set up to read other people through a two-dimensional screen. Reading one another’s emotions is one of the things that allows a group to coordinate more effectively. So we miss some subtle social cues that we would get if we were all in a room together. The other challenge with remote work is that it creates more psychological distance.

In other words, we see things more abstractly when they are physically distant from us, or when we perceive them as more different from us in other ways. When we have more psychological distance, we tend to view other people more like objects and less like human beings.

We tend to overlook their emotions, their motivations. Since remote work increases psychological distance, it also leads a lot of us to treat one another not quite as well as we would if we were face-to-face.

This is something that we are now in the process of learning how to overcome. We can overcome the problems of psychological distance primarily by creating more time and structure to see one another as human beings. A lot of us have heard the advice about having real backgrounds behind us so that you can really see where someone is. That’s one way to do it. Other ways include sharing things about your lives, creating premeeting time for those who want to have the same small talk you would’ve had by walking down the hall in the office.

We need to make a special effort to understand one another as people, to remember that we’re not just avatars on a screen or talking heads. There’s a real person there. If we have leaders who very clearly say, “This is important for us to do as a team,” we will figure out ways to do it better. Whether you want to leave your camera on or off, have small talk time or not, those are just options, not must-dos. Yet making it a priority to reduce psychological distance, that’s something we must do.

What’s the biggest misconception about group dynamics?

I wish everyone would talk more about the difference between trying to improve a team through coaching and improving a team through structure. This is the biggest misconception I encounter when I’m teaching about teams, when I’m working with companies and executives. There aren’t that many books out there on teams and group dynamics. Often, the existing books are very focused on managing group process. That’s in the category of what I would call coaching, when we’re directly trying to influence the process of the team, giving motivational speeches and saying, “You go over there, and you go over there, and you do that,” and discussing strategy.

These kinds of coaching interventions are what most people think of as team leadership. A lot of us have a metaphor for a sports coach or for team leadership. But that’s a mistaken metaphor for a lot of team environments, especially in companies. Sports have an advantage that we don’t have in most forms of work because there is already a very well-structured task. The way they compose their teams is largely dictated to them by the rules of the game, by the positions they have to fill. We don’t have that in work teams.

In work teams, we’re the ones who have to come up with the rules of the game. We’re the ones who have to figure out how to structure the team. In studies that have pitted structural interventions against coaching interventions, structure always wins. Structure is much more powerful than coaching.

One of my favorite studies found that well-structured teams benefit greatly from coaching interventions. They perform better. But when someone offered terrible coaching to that same well-structured team, tried to micromanage, yelled, and did all kinds of terrible things to them, those teams were relatively immune.

If you’re well-structured, bad coaching only hurts you a little, not a ton. Yet the opposite is true for poorly structured teams. For poorly structured teams, when someone offered them very good coaching, they didn’t really benefit. Yet when someone offered bad coaching, bad leadership to these poorly structured teams, they were the ones who really suffered. In the case of structural and coaching interventions, the rich really get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Again, that speaks to the importance of looking first at the structure of your group, at the composition of the group, looking at the tasks, and how they are structured. Those are the things that you have to get right before you try to directly manage the process.

There’s an old saying that you have to put on your pants before you put on your shoes. The structure is definitely pants. But so many managers and organizations don’t do that. They try to coach the team before they examine the structure. That’s always going to be a losing battle, even if you’re the best coach in the world.

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