While a few people say that it is good teamwork which makes a company successful, others argue even if the workforce is good the leadership qualities are what makes or breaks a company. You should debate both sides of the issue and provide your own stance.

While a few people say that it is good teamwork which makes a company successful, others argue even if the workforce is good the leadership qualities are what makes or breaks a company. You should debate both sides of the issue and provide your own stance.

Building Teamwork the Hard Way: Three Steps to SuccessOne of the most ancient debates in management theory and business practice is whether organisational success boils down to good teamwork, or good leadership. Each view is backed by considerable empirical evidence and captures important truths about how to make organisations work. Taking in both perspectives, I would argue that the best case is one where we see great leadership with effective teamwork as complementary rather than competing explanations for organisational performance — leadership usually being more fundamental and teamwork being generally a differentiator of execution quality.

The argument that leadership is the key determinant of success in organisations feels like common sense, and studies have shown it to be successful. Leaders lead by creating the strategic vision that defines where an organisation actually heads to; They enforced values and cultural norms on collective behaviour; they make fundamental resource allocation decisions determining whether organisational potential is properly deployed, and since they are the final external references (the highest responsible) for the organisation from clients, investors, regulators and even society at large. Research in organisational behaviour repeatedly shows that the quality of leadership is one of the strongest predictors of performance across all sectors — the decisions, character and capabilities of senior leadership disproportionately draw on outcomes in ways team execution at any level can promote but never compensate when there are fundamental flaws in strategic direction.

Compelling historical examples bolster this view. The metamorphosis of Apple under Steve Jobs, the strategic renewal of Microsoft by Satya Nadella, and the continued excellence of firms such as Singapore Airlines are largely due to choices made in leadership roles rather than the quality of teams those leaders inherited. Often, when the same distinguished individuals work in each team under a different leader, their outputs vary wildly from one group to another — indicating that context is more important than people, or science proves that leadership is even more powerful than talent.

But the claim that the glue of organisational success is based on teamwork is an equally compelling one, and just as difficult to dismiss. No matter how visionary the leadership, strategic insight can only be operationalized by teams that know how to take things from on high and make it happen at ground-level — turning direction into aligned action, managing the day-to-day interaction with customers and stakeholders that in aggregate deliver organizational performance at scale, innovating collaboratively in ways that respond to unique challenges that even the most prescient leadership cannot possibly anticipate. The information on the performance of organisations such as Toyota — their success is rooted in a quality management system that relies fundamentally upon the continuous improvement contributions of every team member rather than solely the visionary ideals or foresight from leadership — suggests that team-level excellence may become your primary source of sustainable competitive advantage.

Subsequent research in organisational psychology corroborates the contention that psychological safety — where team members have enough confidence to take risks, welcome dissenting views and admit mistakes without fear of punishment — is among the top predictors of team performance. How much individual talent or leadership matches up with another potential teams — Google, after all, had launched Project Aristotle to find out how the company’s best teams were composed, and two of its biggest conclusions found that team composition and team psychological safety often trump everything (even the very best people). This finding contradicts the leadership-centric perspective and shows that collective dynamics can have a more deterministic impact on outcomes than even the most capable leaders.

It is my belief that the most honest answer accepts that leadership and teamwork are not competing explanations for sustained organisational success; but rather, both essential and mutually reinforcing conditions. If you mix mediocre leadership with mediocre people, leadership without team quality equals visions that go unrealised — a strategy known to everyone but almost impossible to translate into execution. Team talent plus no leadership gives you a giant power plant with no direction — very capable people doing work but running off of different priorities and misaligned strategies. Without exception, organizations that are most successful over the long term measure and seriously invest in both elements — building leaders who can inspire, align and set up good conditions for high-performance teamwork, and designing teams so their combined problem-solving abilities far exceed the contributions of individual team members.

In conclusion, great leadership may well lay the foundation for success and a conducive organisational culture, but whether that potential is translated into practice lies in the nature of collaboration. Neither factor alone is enough, and the organisations that understand this most clearly are consistently those that endure best.