If corporate life feels more fleeting than ever, you’re not imagining it. Over the past eight decades, the average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has plummeted from 67 years to just 15, while hard-earned skills now have a startlingly short half-life of less than five years. As the workplace grows more unpredictable, another cornerstone of our professional lives is now under pressure: the longevity of teams.
Simply put, this means the length of time that no one leaves or joins the team is getting shorter. Preliminary research I’ve conducted among executives working in the banking, automotive, energy, and fast-moving consumer goods sectors has found that the length of time people spend working together as part of a core team has shrunk from 1.5-2 years to around 1 year. This means that every 12 months the team dynamic changes due to the addition or departure of a team member, essentially creating a new team.
While further research is needed, the fact that this phenomenon spans diverse industries and geographies indicates that the modern workplace is fundamentally challenging team stability.
A combination of individual, organizational, and structural factors appears to be contributing to the decline in team longevity. For starters, employee expectations regarding how long they intend to stay in a role are shifting. While older generations often committed to a job for life, modern workers prioritize diverse experiences and career growth, resulting in higher turnover rates as they switch jobs more frequently. This trend is particularly pronounced among Gen Z, who according to LinkedIn data, are changing jobs at a rate 134% higher than they did in 2019. This compares to 24% more for millennials and 4% less for boomers.
The pandemic also prompted many workers to re-think their career priorities, with many placing greater emphasis on work-life balance and flexibility in where they work. As companies like Amazon, BlackRock, and Disney mandate that staff return to the office at least four days a week, rigid return-to-office policies risk pushing talent out the door, further shortening team lifespans. A 2024 Gallup survey reveals U.S. employees are job-hunting at the highest rate since 2015, though a cooling job market has made successful job switches less common than in the early post-pandemic years.
At the organizational level, companies are adjusting their business models more frequently to stay competitive, often resulting in team reorganizations and restructuring. The rise of the gig economy further contributes to this dynamic, as firms increasingly rely on freelancers who come on board for short-term, project-based work to reduce long-term expenses and meet fluctuating demand and budgets.
Finally, rapid advances in technology mean the skills required for certain tasks can quickly become obsolete, putting pressure on teams to evolve and adapt to new tools and systems. The global nature of business adds another layer of complexity, requiring teams to collaborate across time zones and cultures, which can place a further strain on team dynamics.
“Even if you are going to be working together as part of a core team for shorter periods, it’s still worth investing if you want to boost your team’s overall performance.”
Teams are staying together for shorter periods just as their effectiveness is being tested by three hallmarks of the modern workplace: more teams, more meetings, and more people in meetings. This shift has skewed priorities toward task-oriented behaviors – like coordination, progress monitoring, and task completion – at the expense of relationship-building activities that resolve friction and foster positive connections.
The shrinking lifespan of teams may lead individuals to question the value of investing in team development, potentially fostering frustration about what might seem like repetitive team-building efforts. Yet in a future that is AI-driven and customer-centric, teamwork is becoming more critical than ever to unlock the creativity and innovation needed to remain relevant. The dynamics within a team don’t just impact the bottom line but influence overall morale, employee retention, and corporate culture.
The good news is that a meta-study examining the variables that lead to creativity and innovation in teams over a 30-year period found that how a team works together (e.g. the processes around how a decision is made) is more important than who is in the team or the team structure, provided there are decent levels of competence. In other words, a few star performers don’t predict the levels of innovation in a team. Rather, a few decently competent people who have put in place a good process will outperform the former team since the sum will be greater than the parts.
This means that even if you are going to be working together as part of a core team for shorter periods, it’s still worth investing if you want to boost your team’s overall performance. Each investment can be seen as a training session at the gym that makes it more likely for you to hit your long-term goals. The higher your team’s base fitness, the easier it will be to create a high-performing team fast, even if individual members switch in and out more frequently.
Before you make the commitment to invest the time and effort to become a high-performing team, it’s important to first check the assumption that this is what everyone wants.
Before you make the commitment to invest the time and effort to become a high-performing team, it’s important to first check the assumption that this is what everyone wants. In some cases, people are happy to function as a working group where people work individually together to solve a problem. This sometimes happens when people are working across multiple teams and suffering from “collaboration overload” making them unable to leverage the synergies from teamwork. With this kind of setup, you might not see the creative magic of a high-performing team, but it might be a fast and efficient way of organizing that is preferable to a pseudo-team.
Once you have everyone’s backing to create a high-performing team, you can follow this four-step process:
This is the most neglected step in the process. While it can be tempting to get down to work – especially if you know you won’t have that long working together – it still helps to complete a canvas for team alignment. This should cover the team’s purpose, goals, and norms, including the behaviors you want to encourage and how you will keep each other accountable, how you want to have fun together, strengths, development areas such as the signs people should watch for when individuals are getting frustrated, roles, and values.
A useful framework for thinking about the roles and dynamics that each individual plays within the group is the “Six Thinking Hats” – a methodology developed by Edward de Bono which assigns roles like the objective White Hat (facts and figures), creative Green Hat, risk-conscious Black Hat, positive Yellow Hat, process-oriented Blue Hat, and emotional Red Hat. Team members should discuss which “hats” they tend to wear and how they can complement each other’s strengths.
The foundation of a high-performing team is trust. It’s important to distinguish between the two types of trust: competence-based trust, built around task completion, and relationship trust. The latter is more important and is nurtured by leaders who openly acknowledge mistakes, allow controlled failures for better learning, and take calculated risks to spur innovation.
You can build trust by creating moments to check in with how your team is feeling in terms of energy levels and emotions, as well as their current concerns and worries that may be distracting them from their work. There are two simple questions, which when asked regularly, can lay the groundwork for trust: How do you feel? And what do you need?
Crucially, the smaller the team, the more likely people are to share and build trust. If you are looking for an optimum balance of creative input without too much conflict because of complexity, I usually recommend limiting the meeting to six people in a face-to-face environment. In a remote context, I recommend five, simply because building trust virtually takes longer, and emotional cues get lost over the camera. When people are leading large teams, a hack that I recommend is to encourage pair discussions and small buzz groups (these can be facilitated in remote settings via virtual break-out rooms). Small sub-groups increase trust levels and have major ideation benefits for large teams. Leaders should not forget to bring the large team back together and align all discussions.
A high-performing team is one where members are accountable for each other’s growth. To grow and make progress, you must put yourself in a position of discomfort – whether that’s pushing yourself harder at the gym to build muscle or enhancing the team environment to build trust. In the workplace, growth can come from effective feedback, both given and received by all team members. But for it to land properly, it must be given in an environment where people feel supported while being challenged.
It’s important to consider the format and content of feedback. Technological advancements like AI tools can help team members strike the right tone, redrafting a blunt email you may have drafted in a moment of anger to something more professional and constructive. A useful tool for giving feedback is the Situation Behavior Impact framework. Start by describing the situation by being specific about when and where it occurred. Describe the observable behavior and don’t assume you know what the other person was thinking. Lastly, describe what you thought or felt in reaction to the behavior.
Even when turnover is high, there is still time to learn from one another by implementing “after-action reviews” or “checkout” systems that encourage members to systematically rate how each meeting or project went and identify areas for improvement. After-action reviews should ideally be carried out while all participants are still available, and their memories are fresh. This means that learning can then be applied right away, even the next day.
Another way to increase accountability among team members for each other’s growth is by implementing the GROW Model Coaching framework that consists of four main steps: Goals (what do you want to achieve?), Reality (where are you now?), Options (what options do you have?), and Will (which choices will you make?).
Building these moments into the DNA of how a team works together can help build the muscle of continuous improvement, and ultimately – a debrief culture.
It takes just one person joining or leaving, to change a team’s dynamic. Yet, what matters most isn’t the individuals but how you work together. Each time a new member joins, it’s worth revisiting this four-step process. While it may seem repetitive, the reality is that with a new person on board, the process will feel different just as the team feels different. Repetition also brings mastery, making the process of running norms or values exercises smoother over time. This increases your chances of ending up in a high-performing team, rather than falling into the pitfalls of unstructured group behavior.
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