The Strength of Teams and the Cost of Disruption

The Quiet Code of Teams

Think about the visuals of a team room at half-time. The scoreboard is close. The air is thick with sweat and adrenaline. The walls hum with tension. The captain stands, not to shout orders, but to remind the group: stay in your role, trust each other, keep the shape.

That scene is not confined to football. It’s what every resilient team does, in business, in sport, even in small towns steering through change. They live by an unspoken code: ego gets left at the door; strengths get pulled into the centre.

Take Geelong. Their “Geelong Way” is about systems over star power. They don’t ask their captain to be the most gifted player on the park. They ask him to be the one who makes others better. That’s why the Cats have remained competitive across generations. Even when champions retire, the system absorbs the loss and keeps moving.

Sydney’s “Bloods” culture is even more visceral. Players talk about it like a creed tattooed under the skin: we sacrifice, we play our role, we honour the jumper.

You can almost see it, a web of trust where every strand is reinforced by selflessness. If one thread weakens, the others pull tighter. It’s not about one star shining. It’s about the whole holding together under pressure.

This is what John Kotter meant when he spoke about “guiding coalitions.” Real change, he argued, doesn’t come from one heroic figure. It comes from a culture where strengths combine into something stronger than any single leader could carry alone.

Strength-Based Teams in Business

Great teams aren’t built by eliminating weakness, but by amplifying strengths.

Now shift that image from the locker room to the boardroom.

The tension in a negotiation feels like the fourth quarter of a final. One leader steadies the room, the Negotiator, who knows when to cool the temperature and when to strike.

The Financier is like the midfielder who sees the whole field, spotting risks before they become breaks, knowing where the runway lies five moves ahead.

The Connector is the winger with uncanny timing, unlocking plays others didn’t even see. One phone call, one relationship, and a door that seemed bolted shut swings open.

And then, often overlooked, comes the Operator, the systems thinker. They are not flashy, but they’re the glue. The Operator is the player who organises the defensive line, who tracks opponents’ runs, who makes sure the team never loses its shape.

In business, they’re the one who ensures the deal promised by the Negotiator can be delivered, the model built by the Financier can actually be executed, and the relationship unlocked by the Connector doesn’t fall through the cracks.

Without them, everything collapses under its own complexity.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, called this “getting the right people in the right seats on the bus.” The bus doesn’t move faster by adding more horsepower; it moves by aligning roles. When every seat is filled by someone leaning into their strength, the team becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Steve Jobs once described Pixar in this same way. To him, Pixar wasn’t a corporation, it was more like the Beatles. Four or five creative misfits, each strong in their own right, but when combined, something transcendent emerged. “None of us could have done it alone,” Jobs said, “but together we made something wonderful.”  That’s the secret of great teams, they are bands, not soloists. The Operator, the Negotiator, the Connector, the Financier, each plays their instrument, but the music only works in harmony.

Why Disruption Costs So Much

But this is the danger: balance is fragile.

Imagine you might have a chance of making a finals series. Midway through, the board sacks the coach. Suddenly, the game plan shifts and trust cracks, with players hesitating. The rhythm falters. The invisible glue that made the team whole dissolves.

That’s exactly what happens in business when a CEO is removed or strategy is changed irrationally mid-project. This is not just a change in face. It’s a rupture in continuity. Fundraising pipelines stall and relationships go cold. The story you’ve been telling the market loses its narrator.

Maybe the Board felt a change was needed to bring about a fix? But Kotter warned against this obsession with short-term fixes. “Premature declarations of victory,” he argues, "are leadership’s Achilles heel". You think you’ve solved the problem by changing the leader, but what you’ve really done is fracture the system holding belief together.

And belief, once broken, is the hardest currency to restore.

The Psychology of Continuity

The strongest leaders understand that power isn’t in constant motion. It’s in rhythm.

Sydney doesn’t sack coaches mid-season. Geelong doesn’t alter a player or leader's position while the jumper’s still sweaty. And the great Western Australian dealmakers, the Rineharts, Courts, Forrests, Robertsons; women and men, who stitched billion-dollar projects out of what were barren stations from thin air, knew to protect momentum until a natural turning point was reached.

Continuity isn’t about protecting egos. It’s about protecting the invisible assets that don’t show up on a balance sheet: trust, rhythm, credibility.

Alex Ferguson, reflecting on his time at Manchester United, wrote that his fiercest responsibility wasn’t tactics, it was protecting the 'change-room’s' belief. The greatest danger wasn’t losing a game; it was losing the player's trust that the system still worked.

Good leadership knows when to steady the hand. Bad leadership pulls the wheel for the sake of control.

Lessons for Towns, Teams, and Leaders

Premierships, billion-dollar deals, small-town renewal, they all hinge on the same code.

• Build Strength-Based Teams. See people as unique weapons, not interchangeable parts. Let negotiators negotiate, connectors connect, financiers calculate, and operators steady the system. Culture beats raw talent when roles are clear and strengths are amplified.

• Prioritise Continuity Over Control. Don’t disrupt midstream. Change leaders only at natural inflection points, end of a season, completion of a project, close of a cycle. Protect the middle; it’s where momentum is most fragile.

• Protect Momentum Like It’s Gold. Momentum is invisible capital. Once it’s gone, you can’t buy it back. It compounds silently, like trust in a community or belief in a team. Measure it. Guard it.

• Culture Outlasts Strategy. Strategies change. Markets shift. Tactics adapt. But culture, like Geelong’s discipline, Sydney’s Bloods, or Pixar’s Beatles-band ethos, carries through turbulence. A good strategy wins a quarter. A strong culture wins a decade.

  
  

The Call for Leaders and Towns

For towns throughout the Great Southern, for businesses navigating the aftershocks of the Covid hangover, with many now returning to the city and the “traditional way of life,” and for football clubs chasing premierships, the message echoes across contexts:

• Build strength-based teams.

• Leave ego at the door.

• Protect continuity mid-project.

• Play for legacy, not the quick win.

Because belief is not built in one quarter, one deal, or one decision. It’s built by teams who trust each other, know their role, and stay steady when the rhythm and beat is in full swing.

That’s how you win premierships. That’s how billion-dollar deals are closed. That’s how small towns write their next chapter.

TK