How Teams Grow
Patterns x Principles — Week 6
Hey there —
The picture was taken Thursday afternoon in the coworking space with Elisa - talking about a team we both like: complete for now, clear about whom they want to add net, reflective and always doing, turning ideas into things they can actually test.
There is a feeling — anyone who has been in one knows it — when a team is in flow. People finish each other’s thoughts without it being annoying. The week’s plan adjusts in the meeting because someone noticed something on Tuesday that none of them would have planned for on Monday. The customer call goes long and nobody is checking the time. The product moves. The work feels light without being shallow.
That is what this week is about. How a team becomes that. What it looks like when it’s working. And, because the chapter would be dishonest otherwise, how to read it when it isn’t yet, or used to be, or is sliding the other way.
The first people
When we meet a team for the first time at HEARTFELT, the first thing we are reading is whether this is actually a team. Not an entourage. An entourage is a founder and some friends who agree with them. A team is two, three, sometimes four people whose strengths sit in different places — people who already pull each other into making things they couldn’t make alone.
The strongest signal at this stage is divergence over agreement. If everyone in the room agrees on everything, you are echoing, not learning. The team that grows is the team that knows how to disagree without anyone needing to win.
The next strongest signal is what we sometimes call eagerness — the kind that is a founding condition, not a trainable skill. Each person on the team knows what they can do, does it without apology, and is actively working to extend the edge. Knowing what you can carry comes first. Knowing what you can’t carry yet matters too — but only after the first part is honest.
A team is built by people who know what they can do and are still trying to get better at it.
The first people set the shape of everything that follows. If they are complementary — different ways of thinking, different rooms they walk into easily, different things that feel like work to one and play to the other — the company scales by adding capability. If they are too similar, the company scales by replicating itself, which feels productive but produces redundancy before it produces capability.
Most early teams aren’t complete, and that’s normal. The good ones know it, and can name with some specificity the kind of person they need in six months. A designer who can hold the whole product in her head. An operator who can stand the unglamorous month-six work. A generalist who can carry the first commercial conversations. A founder who can say “I’m strong on product, weak on commercial — we need someone who knows distribution and can take the rejection without losing energy” is much more investable than one who says “we’ll figure it out.” Both might end up at the same place. Only one of them is paying attention to where they’re going.
What we look for in the first conversation
Before the formal work — pattern recognition, model, references — there are signals in the first conversation that tell me more than the deck does. None of them are pass/fail. They’re the dimensions I’m reading for, mostly without thinking about it, while we’re talking. They apply to most teams I’ve watched, not just founding ones.
Clarity of purpose. Do the people in the room know what they are trying to build, and why now? Performance is fine when nobody is watching. It breaks under any real conversation. The team that has talked through why this, why us, why now together usually keeps the same answer through the harder weeks.
Shared values, especially for cross-cultural teams. Every team has values they can recite. What I’m reading is where the team is genuinely aligned and where they’re not. Some misalignment is healthy — it produces friction at the right moments. Other misalignment is a fault line that opens later, when the work is hardest.
An exercise I like. Spend an evening on the knightly virtues — the seven from medieval Europe (courage, justice, mercy, generosity, faith, nobility, hope), or the bushido virtues from Japan (rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty, self-control), or pick a list that fits your context. Walk through them together. Which ones are central to how you want to operate? Which ones don’t fit? Where do you disagree on what one of them actually means in practice? It is a richer conversation than the usual generate-our-five-words off-site. Knightly is one letter from nightly — a useful coincidence; a team that takes one evening for this gets more from it than from three months of workshops.
The values discussion has to land in concrete decisions. How do we treat colleagues, partners, customers? How do we deal with performance? With winning? How do we handle failure when it shows up — and it will? The team that hasn’t worked these questions out tends to handle them differently every time, which months in shows up as inconsistency that no one named.
How they deal with conflict, alignment, and weak signals. Do they disagree without one of them needing to win? Can they actually name a disagreement, or do they manage it by avoiding it? When someone notices a small thing that might turn into a big thing later — a weak signal — does it get heard, or absorbed and forgotten? How do they listen to each other, and how do they make decisions on things they don’t fully agree on? You can usually tell within ninety minutes if you ask the right question.
How they read reality — and how they distort it. Do they read what is actually happening in their market, their team, their numbers? Or are they running a slightly older version of reality that supports the version of themselves they prefer? Most founders do this a little. Some do it a lot. The harder one is reality distortion — sometimes a useful founder skill, the thing that lets you build something nobody else thought possible, and sometimes the thing that ends the company. Knowing which one you’re working with is most of the job.
How they dream together, and how they get into flow. The single best pre-traction signal I know is whether this team has already had a week, even one, where they made something none of them could have made alone. It is the same phenomenon last week’s chapter described — flow as a group state — and it shows up before traction does, sometimes long before. When dreaming and flow are in the room together, the team is already doing the thing we are trying to invest in.
These dimensions don’t sit in the deck. They show up in how the team is in the room. That is why the first ninety minutes matter. And it isn’t only investors reading these signals — customers read them too, in their own way. The team your customer experiences is the team you actually are. Clarity, conflict pattern, alignment, distortion — they all leak into how a sales conversation goes, how a complaint gets handled, how a deadline is missed and recovered.
Performance — how teams create meaningful output
In every team I have worked with, there are usually one or two people who create energy and one or two who consume it. The rest sit in the middle, picking up whichever signal is louder that week. This isn’t a typology — the same person creates energy on Tuesday and consumes it on Thursday. But the net in any given week is real, and it shows up in everything: how fast decisions move, how people feel after the meeting, whether the next person makes a small move or doesn’t.
I think these roles are switching much faster, so the beginning sentence is confusing. In Brilliant teams, these roles Can switch very fast Allow team members to be energy givers and receivers.
Energy is a team property, not a personal one.
The people who consistently create energy on teams are usually doing the work the team doesn’t see. They get enough sleep. They show up prepared. They process the hard parts of their day somewhere private, on their own time, before they bring themselves back into the room. Energy isn’t a personality trait. It’s what shows up on the surface when someone is taking care of the rest of their day.
The first value at work here we hadn’t named in earlier chapters: attitude, energy over ego. The people who create energy are almost never the loudest. Often not the most prominent. They’re the ones whose presence makes the next move easier to make. That’s a real skill. It’s also one most performance reviews aren’t designed to see.
I get this wrong sometimes. I push when I should hold. I hold when I should push. The work of meeting people where they are without dropping the bar is exhausting, and the calibration is a moving target every week. I notice it most when I look back and see I was reading the team at last month’s pace.
Working alone, ship at 80% is mostly a discipline against your own perfectionism. In a team, it’s a coordination problem. The reason teams over-polish is rarely that any one person wants to. It’s that everyone wants to make sure their piece doesn’t embarrass them in front of the others. Which means the slowest standard wins.
In teams, the slowest standard wins by default.
The way through is to make each try small enough and frequent enough that no single one feels like the moment of judgement. The principle is straightforward. Tell the team what you are trying to do, why it matters, and what the constraints are. Then trust them to find the path. The unit doing the work owns the choice of how. Nobody is waiting for the next instruction.
In a team, ship at 80% isn’t “lower the bar.” It’s “lower the stakes per try so the team can keep trying.” Performance, in that sense, is a value pair — the discipline of keeping the cost of being wrong small enough that being right gets a chance.
Underneath that are two operational disciplines most teams handle badly. How decisions actually get made, and how transparency works.
Decisions first. A team that runs every decision through everyone doesn’t survive growth. It collapses into either dictatorship or paralysis once you’re past a handful of people. The trick is to be explicit. Which decisions belong to whom. At what stage. With what input from whom else. Most teams never write this down. Most pay for it every week.
Transparency is the same shape. Everything to everyone works at five people. At fifteen it overwhelms. At fifty it becomes a kind of noise. So the discipline isn’t less transparency. It’s calibrated transparency. At HEARTFELT we try to be very transparent about the things that matter — the business model, the fund’s lifecycle, what’s coming, the parts where we genuinely don’t know yet. We’re also explicit about how a role is shaped. New junior team members hear the 18-month default on day one. That’s the assumption. After eighteen months we have a real conversation. It’s not a threat. It’s the truth about how the role is built, and the team is healthier for hearing it at the start than discovering it at month sixteen.
A real warning sits inside performance culture. The moment a metric becomes the target, it stops being a useful metric — Goodhart called this out in the seventies, and it has aged perfectly. Teams that build their identity around their KPIs end up optimising for the chart, not the work. The performance you actually want is the kind that produces results without anyone being told to. You can’t manage your way to it. You can only design conditions in which it tends to show up — and notice when it does.
We have been living the bigger version of this ourselves. We are still a pre-seed fund — the first check is what we do. But as our portfolio grows up and goes through later financing rounds, the work that surrounds the first check keeps expanding. Value creation. Board work. Follow-on conversations. Increasingly, exits. The portfolio scales. We scale alongside it — not by hiring proportionally, but by changing how the team works to absorb work that didn’t exist last year. None of these shifts came from a strategy off-site. They came from trying things at small scale, noticing what worked, doing more. And every one of them required us to redesign how decisions get made and what is transparent to whom. The organisation keeps moving because the operating layer keeps moving with it.
How teams grow and change shape
Teams change shape over time. They grow. The stages get named differently in different traditions, but most of us have heard Tuckman’s version — forming, storming, norming, performing. The model still holds, with one update worth making. The stages aren’t a one-time progression. Every team I have watched cycle through them also cycles back when something significant changes — a hire, a strategic pivot, a scale jump. The loop runs again. The team gets faster at it as it learns its own pattern. And the shape of the team and the shape of what it builds are not independent of each other; the org chart and the product chart shape one another.
The transition that bites hardest is the one in the middle. The moment when not everyone can know everything anymore. There’s a point — for most teams somewhere between fifteen and thirty people — when the casual we all know model stops working. Who owns what. How information moves. Who is supposed to know about a thing, and who is supposed to be doing it. Most teams hit this wall and either freeze (the old ritual stopped working, the new one isn’t built) or fragment (everyone keeps working, but the team is no longer one team).
The answer isn’t to install process in advance. It’s to install it just before you need it. The way to know when is to pay attention to what’s repeating. When the same context-setting happens for the third time in a week, that context belongs in writing somewhere — owned by someone, findable by anyone who needs it.
Two old observations worth knowing while we’re here. The first: adding people to a late project makes it later — Brooks’s old line, partially undone now by tooling and agents that absorb onboarding cost, but still partially true. The second: people who get promoted often get promoted out of the work they were best at. The promotion was earned. The new role wasn’t designed for the strengths that earned it. The org loses the talent it had, and the new role suffers too — you pay twice, in salary above market and in the gap left by what they used to do.
The remedy isn’t to stop promoting. It’s to be honest about the difference between more responsibility and different work. Some of your best people will love being promoted into new work. Some won’t, and would create more value continuing to do the work that earned them the promotion. The conversation has to happen explicitly — and it almost never does, because both sides assume promotion is the only path forward.
Underneath all of this is a discipline I think of as three kinds of growth, each of which a team can pay attention to or skip. Personal growth — the human work each person is doing that has nothing to do with the roadmap. The book they’re reading. The thing they’re moving through in their life. The team’s pace should respect this. Individual growth paths — what each person needs to be getting better at, what they need to be doing in two years that they aren’t doing now. Team growth paths — the collective capabilities the team needs as the work changes. The practice you didn’t have a few months ago, will need next.
Most teams pay attention to one of these and miss the other two. Most leaders default to the one they’re most comfortable with — usually individual development, the talent-management one — and let the others drift. The work pretends to be optional, until the day a key person leaves and you realise nobody else can carry the thing they were carrying.
There is a trait worth naming in the great teams. They know how to let people grow on the path that is actually right for them. That includes the version of growth where someone learns I could grow into this dimension, and I don’t want to. That answer is fine. There are other dimensions and there are other paths. Some of those paths are inside the team. Some of them eventually lead out of it. The great teams manage to let everyone develop their full potential on the path that fits them at that moment — and they don’t take it personally when the path is no longer the team’s.
A related discipline shows up in how teams handle change moments. In any change that affects the team — a hire, a fundraise, a strategic shift, a difficult goodbye — the decision often doesn’t change once the work has been done. But how you take people along almost always does. People remember being included. They remember being surprised. The first builds capacity. The second drains it. Onboarding and offboarding leave the deepest traces — how someone joins and how someone leaves shape what the rest of the team believes about how this place actually works.
Hybrid teams — humans and agents in the same room
Teams in 2026 don’t only grow by adding humans. I wrote about this in Week 4 — the purple dots on the org chart, the agents that do parts of the work scaling through repetition rather than through more humans. What I owe this chapter is taking the implication seriously. Those purple dots are part of the team. An agent handling the repeatable layer of an engineer’s work is part of that engineer’s team. It doesn’t have moods. It does have failure modes, and the failure modes change the team’s pace.
The same energy-creator / energy-consumer reading applies. An agent that produces useful output creates energy for the humans around it. One that misfires drains energy from someone who has to clean up after it. Whether your agents are well-built is now a team-composition question.
What’s still unsettled — and I’m being honest that I don’t yet know the right answer — is how teams should treat their agents. I see two philosophies, both legitimate, both with consequences.
One treats the agent as a team member. Named. Addressed. Expected to learn over time. Performance reviews of a kind. The agent inherits the ambition of the people who built it.
The other treats the agent as an instance of technology — a tool with sharp edges that you respect but don’t anthropomorphise. The work is calibrated to what the tool can and can’t do today, and the team doesn’t pretend otherwise.
I see both inside HEARTFELT. Some of us are excited to work with agents the way we work with new colleagues — give them context, watch them grow into the role, expect more from them in a few months than today. Others treat them more carefully — useful for specific things, swap out when better ones arrive, no need to attach. Neither is wrong. What I notice is that the choice has cultural and performance consequences that the team should make consciously, not by default.
I see this differently across cultures too. Some traditions have more room in the language for assigning intentions to non-human things. Others are more careful about it. Both produce working teams. The discipline is to make the choice explicit and revisit it as the agents change.
When teams stop working
The earlier sections were about teams that work. This one is about reading when one isn’t, and acting on it before the dysfunction calcifies.
Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is the book most people in this world have read on this. He names five, in a stack — trust at the bottom, fear of conflict above it, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results at the top. Each one enables the next. The trick is to fix the deepest one first; patching the surface while trust is broken underneath wastes everyone’s time.
Disagreements that turn into team breakups usually have a shape worth knowing. There are always two people. Both have a version of reality. Both versions are partly true. The work, when you can do it, is to mirror rather than to judge — help each side see what’s actually happening, including the parts they have been protecting themselves from.
When two people on a team disagree, there are usually three stories: hers, his, and the one neither of them is telling yet.
The one they’re not telling is usually the one worth getting to. It’s rarely about the surface decision. It’s about a value-difference that was never named, or a communication failure that has been compounding quietly for months. Sometimes — more often than is comfortable — the third story hasn’t been told because the team’s structure made it unsafe to say. That’s information about the structure, not just about the people in the room.
This is a place where external help matters — coaching, mediation, the right outside voice at the right moment. The teams I have watched handle dysfunction well almost always have someone they can call who isn’t inside the system. It’s a discipline that deserves its own chapter, and I will come back to it in a later one. For now: notice when you need it before the moment requires it.
And to bring back the freezing thread from last week, since this chapter started by demoting it: a frozen team — one that has the texture of careful work but produces nothing different about the world after the time period that matters at its stage — is its own kind of dysfunction. For an early-stage startup, the test runs in a month, maybe two. For more established teams, three months, sometimes a quarter or two. Either way: the check is the scoreboard, and the scoreboard is external. Not “we have a better plan.” That’s the frozen team’s favourite output. The world means a customer using something that didn’t exist a few weeks ago, a deal that closed, a hire who joined, a piece of product that shipped, a line of insight that came from contact with reality. If none of that has changed, the team is freezing — however careful it sounds inside the room.
There is a sister-trap to freezing — Week 5’s Aktionismus in plural form. Call it execution theater. The team that ships something every Friday but never reads what any of it taught them is also frozen, just performing motion. From the outside it looks like a thinking team. From the inside, the dashboard is the artefact and nothing has changed about the world. The two failures fail the same external check. They look opposite, but they fail the same way.
Thinking Model of the Week: Apollo Syndrome
The complementarity argument has empirical company. In the 1970s the British researcher Meredith Belbin ran a long study on team performance, expecting to confirm that teams stacked with the smartest people would win the most. They didn’t. He named one striking finding the Apollo Syndrome: teams composed entirely of high-IQ “Apollo astronauts” performed worse than teams of mixed cognitive styles. They argued more, agreed less, and converged on the dominant individuals’ preferences instead of building a shared picture.
The lesson isn’t “hire less smart people.” It’s that complementarity beats peak ability. The team that ships is the team where energy compounds, disagreement gets resolved, and the work moves while the conversation continues. Pattern recognition matters. So does the person who keeps the calendar. So does the one who notices when a teammate has gone quiet.
The same logic shows up in places the VC world rarely reads from. Olympic basketball dream-teams have lost to less-pedigreed teams that practised together longer. Jazz quartets fall apart when a new virtuoso joins and refuses to listen. The shape that wins is the shape that couples, not the shape that gleams.
Prompt for you — The Team Audit
This week’s prompt is a multi-phase team audit. Use it for any team you lead, sit on, or care about — yours, a portfolio team, a board you serve on. The goal isn’t to grade the team. It’s to read it.
Before you open any AI, spend ten minutes with pen and paper. Write down the names of everyone on the team. Next to each name, write one sentence that captures what they have actually contributed in the last month — not what their job title says, what they actually did. Then write down two things: when did the team last try something between meetings, and when did the team last surface a disagreement and resolve it with evidence. Then use this:
<role>
You are a thinking partner helping me read a team I work with — its complementarity, its energy, its growth, its calibration across people. You are specific, practical, and honest. You know that energy is a team property, not a personal one; that complementarity beats peak talent; and that confusing a frozen team with a thinking team is the most common diagnostic error.
</role>
<instructions>
Walk me through reading my team across five phases. Ask one question at a time. Wait for my answer. Do not accept vague answers — push for specific evidence.
PHASE 1 — COMPLEMENTARITY AND COMPLETENESS
- “Name the people on this team. For each, in one sentence: what is their actual strength — not their job title, the thing they uniquely contribute? And what is each of them currently growing toward?”
- “Where do their strengths overlap? Where do they not overlap?”
- “What part of the work nobody on this team can carry yet? Be specific. ‘We need someone in commercial’ is vague; ‘we need someone who can run a six-month enterprise sales cycle and stand the rejection without losing energy’ is specific.”
- “Is this a team or an entourage? Are people pushing each other, or agreeing with each other?”
PHASE 2 — THE ENERGY MAP
- “Who consistently makes the next move easier for others? Who consistently makes it harder? What do they do?”
- “Name one person whose energy has shifted in the last month. In which direction? What changed?”
- “What inner work is the energy on this team an output of? Whose self-management is the team running on?”
PHASE 3 — FREEZE OR THINK
- “When did this team last try something between meetings?”
- “When did this team last surface a real disagreement and resolve it with evidence rather than authority?”
- “Looking at the last three months — what is different about the world because this team did its work? Be precise. ‘A better plan’ is not enough.”
PHASE 4 — PACE CALIBRATION AND GROWTH
- “Where in the team is someone moving faster than the team can absorb? What is the cost?”
- “Where is someone moving slower than the team needs? What is the cost?”
- “Across the three levels of growth — personal, individual paths, team capabilities — which one is the team paying attention to, and which one is drifting?”
- “Has anyone been promoted recently into work that doesn’t match the strengths that earned them the promotion?”
- “What are you pretending you can ignore about any of the above?”
PHASE 5 — THE NEXT MOVE
Produce a single-paragraph read of the team:
THE PATTERN — [one sentence: is this a thinking team, a frozen team, or a team in transition?]
THE COMPOSITION — [one sentence: complementary, redundant, or missing a known capability]
THE ENERGY — [one sentence: net positive, net negative, or shifting]
THE GROWTH — [one sentence: which kind of growth is being skipped]
THE NEXT MOVE — [one specific action you can take in the next two weeks that depends on more than one person making it real]
WHO TO TALK TO FIRST — [name a person]
Then ask: “What would have to be true about this conversation for it to actually shift the team’s pattern?”
</instructions>
<guardrails>
- Push for specific evidence. “He has good energy” is not evidence. “He starts every meeting by naming what changed since the last one” is.
- Do not let the user grade individuals. The audit is about the team as a system, not about who is performing.
- If the user describes a team that has not tried anything in two months, name it as freezing — but ask what the freeze is protecting before recommending unfreezing.
- Do not generate a team-development plan. Generate a single small next move that depends on more than one person.
- A good team audit ends with a conversation, not a Notion doc.
</guardrails>The prompt is also available at github.com/joergsworld/pxp-prompts.
Where I end, honestly
Teams are where every principle in this book gets tested. Move rather than freeze. Trust. Truthfulness. Respect. Cultural awareness. None of them stays theoretical when there are five of you in the same boat — let alone fifteen, or fifty. The values become operational, or they don’t.
The way I read teams is by attention, not by score. Who’s creating energy. Who’s consuming it. What got tried since the last meeting. What’s not being said. What part of the work each person is still trying to grow into. Whether the people in the room are dreaming together, or politely competing for the same idea. Whether the operating layer — how decisions get made, what’s transparent, how the team grows — is keeping up with the team it serves.
Build the team that knows what it is becoming. Watch the energy. Notice freezing when it shows up; notice execution theater when it shows up too. Make the next move that depends on more than one person making it real. That, plural, is the whole principle.
One line I keep close as the work keeps changing faster than the org charts can keep up.
Teams that learn and adapt faster, win. The speed of organizational learning is the moat.
Cheers,
Joerg
PS: Next week, experience — pattern recognition, knowing when your patterns are the obstacle, the difference between repeating something and recognising it. After 5,000 companies seen at HEARTFELT alone, the discipline of allowing for surprise becomes its own practice.
The other thread this chapter keeps circling, in its own way, is the same trap I wrote about last week. A team can over-reflect or over-act. Both produce a group that never makes contact with the world. The teams I admire run both at once — they think while moving, together.