25-03-2025
Why ‘Team Cohesion' Is Killing Your Organization's Culture
Elena Sarango-Muniz is the Founder and CEO of Sarango Executive Coaching, a leadership executive coach, HR consultant and keynote speaker.
I've spent more than two decades building what I thought were perfect teams—aligned, cohesive and rowing in the same direction. I even claimed to be a super-skilled interviewer for finding these people for my and others' teams. But I was dead wrong, and it cost me many headaches, innovation, creativity and a truly healthy organizational culture.
When leaders obsess over team cohesion and alignment, they're actually suppressing the very diversity of thought and approach that drives healthy cultures and breakthrough results.
For years, I enforced "my way" of thinking, leading, hiring and problem-solving, unknowingly creating teams of people who looked different but thought the same. I confused uniformity for unity. I exchanged process alignment for genuine collaboration. I mistakenly idealized my ideal culture versus a "we" culture.
What company executives can discover through consultants and coaches is that true team excellence and healthy cultures emerge not from minimizing differences but from deliberately exploring and leveraging them.
As Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie write in their book Wiser, "When minority voices are heard, well-functioning groups are likely to be jolted out of their routines, and fresh solutions, even a high degree of innovation can follow."
Every team member, including the leader, brings hidden dimensions shaped by their:
When leaders fail to understand these internal complexities, they're essentially repressing their team's most valuable asset—their uniqueness. Let's not forget: We hire whole humans but only utilize the parts that fit our predefined mold or playbook.
The most successful cultures don't emerge from everyone following the same playbook—they come from creating environments where divergent approaches can safely collide, challenge each other and combine into something greater than any single perspective could produce.
Many of my corporate coaching clients feel misunderstood. They feel like they do not belong in their teams and work environments, and to me, this is clearly a potential misalignment and lack of embracing their uniqueness and human-like dimensions.
It's not that I am advocating for chaos or confusion; it is indeed a complex and very difficult leadership responsibility. Rather, I am suggesting that effective leadership means creating a safe space and enough structure for these differences to productively interact rather than forcing everyone into the same box.
Many of the personality assessments used in organizations, usually implemented due to a team crisis or a one-time HR initiative, do not bring to the surface these deeper levels of cultural understanding, these dimensions that are so hidden in each individual. The competitive advantage companies should be searching for isn't in alignment and clarity of personality types—it's in the deliberate integration of the differences found after these assessments have been applied.
In order to create thriving creative teams, organizations will need to embrace the idea that there is more than just team alignment and a clear structure. They must create first the ideal environment and culture, one person at a time.
The most successful organizations of tomorrow won't be built on employee engagement charts and personality tests that fit people into quadrants. They'll be led by those brave enough to embrace the beautiful mess of human diversity and transform it into unprecedented value.
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