What Makes a Great Transformation Team?

The results are in.

We recently asked leaders, “What makes a great transformation team?”  The clear winners were collaboration and trust, followed by clear vision and leadership; agility and innovation ranked lowest.

Each of these factors matter, and in practice, we rarely see them emerge by accident. In this article, we’ll review what they mean and how organisations can deliberately build them.

Collaboration and Trust

A simple principle coined 200 years ago still rings true for any great transformation team: “all for one, and one for all.” Collaboration and Trust ranked as the number one success factor in our survey, and for good reason.

Without it, even the most well-designed transformation will stall under the weight of friction, siloes, and second-guessing. But when progress stops being about individual outputs and becomes about collective outcomes, teams can move mountains.

In our delivery work, we have seen repeatedly that two key factors can reliably bring a team together:

Shared understanding, as individuals

Transformation teams are often assembled quickly across functions and backgrounds. Early conversations about working styles—how people plan, communicate, and give feedback—reduce friction and build mutual respect more quickly.

Shared objectives, as a team

Trust strengthens when people understand how their contribution connects to the whole. Clear goals, reinforced regularly, encourage proactive support, dependency management, and problem-solving beyond strict role boundaries.

Pixar applies this principle through its “Braintrust” feedback sessions, where peers give candid input without hierarchy. The model combines psychological safety with high standards, showing that open challenge and strong trust can coexist.

However, collaboration cannot exist in a vacuum. Teams can only pull together effectively when they understand why.

Clear Vision and Leadership

If trust and collaboration are the engine of a transformation team, clear vision is the direction of travel. When change is in the air, only c-suite executives carry the credibility, authority, and enterprise-wide perspective required to answer the most fundamental question employees ask during change: “Why are we doing this, and why now?”

When that answer is unclear, teams fill the gaps with assumptions, often defaulting to scepticism or fatigue.

A strong town hall can start the journey, but momentum is built in everyday conversations. In many programmes, this is where momentum is either sustained or quietly lost. That’s where middle managers are critical. They translate ambition into practical meaning for teams, roles, and priorities.

Successful organisations actively equip middle managers to lead change with a clear narrative, context, and permission to speak honestly about what is difficult or uncertain. They shouldn’t act as a relay for executive messaging, but as credible interpreters and coaches.

Microsoft’s cultural shift under Satya Nadella illustrates this well. While the top established a clear growth-mindset vision, the real impact came from reframing leadership throughout the organisation. Managers were encouraged to become coaches rather than controllers and learning replaced knowing as a core value. Consistent narrative from the top, combined with an empowered middle, enabled Microsoft to align tens of thousands of employees behind a shared direction.

The Forgotten Few: Agility and Innovation

Perhaps the most striking survey result was not what ranked highest, but lowest. Agility and innovation are commonplace on a transformation’s crib-sheet, yet they are not seen as core foundations of great teams.

This reflects a common gap: organisations say they support experimentation but often reward predictability. We see this tension frequently in transformation environments.

Agility and innovation require a willingness to test and learn, to accept that not every decision will be right the first time, and to tolerate uncertainty and failure. These are conditions that organisations claim to support but rarely reward.

For agility and innovation to take root, they must be encouraged and celebrated. Teams will not “fail fast” if failure is penalised. They will not experiment if deviation from the plan is frowned upon. Reward structures, performance metrics, and leadership reactions all send powerful signals about what is truly valued.

To shift these behaviours, an organisation must understand them, tracking leading indicators—early measures of adoption, engagement, and capability—not just lagging outcomes. Teams that can see early signs of progress can course-correct in real time, rather than reacting after momentum has faltered.

In summary

Each of these factors plays a role in delivering meaningful and lasting transformation, and in our experience supporting complex change programmes, the difference between success and stall almost always comes back to how deliberately they are built into day-to-day delivery.

Before moving on, ask yourself: How does your team build trust? How does your organisation empower leaders at every level? Is innovation genuinely rewarded, or quietly stifled?  

Transformation is not driven by frameworks alone. It is shaped by human behaviours, reinforced by leadership choices, and sustained through what organisations choose to recognise and reward. When these elements are built deliberately, transformation becomes not just possible, but repeatable.

If you’d like to explore how to set your transformation up for success, reach out to our transformation experts today to start the conversation.