Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups with Colin M. Fisher / Part One

In this episode of Anatomy of Leadership, host Chris Comeaux is joined by Colin Fisher, professor, researcher, author, and jazz trumpeter, to explore what decades of research reveal about how groups really work—and why so many teams struggle to reach their potential.

Drawing from his book The Collective Edge, Colin challenges the myth of the “lone genius” and reframes leadership as a discipline of design.  Instead of motivating harder or managing individuals more closely, leaders are invited to think like architects—intentionally shaping team size, structure, norms, and psychological safety so collaboration and learning can emerge naturally.

This conversation dives into why most teams are too large to function effectively, how hidden norms silently shape behavior, and why harmony is often mistaken for real collaboration.  With practical examples from healthcare, hospice, and other mission-driven environments, the episode offers research-backed insight into building teams that learn, adapt, and perform under pressure.

Episode Insights

•Why teams are often less than the sum of their parts
•How team size and structure impact decision-making
•What psychological safety really looks like in practice
•Why disagreement is essential for strong teams
•How leaders can unlock collective intelligence—not suppress it


If you lead teams, sit in meetings, or want collaboration to actually work, this episode will fundamentally change how you think about leadership and group performance.

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Guest:  Colin M. Fisher, Ph.D. author of the book, The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups

Host: Chris Comeaux, President / CEO of Teleios

Teleios Collaborative Network   /   https://www.teleioscn.org/tcntalkspodcast

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Intro

Melody King 0:00

Everything rises and falls on leadership. The ability to lead well is fueled by living your cause and purpose. This podcast will equip you with the tools to do just that. Live and lead with cause and purpose. And now, author of the book The Anatomy of Leadership, and our host, Chris Comeaux.

Chris Comeaux 0:21

Hello and welcome to the Anatomy of Leadership. I'm excited today. Our guest is Colin M. Fisher, PhD. He's a professor and author, a speaker, an occasional jazz trumpet player. That's pretty cool. He's an author of the new go-to book on group dynamics. If you're watching us, I've got it right here. The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, which has been translated into 10 languages. His academic research on group dynamics, creativity, improvisation, and leadership has been published in the field's top academic journals. His work's been featured in major media outlets such as BBC, Financial Times, Forbes Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MSN, MPR, Psychology Today, and The Times. He's a sought-after keynote speaker for business, governments, and nonprofit organizations all over the world because he's seeking to improve teamwork, creativity, and decision making. Colin's also, I guess in his spare time, an associate professor and PhD of Program Director at the University of College London's School of Management. Colin received his PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard University. And this is really cool, his prior career as a jazz trumpet player, Colin was a longtime member of the Grammy nominated Ether slash Orchestra, which with whom he toured extensively and recorded several critically acclaimed albums. So he is truly a right brain, left-brained guy. So welcome, Colin. Is there anything I left out that you just want our audience to know about you?

Colin Fisher 1:48

I think you really covered the whole thing there, Chris.

Chris Comeaux 1:51

Colin, what what's your superpower?

Colin Fisher 1:53

I hope my superpower is to take these kinds of complex, really technical ideas that you know from these jargony areas, like even saying the word group dynamics or saying improvisation can already sound jargony. And trying to make it more accessible and concrete for people. So I hope I'm uh a super to the extent one can be super messenger for what research can really tell us about leadership and uh human behavior.

Chris Comeaux 2:26

Yeah, and I I agree that is a superpower. Also, I think you have another one I'll talk about in just a moment. So the reason why we call this podcast Anatomy of Leadership, Colin, I wrote my first book, The Anatomy of Leadership. I'm an accountant by trade. So accountants organize things, right? So I tried to organize the field of leadership in a way with my book called calling it the Anatomy of Leadership. And I did write a chapter, and the whole point of my book is more of like I might be going two inches deep, knowing that there'd be great thought leaders like yourself that would then go much deeper. So I had a basically a chapter on basically building teams about making teams. So when Carol Fisher, who we both have in common, hence your last name, Fisher, she's like, You gotta meet Colin. Um, and so I got your book first, and then we got to meet, and then we got to schedule. First off, man, brilliantly written. I love your writing style. First off, I'm a history buff. I love how you bring in history, your own experiences, jazz and music. My mentor, Dr. Lee Thayer, was also a jazz musician, and quite often he would draw these amazing parallels to being a musician, and like he would use the term composing the organization, which is a lot of what you're getting into in your book. So, just first off, and also I love your unique humor. I think that's a superpower. It's it's a little it's a cool, witty sarcasm in how you weave that through the book as well. So I I actually read this over Thanksgiving. I actually couldn't put it down. So just first off, well done with your book. I hope everybody goes out and gets it. We'll make sure we include a link in it in the actual show notes.

Colin Fisher 3:54

Oh, thank you so much. I I really appreciate it, Chris, and I'm really glad you enjoyed it.

Debunking The Lone Genius Myth

Chris Comeaux 3:58

So in the book, you push back against the myth of the lone genius, which is just so woven into the American psyche. Why do you think our culture is so attached to heroic individuals? And what do we miss when we ignore the group behind the achievement?

Colin Fisher 4:13

Yeah, I mean, that's the million-dollar question that in a way, I think that this kind of thinking about a lone genius or having a hero that we look up to, or even a villain that we all despise, it's baked into our psychology. It's really wired into our brains in a lot of different ways. And one of those is that we're storytelling creatures and that we can understand these stories a lot better when it's got these protagonists that we can relate to, because we experience the world through through our own perspective and through our own eyes. But then even more than that, this translates into what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. And you know, it's fundamental in the sense that it's at the very bottom of our psychology, where when we're trying to explain other people's behavior, we default to thinking about their traits, to thinking about their personality, to the you know, the way they are as a person. And so when, you know, for example, when somebody's late to a meeting, that we often think, oh, you know, that's because they're lazy or they're not conscientious, or, you know, they're not keeping track of time, and that we underestimate the extent to which situations are causing their behavior. So we don't think, oh, you know, maybe there's something going on in their life, there is bad traffic, that and that one of those situations that we really overlook the most is the group. And so it makes it really hard for us then to say, right, the reason that people are behaving the way they are is because of the groups they're a part of. It's because of these social norms that they're around, it's because of who they're hanging out with all the time, or that actually their individual performance is part of a bigger collective. And that's hard for our brains to grasp onto, and it's something that we have to take a beat, take a pause, and say, wait a minute, I know my brain's trying to tell me that this is because that person's, you know, got these traits and these personalities and these uh you know, these thing these things about themselves as a person, but that when I really want to understand the world correctly, especially the world of work, and as a leader, we have to understand why, you know, why people behave the way they do if we're gonna get the most out of it. We have to uh fight that psychology and think about the group more deliberately.

Chris Comeaux 6:48

Hmm. You're you're making me think of a quote that I actually used to keep in front of my desk, which is we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. And so um So you say that leaders should think like architects in the book rather than motivators, um, which is a really a great framing. What are the most common design flaws that you see in teams? And maybe especially in these mission-driven fields, I spend a lot of my time in healthcare, a lot of our listeners in the hospice and pal to care space. So I'm just curious what you'd say about that.

Leaders As Architects

Optimal Team Size And Composition

Colin Fisher 7:21

Yeah, I mean, I think that I I love that you focused in on that quote, because I think that's one of the most important messages is to, you know, we when we think about leadership, if you watch movies or something like that and you see, you know, the the great sports coach or the the great corporate leader, they're they give some kind of climactic speech and everyone cheers and and rallies around them. And that's this kind of image that we get from popular culture about what leadership really is. But the most important leadership when we're trying to measure what actually makes a difference, it's the architectural stuff behind the scenes about figuring out how we're going to create this structure that's going to make it easier for everyone to work together. And the the most important elements of that structure, the first one and probably the most common mistake when we're talking about teams, is the composition of the team. But it's not the the thing I think most people think about, which again, a lot of people's minds goes to personality when I say, oh, you have to think about the composition of your team, and we think, oh, well, we've got to get you know the right mix of you know extroverts and introverts or something like that. But it turns out that though those kinds of approaches aren't very successful. That w there's not much evidence that trying to compose your team based on those factors works well. The most important thing that we overlook is just the size of the team and that most organizations have teams that are way too big. So my my mentor Richard Hackman did a lot of research into optimal team size. And what he found is that when you you know ask people, is the team that you're on too big or too small? And you kind of chart those lines, you say, you know, how big were teams that people said were too big, and how big were teams that people said were too small, those lines cross at about 4.5 people. And that really is this is what other research has also shown. That's the teams that perform the best are somewhere between three to seven members. But when we think about the meetings we're in, and you say, well, how many meetings are you in that fit that description? That are this three to seven member member groups, where we can have competence, everybody can contribute, everybody can participate, and we're gonna really understand what the people in the room think. Well, at least for me, and I'm you know, I'm in a organization full of people who actually study leadership and things like that, and we still have tons of meetings that have 15, 20, 25 people in there and we're trying to make decisions. And that in uh in the course of doing that, you're already behind when you're creating these teams that are this large and are trying to be interdependent all at once, where we're trying to really understand each other and get on the same page. And so the the number one thing I see is there are people who try to do everything all together and they think of their team as being this larger unit that has, you know, often fifteen to thirty people, and they don't think in terms of the actual tasks that we need to do, which are usually done in these in these much smaller units. So I would say that's that's one of the most common uh things that I see, especially, you know, as you kind of move up the the food chain in an organization, top management teams are probably one of the the worst offenders of this, where you find you know really lar teams are just too large to have a discussion trying to make decisions um repeatedly over time. And that um to answer your other question about healthcare in particular, uh that it's great where a lot of team science is done in healthcare settings. So I I reference a lot of research by Amy Edmondson who did a lot of her research on nursing teams, on hospitals and and seeing the challenges there. And that one of the the things, you know, especially when we're talking about these frontline healthcare teams, is that they're they're coming into a professional norm where it was traditionally very hierarchical. Like if you're in an an operating room, the leadership really, you know, used to and still often gets consolidated in the surgeon and the doctor, and that there was a norm where you could have these really sort of dictatorial styles of of talking to everybody else in the room. And that one of the things that uh Edmondson's research found was that there were people were afraid to speak up in these kinds of environments. And that you know, when she was looking at these hospitals where they were measuring adverse drug reactions as a measure of the kind of performance of their nursing teams. And they found this kind of bizarre finding where the teams that followed the textbook for for composing their teams uh the best were reporting the most adverse drug events in that hospital. And they'd say, well, this doesn't make any sense. Like this these teams are doing everything right. Why are they the ones who you know look like they're making the most errors? But it turned out it wasn't that they were making the most errors. The well-structured teams were the ones that were reporting errors. And what was happening is the poorly structured teams, they were the ones who were hiding all the errors that they were making. They weren't reporting them. And that was because they didn't have they weren't able to create this sense of psychological safety in these teams, in part because of these norms that I think are, you know, more severe in healthcare, where we have these very hierarchical um approaches to leadership where we don't talk about our mistakes, we don't kind of share and collaborate on these learning tasks as easily. So I think you know, healthcare sometimes is a an extreme case where we're coming across different professions, across different functions, and having to work as a team. But it's also, of course, one of the most important ones, and and I have found tons of people in the healthcare industry like yourself who are really interested in how to get better and how do we take the lessons from team science and apply them to this really important uh industry.

Chris Comeaux 13:55

You know, it's so fascinating listening to you. Um I I'm very biased. I think hospice is probably one of the most brilliantly designed models of healthcare. But listening to you, the core of the team, and actually it's called the interdisciplinary team, the IDT, is usually a nurse, a social worker, a chaplain, a CNA. And so that's like the and then you have a volunteer. And so that's usually the core team delivering the care. Now, how they get organized amongst the team, there are more people than that. But at the lowest level, that is the care delivery model. And I used to, I used to always say that hospice is like a terrorist network, and people would go, What? And I would actually say it for a fact. Supposedly a terrorist network, you could cut the head off and it still functions because the way the cells actually function was it was my way of getting people's attention. But that's what I was poking on is that at that cell level, that that team level, the way they deliver care is unlike, and maybe just we bumped into it by accident and you've just proved it in the research. Um, but also listening to you, man, that is like I know some healthcare leaders that their span of control is like 50 people that report to them. But it's it's not that maybe you wouldn't do that, right? But it's thinking about the project level work that gets done, where you need that collaboration is where you create that kind of span of control or at least that size team. Am I interpreting you correctly in that?

Healthcare Lessons And Psychological Safety

Colin Fisher 15:23

Yeah, absolutely. That I think it this isn't to say we can't organize work units where you know one person is supervising, uh, you know, has a you know a large number of direct reports. But that the danger then, especially when we're in this kind of like usually when you have 50 people, you know it's pretty hard to get everybody in a single room and do stuff together. And I think the mistakes come when you have this kind of like 15, 20, 25 kind of range, where it's like you could get everybody in the room, and that then a lot of leaders don't differentiate between the stuff where there are real projects and there's real work, real decisions that need to get made, real you know, times we need to generate ideas that we need to learn from each other and reflect, and times where it's just one-way information exchange where the leader is just gonna talk at you for a long time. And this is where we see a lot of the dysfunction starting to emerge. So, you know, it may seem to a leader like, oh, it's great, I get everybody in the room and I just say everything once, and that makes my life easier. Right. But what you're producing then is a norm that people are gonna show up, they're not gonna be asked for their views, they're not gonna speak up, and that it's okay to just kind of sit back and listen to what the leader says. And that norm is sticky, and that's one of the things I talk a lot about in the book is that how sticky these social norms are, when you create a situation where you're like, when when I talk, people sit and listen passively. That's gonna stick around from situation to situation. It's not just gonna be in that one meeting. And so I think breaking that habit and using you know all the tools we have available to ourselves now to if you need to tell everybody something, there's a lot of ways to do that besides making them come into a room uh and and sit there and listen to you. Yeah, we can record videos of ourselves, we can send emails, we can do a lot of things that don't require that. And that when but when we need to really have a discussion, make make a decision, you know, r reflect on best practices, that those kinds of things we're doing in these smaller units. And I think that's that's the key distinction, is not you have to restructure your organization where you have only 4.5 uh member units, but that the job of a leader, again, as this architect of of these teams, is to say, well, how do I take this larger c group and turn them into these real teams that I'm getting as close to that ideal 4.5 member team, which it sounds like in hospice is is the norm already? Um, how do I do that consistently for all kinds of tasks?

Chris Comeaux 18:14

That is so well said. So, and this is again another thing I see quite often in healthcare, especially at hospice. Many teams confuse being nice with being effective. How can leaders distinguish between true collaboration and false harmony that really suppresses dissent and robust debate and discussion that really you know solves the problem, moves the team forward?

Colin Fisher 18:38

Yeah, I mean, so if you're the leader and you think that, oh, we're this really harmonious team and everybody agrees with me all the time, you know, we we almost never need to have a discussion. You almost certainly have false harmonics. That if if nobody's telling you they disagree with you, then that's the number one sign that's that something's awry, and that you need to encourage people to to speak up. And this is just inherent to how humans deal with people who are higher in status or more powerful or control their fate, that we are very sensitive, just like a lot of animals, to status skews and dominance skews where we don't like to speak up and and threaten our own social standing in in a group. And that means that leaders have to go out of their way to get people to speak up, and that especially people who are new to leadership roles often need to get used to this. That the the person who is your buddy before and would tell you, you know, exactly what they thought, they may be a little more hesitant too once you control their promotion or their bonuses or you know other aspects of their career. And so the best leaders explicitly are encouraging. People to disagree with them. They're asking for this. When they're getting people who are speaking up and suggesting different ideas and disagreeing with them, they're praising that and saying, That's what I want. That's what that's what we need here. And when they're making mistakes, they're talking about them openly. And saying, like, hey, here's what I'm learning right now. I want everybody else to do the same because that's the only way we're going to learn. If we all, you know, just like Edmondson's uh nurse nursing teams, if we're hiding the mistakes that we're making, we're not gonna get better. We're not gonna learn. And so I think, you know, it's from the outside, it's often pretty easy to tell when there's false harmony, because any group of five people isn't gonna agree on everything consistently very, very often. That there's always gonna be people who are privately having questions about what's being said or have diff have their own ideas. And if you don't hear those ideas in an hour-long meeting, that's a group that's got some false consensus.

Chris Comeaux 21:07

You know, you talked about um but you really made me uncomfortable in a good way with this one, because Tuckman's model is something that I've used frequently, forming, storming, norming, performing. And this is the way I usually would describe it, because in hospice we're very familiar with the stages of grief. And so it it goes back to our very inception of hospice in America, uh, Kubler Ross. And so um, the stages of grief, in a way, now that's kind of been reframed. But the original stages of grief, to me, the purpose of was making people understand that what you're going through is normal. And that's how I frame Tuckman's model is that the forming, the storming, the norming, performing, but yet it's not a perfect, it doesn't go exactly that way. And usually this is my punchline. You're gonna storm as a team. So don't lean away from the storm, lean in. And then we bring a lot of other tools to the table to help them actually storm well. Would you push back on that actually? Because in some respects, you know, you've nailed, because now I'll even caveat and say if you do research, people say now Tuckman's model is not relevant. But that's how I try to make it relevant, just to let them know that that human inclination of going the false harmony, I don't want to have the tough conversation, that's not going to create a great team, a great culture. We need you guys to lean in.

Big Meetings, Bad Norms

False Harmony Versus Real Collaboration

Colin Fisher 22:26

So I mean, I think, you know, as a tool for sparking discussion, that sound you know, I don't disagree with what you said about you know, that's having disagreement is normal and we need to to work on on that. And I think the reason that researchers like me have pushed back on Tuchman's model is simply that like one we don't you know, you don't observe it in a lot of teams. Where and that, you know, as you say, but this is more of a description, that's not necessarily a good thing. That we don't see this kind of storming phase in a lot of teams. That you know, that might well be a bad thing. And that's you know, the prop part of the problem with the Tuchman model is it's not uh distinguishing kind of between here's a description of what we usually see and here's something that you ought to do. And um yeah. And the uh the other side of that is I think the people who've really taken the wrong lessons from the Tuchman model were people who were really involved in team building, kind of one-word uh team building uh approaches. Where uh people took this idea that we need to establish trust and norms before we can really get to work. And so there there's been this movement that kind of started to separate this, you know, trust building, rapport-building process from the doing of the work. And these are things like saying, like, oh, we're gonna, you know, have these new teams. First we need to have this off-site and we need to go on this ropes course, and that then when once we build that trust, then we're gonna be ready to go in and perform. And that's the consequence of kind of putting performing at the end after all these other phases. But the reality is much more messy. We we build trust, the best kind of trust, by doing the work. We build the best kinds of norms by doing little experiments, by doing a little bit of work, reflecting on how it went, talking about what we could do better and improving. And that, you know, this idea and the kind of harm and the the reason I I you know poke at Tuckman a lot in the book is because I think p people are taking a different lesson than the one it sounds like you were taking from it. And, you know, selling these these products that are taking us actually farther away from the way we would really want to build teams in a research-based fashion, which is uh much more like what we see in sports teams or in the military, where when they want people to do better, they have practice, they have training camp, they have boot camp, and they get people together to do tasks that are lower stakes versions of the real work that they're gonna do. That and that is brilliant. Yeah. The research is just unambiguous that like if you want teams to perform better, training teams as the team that's gonna do the work, doing as close to the real work as you can, but you know, turning down the stakes a little bit when they're inexperienced, that's the way you're gonna get the best teams. And that the farther you get away from the real work that they're gonna do, the harder it's gonna be for them to build work-based trust. My sense that when I give you one of these tasks, you're gonna come back and deliver me the thing I need to do my work. That we're willing to tell each other our deakest, darkest, deepest, darkest secrets, or that I'm gonna catch you in the trust fall, which, you know, isn't worthless, but it's just less good than what we get out of of doing these kind of like high fidelity simulations or low-stakes version of the work.

Chris Comeaux 26:18

That is so good. And I actually again meant to give you a shout out. I use the dream the Olympic Dream Team basketball team as an example all the time. And you put it in your book and actually went through some of the historical difference in the teams, and but quite often I'll say, you know, we have this fallacy that we think we just put the dream team on the field, we hired them, and magically, you know, because it it the story always is ever they lived happily ever after. No, it doesn't work that way in the real life. And I love that you call that out that the team that had some big name people now, but weren't exactly big names in the beginning, like LeBron Dreams. Um, I think Wade was another. And so they kind of did what you said, like build the trust stuff, and then didn't quite spend as much time in the actual work together. They lived together, built trust, but then they didn't perform at that higher level. I that is just incredibly well stated.

Jeff Haffner 27:12

Don't miss part two of this episode Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups with Colin Fisher. Dropping this Friday, January twenty-third on TCN Talks and Anatomy of Leadership.