The Importance of Small Daily Habits in Forming Super Teams

Over the years as a team leader, I’ve had the privilege of working with diverse individuals across various cultural settings. Through trial and error, I’ve uncovered what truly works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to leading teams effectively. Here are the key lessons I’ve learned along the way.

A good team starts with a leader

A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve a common goal. The phrase "working together" is essential in this context. But what does it really mean, and why is it important?

No teamwork, no fun

To illustrate this concept, let’s use a volleyball team as an example.

Each team member has a specific position: setter, outside hitter, opposite hitter, middle blocker, and libero. Each position requires specialized skills from the player. However, during the game, every player, regardless of their assigned position, must be skilled in all aspects of the game: defending, hitting, setting, and blocking. This expectation arises from the dynamics of the volleyball match, where each player must engage in the game entirely.

Imagine what happens when at least one of the players focuses only on the assigned position, ignoring other players and the current game situation.

For example, the striker takes responsibility for strikes only, excluding all situations when there is a need to block, defend, or play the ball to another striker. This striker just stands there in the field awaiting for the ball to strike. Otherwise, this striker ignores the ball completelly.

Does this sound like team work?
Does this sound like a trustworthy team member?
Can all other team members rely on such a player?

From my experience as an amateur volleyball player, I can tell that playing in that setup is not fun. I remember games where one or the other player didn’t receive the ball because it wasn’t in the position, or when it was "too far to defend". We played just for fun, and it was already frustrating. However, for the professional team this is a matter of win or lose, so the stakes are much higher.

Now, imagine that all team members focus solely on the assigned position.

They have one goal in mind, but they do not work together. Each player works in isolation. Each of them does the job, but still, the overall team results are poor. In the worst case scenario, the match is lost, in the best case scenario, it is hardly won by a small difference. It might be frustrating for each of the team members, and lead to miscommunication, blame games, and lack of will to engage or take responsibility for the game results.

Why you need a leader

To avoid this team behavior, a coach is inevitable. This role brings order and a sense of direction to the team. The coach takes responsibility for teaching players how to act according to the game, not only to the position they are in. The coach leads the team to be true to themselves, trust each other, have the courage to speak up, engage, take responsibility as a team, and finally score the result.

Not by playing in a position, but by being comfortable in playing outside the position.

How bad leaders hinder team development

Bad leaders create ineffective teams and lead to poor results. What are the characteristics of an ineffective team?

Team members do not trust each other. They tend to focus only on their comfort zone. They do not try or come up with new ideas. No one is eager to share opinions. They don’t care about the product's overall goal. They do not engage in meetings and decision-making. The only thing they care about most is survival with as little responsibility as possible.

Take, for example, the volleyball team with a coach that openly shouts at one of the players "What was that? You call that a passing? Where have you been at that time? For sure not in the field!", or "When do you actually plan to play the game, princess?!"

This does not sound like a motivational and encouraging speech. Sure, maybe there are individuals for whom the hatred towards the coach is motivational. For sure, I’m not the one.

In my opinion, most probably players will just collapse, put themselves in defense mode, and stop engaging in the game at all. Leading by fear and control is a short-term strategy. What does it take to be a bad leader?

I’m sure that there are many traits of bad leadership defined on the internet. However, here are some examples of bad leadership practices that have a huge impact on team formation, performance, and well-being.

How to be a bad leader, based on examples

Control is the highest form of trust

As a leader, you can trust your team only by maintaining total control over them. The leader assigns tasks, tells them exactly what to do, and attends and leads all the meetings. Nothing is left unattended - micromanagement at its best.

Take, for example, a decision about taking tasks to work on. Team members do not decide about that. They ask the team leader what is next.

There is no place for error

The team leader does not accept errors. Each failure must be punished. The best way is to humiliate the culprit publicly. Make him miserable and put into guilt. Making people uncomfortable with the public blame game makes them vulnerable to total control.

None of the team members can make a mistake. If one does, then this mistake should be hidden, or the blame should be put on someone else.

Finding culprit solves the problem

The blame game is very important in bad team management. Thus, when some failure occurs and it comes to the surface of the meeting then it is up to the leader to find the culprit. This makes everyone in the team uncomfortable and feel shameful.

"I’m lucky it is not me" - everyone might think, but someone will be punished. The problem will be solved eventually by someone picked by the team leader. But imagine what the pressure would be on that person.

Only the leader has the final word and knows everything

It doesn’t matter if the leader is right or not. His decision is the final decision. If the decision leads to bad results, the leader must start the blame game and find the culprit outside. The best candidate is the team and their wrongdoings.

Additionally, no one is supposed to argue with the team leader. If this happens, the team leader must shout nervously, "I’m the one making decisions here!" That should do the work.

The leader’s goal is the team’s goal

It might not be obvious for the team at first, but the team must eventually figure it out: they are working for the team leader, and they are fulfilling the leader's goals.

Usually, the leader’s goal is to have total control over the team and to look good in front of the manager and stakeholders. A good example is to force a team to work overtime in order to demonstrate the quality of team management.

Ignore the conflicts

A good bad leader should ignore any signs of conflict. As a leader, you don’t care about them. If team members start to argue in a meeting, just silence them without any hesitation. Solving conflicts takes time and distracts from the main goal of the meeting.

The team leader also doesn’t care about personal conflicts. For example, if a team member asks for help, the leader should just respond with, "From my perspective, you should get along somehow because your conflict has an impact on the goal. Do something with it."

By exhibiting this kind of behavior, I can guarantee that no one will succeed as a bad team leader; the team will underperform without any hope of getting better. And the longer one persists as a bad leader, the more one will have to lie and cheat in order to look good in front of the stakeholders.

As a consequence, engagement and motivation will decrease over time, and team frustration will grow. Managing by fear, shame, and blame will leave team members miserable without hope for change.

Described practices lead to a toxic work environment, where people are discouraged from taking responsibility, sharing opinions, and learning from mistakes. Teams can’t learn by doing and verifying ideas when they are oppressed by bad leadership.

But, is there any other way?

How good leaders build super teams

Good leadership is not only about avoiding bad practices. It is mainly about the proactive, self-aware, engaged stance of the person in the lead.

Great team building starts with a good leader. Good leaders create good teams that deliver good results. But super leaders create super teams that stand for the ideas they believe in.

They do not work in the typical sense of work. They play, and change positions. They look into greatness. They experiment when possible, they seek for improvements, and new tools. They value their work, celebrate wins and achievements, and retrospect their failures. They have fun.

What does it take to get there? Why is it so hard to build a super team? Is this even possible?

With my experience, I dare to say it is possible. It all starts with the team leader. His actions and decisions shape team dynamics, and empower the team to develop essential competencies that give rise to the super team.

The following sections describe five essential competences. Each is built on top of the previous ones, so the sequence is necessary. The team leader is responsible for guiding the team through the journey. Let’s look at the skills and find out what the leader can do to help the team.

Trust

Why is it important?

This is the first skill a leader should help the team develop. Without trust the team can’t do teamwork, can’t explore new possibilities, can’t speak up, won’t argue and disagree, can’t take responsibility and engage in decision-making. Without decisions, there are no actions, without actions, there are no outcomes.

What does a leader need to do?

To build effective teams, leaders must establish clear workplace rules and principles and ensure consistent adherence. While initial implementation within existing teams can be challenging, providing predictability fosters a safe and comfortable environment.

New teams often lack established principles, and even experienced teams can fall into this trap. In one team I was part of, the absence of any guiding principles meant everyone operated based on their individual judgment. We even lacked a proper continuous integration process.

Although I felt uneasy about this situation, I wasn’t confident enough to propose changes at the time.

To create effective workplace rules and principles, follow these steps:

1. Identify pain points: Individually gather all concerns and difficulties experienced by team members.
2. Observe dysfunctions: Note any inefficiencies or problematic behaviors within the team.
3. Develop solutions: Brainstorm and create potential solutions to address the identified problems.
4. Summarize findings: Compile a clear and concise summary of the pain points, observations, and proposed solutions.
5. Share and discuss: Present the summary and solutions to the team for review and discussion.
6. Gather feedback: Actively solicit and collect feedback from all team members.
7. Gain consensus: Ensure that the entire team agrees with and accepts the proposed solutions.
8. Develop implementation plan: Create a detailed plan for introducing the agreed-upon rules and principles.
9. Gradual introduction: Implement the principles one at a time, allowing the team sufficient time to adapt to each new rule.
10. Reinforce and habitualize: Continuously ensure the principles are being followed until they become ingrained habits within the team culture.

For leaders, gaining team trust is essential.

From my experience, a golden rule is to lead by example. This involves actively participating in both team leadership and development tasks. It also means that I’m open to criticism, welcome feedback, and admit to mistakes. I also take responsibility for my actions, and always deliver on promises. Furthermore, I ask for opinions, and help, and never neglect other ideas without understanding.

The leaders must provide a space for people to share their opinions and thoughts. Careful observation and active listening to the team members, individually and collectively are the keys to creating a comfort zone for everyone during the meetings. Team leaders should actively intervene when team members are ignored or made to feel uncomfortable.

I always try to get everyone involved in meetings by paying attention to who isn't speaking up. Then, I'll call on them directly and ask for their thoughts, like "Sally, what do you think about this?", "John, what is your opinion on this topic?", "Mary, what is your idea?"

Usually, people will respond, but in case of discomfort, I just let it go by saying "That is ok, if you don’t want to do that. Maybe next time". From my experience this will build up a safe space to share opinions in the long run. People will start to feel more comfortable and more eager to step up. The more opinions the greater the space of possible solutions.

The golden rule here is to ask open ended questions, never questions that can be answered with "Yes/No".

Courage

Why is it important?

Not every idea is worth doing, but every idea is worth sharing and listening to.

Courage to speak up and disagree is fundamental for sharing thoughts and opinions. This way, the team has access to the much bigger space of possibilities and options to choose from. The team has a higher chance of doing the right thing and doing it right, selecting the right tools, or even changing the rules for the better. Without courage, it won’t happen.

What does a leader need to do?

Encourage people to publicly speak out or disagree. When I see an inexperienced developer during a meeting, I just stop the discussion and kindly ask for his opinion by saying "What are your thoughts about this? Would you like to share something with us?".

The developer may use this opportunity or not. I’m always ready with the follow-up question "If nothing comes to your mind now then maybe you can share your thoughts with me later on?". This is enough to make an opening. Not this time, but maybe next time. As a leader, I need to remember to set up those openings as much as possible.

Any initiative taken by a developer, any idea shared, is worth public praise and thanks, by any means, whether it is on a Slack channel, or during a sync meeting. The leader helps to build courage case by case with each individual team member to the point that it becomes the new normal.

In one of the projects I was working on, one of the developers shared a great idea for simplifying our retrospective talks. Unfortunately, this guy didn’t want to own and lead the idea. Thus, I took it over, and asked what everyone else thought about that. We’ve started to use the tool and we are using it to this day. After that I publicly thanked the developer for this idea, so that everyone knew from whom it was coming from.

The leader must also be responsible for promoting ownership for initiatives.

It might be pipeline optimization, essential refactoring, introducing or replacing a library, component design and development. The important part here is to take lead and ownership. With courage building slowly over time it becomes more and more normal. When each of the developers lead at least one initiative then it is time for the next essential skill.

Engagement

Why is it important?

Without engagement, people do not care about what they do. They quickly become bored, annoyed, and end up in stagnation and boredom. In the end, some just quit, whereas some just do the minimum possible work with no engagement at all.

Just imagine what discussions look like. There is probably only one person talking; everyone else is half-sleeping or scrolling through the internet. No one cares. This is a dead serious hard time for the team to make any decisions.

Without decisions, there are no actions, without actions, there are no outcomes. This seems to be a stale situation for the teams, as any problem rises to the rank of unsolvable. How to handle this as a leader?

What does a leader need to do?

First of all, if the team lacks trust and courage, then the leader needs to get back to basics and build these two skills up front. Otherwise, decisions taken by the team will be based on a lack of trust and honest opinions. This would lead to a risk of bad decisions that no one wants to trust and follow. The team would not be motivated to take action after all.

However, with trust and courage already built up, a leader should put more focus on building decisiveness in the team.

At this point, the team is mature enough to jump into conflicts. Usually, those should be healthy conflicts, but sometimes ego pops up. Thus it is up to the leader to help solve them.

As a leader, when I see rising conflict I help focus on the problem and how to address it with possible solutions available. For me the best way is to state a question "What is the expected result, or what is the best for the client/customer?". Usually conflict is solved with tradeoffs, and not everyone being happy. But, this is not about making everyone happy. This is about learning to make decisions even in tough situations.

Engagement is built up by delegating more responsibilities to the team. Thus, the leader must lead discussions but leave decisions to the team.

Good practice for a leader is to do the following:

• Setup meeting with well defined agenda and expected outcomes
• Lead the meeting using agenda, but leave the room for discussion
• Keep all the distractions at a bay, there is no room for that
• Summarize ideas/propositions with pros and cons
• Encourage to take decision
• Ask: "Considering pros and cons, which one suits better, in your opinion?"
• Make a survey on the fly
• Repeat the decision, and make sure that every one is aware of it and understands it
• Meeting done

Important step: Write down the decision using format the team agreed upon. All the decisions taken by the team are nothing without follow-ups.

It is the leader's responsibility to keep track of the decisions made. It is good practice to maintain Architectural Decision Record (ADR) for technical decisions, and Team Agreements Document (TAD) for workflow and processes decisions. There is nothing like a well written ADR, and Team Agreement.

Keep in mind that both ADR, and TAD records are subject to change over time as the architecture and team evolve.

Co-responsibility

Why is it important?

Co-responsibility is when the team feels responsible for what they do and deliver. Each team member owns a wide range of activities and responsibilities. The team members support each other, trust each other, and have the courage to step up in case of issues.

With co-responsibility, there is a task flow between people. They share and talk about tasks without any problems, as it would be a natural thing to do.

There is no place for blame games. There is no "not my code, not my problem" stance.

In the last project I worked on, it was normal to have a daily synchronization meeting where we shared our progress and issues. At some point, one of the developers said he was almost done with the backend part, and the whole task would be waiting for the frontend to be finished.

The frontend developer admitted that he is already deep into other activities, and it would take a couple of days to dig out, so the backend developer offered to jump into this frontend task. And he did, and he did deliver it.

However, in one of the older projects I worked on, one of the developers reacted to an issued bug: "This is not my code". He eventually fixed the bug. But his reaction was staggering to me. At that time I was not an experienced leader, so I didn't know how to react to this situation.

Now I know that this team hasn't developed the skills of trust, courage and engagement at that time. Now I would just say "Yes, it is not your code. It is our code. We are all responsible for the quality of the product", and then build up the team skills starting from trust.

What does a leader need to do?

First of all, stop the blame games as soon as possible. The best approach that works for me is to focus on problems and solutions.

One of the developers once approached me, whining, "This frontend developer didn’t get the requirements correctly, and now the request is incorrect, and the feature fails with a 500 code."

I immediately understood that frustration is probably mixed with responsibility and engagement. Thus, I suggested talking with the frontend developer to reach a common understanding and develop ideas to prevent this. The solution was to just make a better contract before starting with implementation. It worked. There were no blame games.

Another important leader activity is to keep an eye on the task flow, and in case of stale moments, suggest taking over a task. This way it becomes more and more of a habit. A golden rule, to me, is to lead by example: take over tasks as a leader. One time, the leader takes the task, but other times the leader asks someone else to do it.

From my experience, this is highly beneficial in the long run, because team members in my last project started to ask for taking over the tasks, and then after some time then volunteered to do it, without asking. What a great team to work with, for a team leader.

Another golden rule that always works is to be grateful for what people do. Thank them any time you can. The best way is to do it publicly so everyone on the team knows what the person did well.

Outcome

Why is it important?

When a team has built trust, courage, engagement, and co-responsibility, they reach the stage where their work is no longer just about "getting things done." At this point, outcomes emerge naturally as the result of well-developed habits.

The backlog is delivered consistently, quality standards are met without constant supervision, and the team starts to surprise both leaders and stakeholders with new, valuable ideas. This is where innovation flourishes: the team identifies improvements, experiments with solutions beyond the obvious, and sometimes anticipates needs the client or Product Owner never articulated.

A team at this level is no longer reactive, it becomes proactive.

Instead of waiting for instructions, members co-create the vision, challenge assumptions, and take ownership of shaping the product and processes. For the leader, this is transformative. The leader now has a trusted partner in strategy, the team itself. Together, they execute tasks, create direction, and shape the future.

What does a leader need to do?

At the outcome stage, the leader’s role shifts from guiding daily behavior to unlocking strategic potential. Leaders should:

• Set the horizon, not the path: Clearly communicate long-term goals and the bigger picture, but leave room for the team to explore how to achieve them.
• Protect innovation space: Encourage experiments, allocate time for discovery work, and celebrate not only successful outcomes but also lessons learned from failures.
• Amplify successes: Make achievements visible inside and outside the team, ensuring recognition for both results and creative approaches.
• Enable autonomy with alignment: Keep the team aligned with organizational strategy while giving them autonomy in execution.
• Engage in forward-looking reflection: With a mature team, retrospectives evolve from fixing small process issues to reflecting on strategic impact and long-term direction.

The leader becomes less of a "coach on the field" and more of a “partner in vision.” This is when true super teams are born, when delivery is stable and innovation is ongoing. The leader can look beyond the day-to-day toward building sustainable success with a trusted, capable team.

Summary

The five essential skills: trust, courage, engagement, co-responsibility, and outcome are the foundation of every high-performing team. They apply regardless of whether a team is remote or in-office, newly formed or well established. The leader’s role is not to prescribe rigid rules but to adapt their approach to the team’s context.

For remote teams, this may mean emphasizing processes, rituals, and tools that foster connection and clarity. The leader’s task for established teams is often to address hidden dysfunctions or recurring conflicts. Leadership is always about continuous observation, active listening, timely intervention, and a willingness to adapt.

Strong teams don’t appear overnight.

They grow step by step, habit by habit. The leader guides this journey by shaping the environment, encouraging honest conversations, and modeling the behaviors they expect. When these skills mature, the team becomes more than a collection of individuals; it becomes a trusted partner capable of delivering today’s goals and shaping tomorrow’s direction.

Key takeaways

• Leadership is pivotal: The leader sets the tone and creates the conditions for growth.
• Trust first: Without trust, no other competence can take root.
• Courage unlocks voices: Teams thrive when every perspective is heard and valued.
• Engagement drives action: Clear decisions and shared ownership fuel momentum.
• Co-responsibility binds the team: Success and failure are shared, not siloed.
• Outcome is the summit: Delivery becomes consistent, and innovation emerges naturally.

In the end, extraordinary teams are not built on grand gestures but on the discipline of small, daily habits; reinforced by a leader who observes, listens, reacts, and adjusts.