Why Traditional Team Building Falls Short in the AI Era
- Russell Kern
- Oct 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 13
The Excel Spreadsheet That Doesn't Add Up
Right people + Right roles = High-performing team.
It’s the equation every CEO believes. Hire talented people. Put them in positions that match their skills. Watch the magic happen.
Except the magic doesn’t happen.
Instead, you get teams that look great on paper but can’t seem to collaborate when it matters. Strategy meetings that produce nothing. Innovation sessions that generate silence.
Brilliant individuals who somehow become less effective when they work together.
Sound familiar?
The Problem with the “Right People” Formula
Gino Wickman’s Traction teaches us to get the right people in the right seats. It’s solid advice—as far as it goes. But it fundamentally misses something about how human beings actually function.
Your team members aren’t computers you can plug into an organizational chart. Each person brings a 3-pound brain containing 170 billion cells, nearly 100,000 miles of neural wiring, firing signals between 1 and 120 meters per second.
That’s not just impressive biology. It’s the reason why assembling talented individuals doesn’t automatically create a high-performing team.
Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to keep us alive, not to make us great at innovation meetings. Every team member walks into your conference room with unconscious survival behaviors, complex emotional responses, and threat-detection systems that activate the moment they sense social risk.
Put five brilliant people together and you don’t get five times the brilliance. You get five different nervous systems, each one trying to avoid looking stupid in front of the group.
Sports franchises prove this every season. Billions spent buying star talent. Championships that never materialize because ego, insecurity, and self-focus undermine teamwork.
The gap between talented individuals and high-performing teams has almost nothing to do with talent. It has everything to do with trust, psychological safety, and practiced collaboration skills.
The AI Complication Nobody Expected
Now add artificial intelligence to this already complex equation.
We’ve navigated technology transitions before—mainframes, personal computers, email, cloud computing. Each time, we assumed smart people would adapt. Eventually, they did.
AI is different in ways most leaders haven’t grasped yet.
The transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles took 13 years and fundamentally changed what skills workers needed. AI transformation is happening 10 times faster and touching every role in your organization.
When surveys show that 50% of today’s workforce fears losing their job to AI, that’s not resistance to change. That’s the amygdala doing exactly what evolution designed it to do—protect against threats.
Here’s the challenge: Our brains evolved on flat plains over millennia. We’re wired for gradual, linear change. AI transformation is exponential. We’re terrible at seeing and adapting to logarithmic change.
Leaders who expect enthusiasm about AI are setting themselves up for disappointment. Leaders who approach transformation with compassion and patience get actual results.
The Productivity Myth That’s Costing You
“We’ll give everyone access to AI tools and productivity will skyrocket.”
I hear this constantly. It almost never works.
Learning to write prompts in ChatGPT or Claude won’t magically transform your business. Deloitte found that 68% of organizations can’t move even 30% of their AI experiments into production.
The bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s collaboration. It’s trust. It’s support. It’s coaching.
Before AI can deliver meaningful value, teams need to master working together. They need to map workflows, identify where repetitive work happens, and have honest conversations about what should change.
That requires trust—the kind most organizations don’t deliberately cultivate. Trust that everyone knows their role and is expert at getting their work done. No need to micromanage.
It requires communication clarity.
What is the mission?
Why?
What is the priority?
What information do we have?
What do we need to find out?
What is needed for the team’s success?
It requires psychological safety—a culture where people can challenge ideas and suggestions without fear of hurting each other’s feelings or facing retribution. A culture that invites constructive debate in search of the best solution.
It requires shared foundational understandings of your business, your customers, your processes, and each other.
Without these human foundations, even the most advanced AI becomes just another underutilized tool in your tech stack.
What Actually Works
The Mayo Clinic faced a collaboration problem where lives literally hung in the balance. Patient outcomes depended on doctors, nurses, and specialists communicating clearly across disciplines.
They didn’t hire different people. They restructured how teams collaborated—cross-disciplinary morning huddles, shared decision-making tools, patient-centered team pods, and real-time learning systems.
Results: Patient satisfaction increased. Treatment innovation doubled. Care costs lowered. Staff burnout decreased.
Notice what they prioritized: changing how humans worked together before adding technology to amplify those improvements.
Adobe took a different approach with its Kickbox program. They gave every employee—regardless of department or role—a box containing $1,000 and permission to prototype an idea. No manager approval required.
The impact: A 2,500% increase in ideas tested. Massive growth in their patent portfolio. Employee retention in the top 5% of large companies. Revenue per employee exceeding $700,000.
Both examples share a common thread: first invest in human collaboration, then in technology to multiply what humans can achieve together.
The Path Forward
If you’re a CEO wondering why your talented team can’t seem to innovate together, the answer probably isn’t hiring different people. It’s creating different conditions.
Start with these fundamentals:
Build genuine psychological safety. Not the lip-service kind where you say “all ideas welcome” then shoot down the first suggestion. The real kind, where people can challenge your thinking without career consequences.
Develop trust through practice. Trust isn’t built in off-site retreats. It’s built through repeated, low-stakes collaboration on actual work problems.
Create AI literacy across the organization. Not just in IT. Everyone needs a basic understanding of what AI can and can’t do, where it adds value, and where human judgment remains essential.
Map your workflows before implementing AI. You can’t improve what you don’t understand. Before deploying AI tools, understand how work actually flows through your organization.
The business landscape is changing faster than most leaders realize. Companies like Shopify now require employees to integrate AI into their work and justify why tasks need humans instead of automation.
Your competitors are figuring this out. They’re building cultures where human wisdom and machine capability multiply each other.
The question isn’t whether this transformation is coming. It’s whether you’ll lead it—or be left behind by it.
Russell M. Kern is the CEO of Kern and Partners. A workforce consultancy expert in Human+AI Collaboration skill development. Russell is the author of TRANSFORM or DIE: How to build teams that outthink, outpace, and outprofit the competition in the AI Age. He can be reached at russell@kernandpartners.com.
