According to Harvard Business Review research, 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, underperforming on key metrics in ways that are consistent and measurable. For executives, that number reflects structural decisions made at the top.
When a team underperforms, the instinct is to look at the manager and ask:
- Are they communicating clearly?
- Are they setting the right expectations?
- Are they able to motivate their people?
These questions all assume the performance problem originated at the management level, and that assumption is often wrong. The decisions that most directly determine whether a team will perform at a high level are made well before a manager runs their first meeting — they’re made by executives.
Team composition is an executive decision
Who gets placed on which team, how roles are organized, and who is positioned to lead are structural decisions that most often sit at the executive level and set the performance ceiling of every team in your organization.
McKinsey research finds that companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance. The same principle extends down through the organization, as the structural decisions executives make about how teams are built and who leads them are among the most consequential decisions they make.
The conventional approach to team composition focuses on skills, experience, and bandwidth. Those factors matter, but they’re incomplete without considering how people are motivationally wired. A team built entirely on technical competency and availability, without consideration for the type of work that fuels/depletes them, is a team whose performance will be limited by factors no manager can fully compensate for.
The truth is, people are not equally energized by all types of work.
Someone wired to think analytically and build precise, well-tested solutions experiences a fundamentally different relationship to their work than someone wired to generate momentum, influence others, and move fast. Put those two people together on a project without the language or awareness to understand why they approach work so differently, and the friction that surfaces starts to feel personal. But it isn’t — it’s just two people operating from different motivational wiring, and without a framework to name it, that distinction is nearly impossible to see in the moment, and no manager can be expected to diagnose it on their own.
Executives who understand the motivational makeup of their organizations can build teams with intention, assembling groups whose Motivations and Motivational Dimensions complement each other in ways that make high performance possible.
Role design shapes motivation before the role is ever filled
Beyond team composition, how executives design roles determines whether the manager and employees in those roles bring their full selves to the table and perform at their best.
A role that requires someone to operate primarily in territory that drains them will produce friction, burnout, or mediocre output over time, regardless of skill level. This is one of the most underexamined contributors to team underperformance. When people are placed in roles that don’t fully align with their Motivations, they may perform well enough to stay employed, particularly if they have strong skills and a strong work ethic, but they’ll rarely produce the work that moves the organization forward with energy and commitment.
Yes, the work gets done, but it takes more out of them than it gives back. That gap between people grinding through their work and those energized by it compounds at the team level. Gallup research found that organizations selecting people who fit their roles psychologically see 20–40% fewer managers and skilled employees quit compared to those that don’t. Motivational fit is a core dimension of that psychological fit, and it’s a structural decision executives make long before a manager gets involved.
The team data executives often lack
Most executives have a reasonable sense of who the high performers are, where the friction points live, and which teams are hitting their numbers. What most executives don’t have is a clear view of the motivational makeup of their teams: What’s driving performance, what’s suppressing it, and where structural misalignments exist that no management intervention will fully resolve.
Deloitte’s research on high-performing teams found that 77% of team leaders believe they belong to a high-performing team, while only 59% of team members agree. Structural problems, by nature, are less visible to the people best positioned to fix them.
What surfaces as tension between two leaders — the kind that slows decisions and makes meetings harder than they need to be — is often attributed to personality and treated with communication coaching. But when both leaders’ motivational profiles are mapped side by side, the friction is frequently predictable: Two people wired in different motivational directions, processing the same situations through fundamentally different internal frameworks. Once that’s visible, the solution changes entirely. Role adjustments, clearer ownership boundaries, and a shared language for how each person is wired can resolve friction that communication training alone never will.
MCode addresses this directly.
The MCode assessment — a 30-minute behavioral assessment grounded in personal achievement stories — reveals each person’s unique motivational profile across 8 Motivational Dimensions and 32 Motivations. When those profiles are mapped at the team level through a custom Team Motivational Map, patterns emerge that aren’t visible through performance reviews, engagement surveys, or skills assessments.
- Executives can see where a team has strong motivational alignment and where the gaps are.
- They can see which roles are held by people whose profiles fit the demands of those roles, and which are held by people working against their wiring.
- They can identify where team friction is structural rather than interpersonal, which changes what the solution looks like entirely.
From organizational intelligence to organizational performance
McKinsey research indicates that transformations anchored in team-centric approaches can improve organizational efficiency by up to 30%. Getting there starts with structural intelligence — understanding how your teams are built and where the motivational gaps are.
This kind of intelligence belongs at the executive level because the decisions it should inform are executive decisions. Team composition, role design, leadership appointments, organizational structure, and resource allocation are all made more effectively when they include an understanding of motivational dynamics alongside skills and experience.
Organizations that build motivational intelligence into how they structure their teams and make their people decisions consistently outperform those that don’t because they have talented people in configurations that allow that talent to translate into performance.
Help your teams gain alignment
MCode’s Team Alignment Workshop gives executives a structured path to building motivational intelligence across their organizations. Every team member takes the MCode assessment, results are synthesized into a custom Team Motivational Map, and a Certified MCode Executive Coach leads interactive sessions tailored specifically to each team’s motivational makeup.
For executives, the output is actionable organizational intelligence:
- You learn where your teams are set up for high performance and where structural adjustments could remove friction that management alone can’t resolve.
- Your managers gain a common language and a shared framework for understanding how their teams are wired, which makes them more effective without requiring a wholesale overhaul.
- Every individual on those teams gains clarity on what drives them, how their wiring contributes to the team’s collective strength, and where they’re most likely to do their best work.
The question worth asking
If performance problems keep surfacing across your organization, if teams keep hitting the same friction points, if talented people consistently underperform in certain roles, if engagement stays stubbornly flat, it’s worth asking: Is the issue management or the structure built around your managers — the context they must operate within? Executives who ask that question and act on what they find build organizations where high performance isn’t the exception. It’s the expectation that is consistently met and exceeded by choice.
Getting started is easy: Start with a Team Alignment Workshop to see the immediate impact motivational intelligence has within a team, or take the MCode assessment to understand your own motivational profile and the organizational patterns it may be creating.
