August 7, 2026What Teamwork Is Really About on Strong Organizations

Most teams look fine from the outside. It is only when pressure hits, when a market shifts or a plan falls apart, that you find out whether the teamwork holding a company together was real or performative. I have sat in on a lot of conversations with leaders who describe their teamwork in the abstract, all values statements and culture decks, but rarely can they tell you what teamwork actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday inside their own walls. That gap is exactly what Meridith Elliott Powell has learned to read before she ever agrees to work with an organization.

Meridith Elliott Powell is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and business strategist who has spent her career studying how companies behave under uncertainty, and what I find most useful about her perspective is how practical it is. She does not talk about teamwork as an inspirational idea you post on a wall. She talks about it as something you can observe, measure, and predict, often within the first few conversations with a company. In our discussion, she broke down three signals she watches for when sizing up whether a team’s teamwork is real or just well-rehearsed, and each one tells you more about a culture than any strategy document ever could.

🎧 Watch and listen to the full interview about teamwork here

What Teamwork Looks Like Before You See It

Here is what struck me most about how Meridith approaches a new client relationship. She is not waiting for the keynote to figure out whether an organization’s teamwork is genuine. She is diagnosing it in the lead-up, in the emails, in the access she is given, in the pace of the approvals, in who shows up to the planning calls. Long before she says a word from a stage, she already has a working theory about whether the people in that building trust each other enough to function as a real unit when things get hard. It is the kind of pattern recognition you would expect from someone whose career moved through sales, banking, and healthcare on her way to the C-suite, and who has spent the years since helping organizations turn uncertainty into business growth.

This is a useful reframe for anyone who leads people, and it says something worth sitting with about how modern leadership actually gets evaluated. We tend to think of teamwork as something that gets built in a retreat or a workshop, an event you schedule and then check off. Meridith’s approach suggests something less comfortable and more accurate: teamwork is not an initiative, it is a byproduct. It shows up as the residue of how an organization already treats access, speed, and leadership presence, long before anyone tries to engineer it on purpose. If you want to know whether a company has a strong team culture, you do not need to attend the offsite. You need to watch how it operates on a normal week.

The First Signal: Who Gets to Talk to You

The first thing Meridith looks for is access. Specifically, whether a company is willing to let her speak directly with frontline personnel before she ever steps into the room to work with them. As she put it during our conversation, she pays close attention to whether they will let her talk to other people in the organization, and whether they are willing to open the door to the people actually doing the work.

On the surface, this sounds like a scheduling detail. It is not. Access is a decision, and decisions reveal priorities. When a company restricts outside contact to a narrow band of executives, when the only people Meridith is allowed to speak with are the ones curating the message, that restriction is itself the message. It tells you that leadership is more concerned with controlling the narrative than building genuine communication with the people living the reality of the business every day. And an organization that manages its own narrative internally, shielding outsiders and insiders alike from the unfiltered truth, is rarely an organization with strong teamwork underneath the surface.

Contrast that with a company that opens the floor freely. When frontline employees are given direct, uncensored access to someone assessing the health of the organization, it signals something structurally important: that leadership is not afraid of what those employees might say. That kind of openness does not happen by accident. It is downstream of a culture where teamwork already exists between layers of the org chart, where the people closest to the customer are trusted enough to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for.

Access Is a Referendum on Trust

I keep coming back to this idea because I think it applies far beyond the context of hiring a keynote speaker. It says something fundamental about business leadership as a discipline, not just as a title. Access is one of the most honest measurements of trust inside any organization, and trust is the raw material that teamwork is built from. You cannot have meaningful collaboration in an environment where information only flows one direction, where the people at the bottom of an org chart are treated as a liability to be managed rather than a resource to be heard.

What makes this especially interesting is how quietly this signal operates. Nobody announces that they are restricting access as a form of control. It simply happens, layer by layer, gatekeeper by gatekeeper, until the distance between leadership and the frontline becomes so wide that neither side can accurately describe what the other is experiencing. That distance is often mistaken for professionalism or hierarchy. In reality, it is usually a symptom of teamwork that has quietly broken down, replaced by a system of message control dressed up as structure.

This is why the strongest leaders I have encountered treat transparency as a discipline rather than a virtue signal. They build habits, not slogans, around openness: regular access between leadership and frontline staff, unfiltered feedback loops, and a willingness to let outsiders see the organization as it actually functions rather than the version prepared for a boardroom. Teamwork of that caliber cannot be faked in a single meeting. It has to be practiced continuously, because the moment access closes, trust begins eroding, and everything built on top of it erodes right along with it.

The Second Signal: How Long It Takes to Decide

The second clue Meridith watches for is decision-making speed. She described paying close attention to how much time it takes a company to make a decision, and whether there are heavy layers of bureaucracy sitting between an idea and an action. If those layers exist, her read is direct: the company is moving too slowly for the market it is competing in.

I have seen this pattern play out again and again with organizations I have worked alongside. Slow decision-making rarely comes from a lack of good ideas. It comes from a lack of trust distributed through the system. Every additional layer of approval exists because someone, somewhere, decided that people closer to the decision could not be trusted to make it well. That might sound harsh, but structurally, it is exactly what bureaucracy communicates. Each sign-off is a small vote of no confidence, and when you stack enough of them together, you get an organization that cannot move even when everyone privately agrees on what needs to happen.

Teamwork, in its healthiest form, compresses decision-making. When people trust each other’s judgment, when responsibility has actually been distributed rather than just delegated on paper, decisions get made closer to where the information lives. That is not recklessness. It is efficient teamwork functioning exactly as it should, allowing the people with the most relevant context to act without waiting for permission from someone three levels removed from the situation.

Bureaucracy Is Slow Motion Failure

The deeper implication here is one that many leaders resist hearing: bureaucracy is not neutral. It is not simply the cost of doing things carefully. It is often a visible symptom of teamwork that has broken down at a structural level, replaced by a system built to protect individuals rather than empower teams. When people are afraid of being blamed for a bad outcome, they build approval chains to diffuse responsibility. The chain grows longer with every reorganization, every leadership change, every past mistake nobody wants to repeat.

The problem is that markets do not wait for approval chains. Competitors move. Customer expectations shift. A slow decision in a fast environment is not a cautious decision, it is a costly one, and the cost usually shows up as lost opportunity long before it shows up on a balance sheet. It is often the quiet difference between leading and trailing in business. Meridith’s insight about bureaucracy is really an insight about teamwork disguised as a comment on process. An organization with strong teamwork does not need six approvals to greenlight a reasonable idea, because trust has already been distributed through the system in advance. Teams that function this way are not moving fast because they are careless. They are moving fast because the trust underneath them has already done the work of alignment before the decision point ever arrives.

This is also why so many transformation efforts fail even when the strategy is sound. Leaders will invest heavily in strategy without noticing that their decision-making structure is quietly working against them. If you want to diagnose whether teamwork is real inside your organization, look at how long it takes between someone raising a good idea and that idea becoming action. The gap tells you almost everything you need to know.

The Third Signal: Whether the CEO Shows Up

The third signal Meridith watches for is the most human of the three: whether the CEO is personally engaged in the process. Not delegated. Not represented by a proxy. Actually present, actually paying attention, actually invested in getting it right. She has learned that when leadership shows up like this, it is a mark of an organization that takes its people seriously.

It would be easy to read this as a comment about vanity, about executives wanting visibility. I do not think that is what is happening here, and I do not think that is what Meridith means either. It is worth remembering that she worked her way up from an entry-level role into the C-suite herself, and that history shapes how she reads this signal. She knows firsthand what it looks like when the people at the top actually see the people doing the work, which is part of why she has become one of the most respected women leaders in her field. CEO involvement is a proxy for something much bigger: whether leadership actually believes that culture, teamwork, and professional development are core business priorities, or whether those things are treated as optional extras handled by whoever has bandwidth. When a CEO personally invests time in something like preparing for a keynote about their own organization’s culture, they are signaling that the health of their people is not a delegated task. It is central to how they think about running the business.

Presence Is a Form of Permission

What makes CEO presence so powerful is what it grants everyone else permission to do. Culture moves at the speed of leadership behavior, not leadership language. Employees do not calibrate their effort or their honesty based on what a mission statement says. They calibrate based on what they watch leadership actually do, day after day, especially in moments when nobody is forcing them to pay attention.

When a CEO shows up personally to engage in something as seemingly small as preparing a room for a conversation about their own culture, it sends a signal down through every layer of the organization: this matters enough for the person at the top to spend their time on it. That kind of presence gives permission for teamwork to flourish, because people take their cues about what is genuinely valued from where leadership chooses to spend attention, not from where leadership chooses to spend budget. It does not need to be loud or inspirational and motivational in the traditional sense. It just needs to be consistent enough that people can trust it is real.

I have seen the opposite play out just as clearly. When leadership delegates everything related to culture and teamwork to HR, to a committee, to anyone but themselves, employees notice the absence even when nobody says anything out loud. The message received is rarely the message intended, but it is received all the same: this is not actually a priority. And once that belief settles into an organization, no amount of trust-building exercises or team offsites can undo it, because people do not believe in what leadership merely says. They believe in what leadership visibly chooses to do with its own time.

The Pattern Underneath All Three Signals

The more I think about these three signals together, access, speed, and presence, the more I see them as three expressions of the same underlying quality: trust distributed throughout a system. Access reflects whether leadership trusts its people enough to let them speak freely. Decision-making speed reflects whether leadership trusts its people enough to let them act without excessive oversight. CEO involvement reflects whether leadership trusts the work enough to personally invest in it rather than delegate it away.

None of these signals are really about teamwork in isolation. They are about the conditions that make real collaboration possible in the first place. You cannot build a strong team culture on top of restricted access, slow decisions, and absent leadership, no matter how good your team-building exercises are. Teamwork is not a program you run. It is an outcome that emerges naturally once trust has been distributed correctly through an organization’s structure, and it disappears just as naturally when that trust is withheld.

This is the part of Meridith’s framework I find most valuable, and honestly, the part that quietly reframes how I think about assessing any organization I work with. She is not assessing team health by asking people whether they feel like a team. She is evaluating it by looking at the structural evidence: who gets heard, how fast things move, and where leadership spends its attention. Those three data points will tell you the truth about teamwork, and predict long-term success, far more reliably than any survey ever could, because surveys measure what people say, while these signals measure what an organization actually does.

Building Teamwork That Survives Pressure

This reminded me of something I have seen repeatedly across very different industries. The organizations that hold together under real pressure, a market downturn, a leadership transition, a sudden shift in customer demand, are rarely the ones with the most polished culture decks. They are the ones already operating like elite performance teams long before the pressure ever arrived, because trust had already been distributed through the system. Teamwork that is only performed during calm periods tends to dissolve the moment things get difficult, because it was never structurally embedded to begin with. Teamwork that is built into how decisions get made, how information flows, and how leadership shows up tends to hold, because it does not depend on anyone remembering to be a good teammate. It is simply how the system already operates.

If you are a leader trying to strengthen teamwork inside your own organization, Meridith’s three signals offer a surprisingly actionable starting point. Ask yourself honestly whether frontline employees have real access to leadership, or whether that access is filtered through layers designed to protect a narrative. Ask how long it genuinely takes for a reasonable idea to become an approved action, and whether that timeline reflects thoughtful diligence or unspoken distrust. And ask where you, personally, as a leader, are spending your own time and attention, because your team is watching that far more closely than they are listening to what you say about teamwork in a meeting.

None of these fixes require a large budget or an outside consultant, although working with someone who has spent a career studying these patterns, the way Meridith has, can accelerate the process considerably. What they require is a willingness to look honestly at your own structures and admit where trust has quietly narrowed over time. Teamwork does not break all at once. It erodes gradually, one restricted conversation, one delayed decision, one absent leader at a time, until an organization wakes up one day surprised that the team it thought it had is not the team that actually shows up when it matters.Here is what struck me most about how Meridith approaches a new client relationship. She is not waiting for the keynote to figure out whether an organization’s teamwork is genuine. She is diagnosing it in the lead-up, in the emails, in the access she is given, in the pace of the approvals, in who shows up to the planning calls. Long before she says a word from a stage, she already has a working theory about whether the people in that building trust each other enough to function as a real unit when things get hard.

This is a useful reframe for anyone who leads people. We tend to think of teamwork as something that gets built in a retreat or a workshop, an event you schedule and then check off. Meridith’s approach suggests something less comfortable and more accurate: teamwork is not an initiative, it is a byproduct. It shows up as the residue of how an organization already treats access, speed, and leadership presence, long before anyone tries to engineer it on purpose. If you want to know whether a company has a strong team culture, you do not need to attend the offsite. You need to watch how it operates on a normal week.

The First Signal: Who Gets to Talk to You

The first thing Meridith looks for is access. Specifically, whether a company is willing to let her speak directly with frontline personnel before she ever steps into the room to work with them. As she put it during our conversation, she pays close attention to whether they will let her talk to other people in the organization, and whether they are willing to open the door to the people actually doing the work.

On the surface, this sounds like a scheduling detail. It is not. Access is a decision, and decisions reveal priorities. When a company restricts outside contact to a narrow band of executives, when the only people Meridith is allowed to speak with are the ones curating the message, that restriction is itself the message. It tells you that leadership is more concerned with controlling the narrative than understanding the reality. And an organization that manages its own narrative internally, shielding outsiders and insiders alike from the unfiltered truth, is rarely an organization with strong teamwork underneath the surface.

Contrast that with a company that opens the floor freely. When frontline employees are given direct, uncensored access to someone assessing the health of the organization, it signals something structurally important: that leadership is not afraid of what those employees might say. That kind of openness does not happen by accident. It is downstream of a culture where teamwork already exists between layers of the org chart, where the people closest to the customer are trusted enough to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for.

Access Is a Referendum on Trust

I keep coming back to this idea because I think it applies far beyond the context of hiring a keynote speaker. Access is one of the most honest measurements of trust inside any organization, and trust is the raw material that teamwork is built from. You cannot have meaningful collaboration in an environment where information only flows one direction, where the people at the bottom of an org chart are treated as a liability to be managed rather than a resource to be heard.

What makes this especially interesting is how quietly this signal operates. Nobody announces that they are restricting access as a form of control. It simply happens, layer by layer, gatekeeper by gatekeeper, until the distance between leadership and the frontline becomes so wide that neither side can accurately describe what the other is experiencing. That distance is often mistaken for professionalism or hierarchy. In reality, it is usually a symptom of teamwork that has quietly broken down, replaced by a system of message control dressed up as structure.

This is why the strongest leaders I have encountered treat transparency as a discipline rather than a virtue signal. They build habits, not slogans, around openness: regular access between leadership and frontline staff, unfiltered feedback loops, and a willingness to let outsiders see the organization as it actually functions rather than the version prepared for a boardroom. Teamwork of that caliber cannot be faked in a single meeting. It has to be practiced continuously, because the moment access closes, trust begins eroding, and everything built on top of it erodes right along with it.

The Second Signal: How Long It Takes to Decide

The second clue Meridith watches for is decision-making speed. She described paying close attention to how much time it takes a company to make a decision, and whether there are heavy layers of bureaucracy sitting between an idea and an action. If those layers exist, her read is direct: the company is moving too slowly for the market it is competing in.

I have seen this pattern play out again and again with organizations I have worked alongside. Slow decision-making rarely comes from a lack of good ideas. It comes from a lack of trust distributed through the system. Every additional layer of approval exists because someone, somewhere, decided that people closer to the decision could not be trusted to make it well. That might sound harsh, but structurally, it is exactly what bureaucracy communicates. Each sign-off is a small vote of no confidence, and when you stack enough of them together, you get an organization that cannot move even when everyone privately agrees on what needs to happen.

Teamwork, in its healthiest form, compresses decision-making. When people trust each other’s judgment, when responsibility has actually been distributed rather than just delegated on paper, decisions get made closer to where the information lives. That is not recklessness. It is efficient teamwork functioning exactly as it should, allowing the people with the most relevant context to act without waiting for permission from someone three levels removed from the situation.

Bureaucracy Is Slow Motion Failure

The deeper implication here is one that many leaders resist hearing: bureaucracy is not neutral. It is not simply the cost of doing things carefully. It is often a visible symptom of teamwork that has broken down at a structural level, replaced by a system built to protect individuals rather than empower teams. When people are afraid of being blamed for a bad outcome, they build approval chains to diffuse responsibility. The chain grows longer with every reorganization, every leadership change, every past mistake nobody wants to repeat.

The problem is that markets do not wait for approval chains. Competitors move. Customer expectations shift. A slow decision in a fast environment is not a cautious decision, it is a costly one, and the cost usually shows up as lost opportunity long before it shows up on a balance sheet.

Meridith’s insight about bureaucracy is really an insight about teamwork disguised as a comment on process. An organization with strong teamwork does not need six approvals to greenlight a reasonable idea, because trust has already been distributed through the system in advance. Teams that function this way are not moving fast because they are careless. They are moving fast because the trust underneath them has already done the work of alignment before the decision point ever arrives.

This is also why so many transformation efforts fail even when the strategy is sound. Leaders will invest heavily in strategy without noticing that their decision-making structure is quietly working against them. If you want to diagnose whether teamwork is real inside your organization, look at how long it takes between someone raising a good idea and that idea becoming action. The gap tells you almost everything you need to know.

The Third Signal: Whether the CEO Shows Up

The third signal Meridith watches for is the most human of the three: whether the CEO is personally engaged in the process. Not delegated. Not represented by a proxy. Actually present, actually paying attention, actually invested in getting it right. She has learned that when leadership shows up like this, it is a mark of an organization that takes its people seriously.

It would be easy to read this as a comment about vanity, about executives wanting visibility. I do not think that is what is happening here, and I do not think that is what Meridith means either. CEO involvement is a proxy for something much bigger: whether leadership actually believes that culture, teamwork, and people development are core business priorities, or whether those things are treated as optional extras handled by whoever has bandwidth. When a CEO personally invests time in something like preparing for a keynote about their own organization’s culture, they are signaling that the health of their people is not a delegated task. It is central to how they think about running the business.

Presence Is a Form of Permission

What makes CEO presence so powerful is what it grants everyone else permission to do. Culture moves at the speed of leadership behavior, not leadership language. Employees do not calibrate their effort or their honesty based on what a mission statement says. They calibrate based on what they watch leadership actually do, day after day, especially in moments when nobody is forcing them to pay attention.

When a CEO shows up personally to engage in something as seemingly small as preparing a room for a conversation about their own culture, it sends a signal down through every layer of the organization: this matters enough for the person at the top to spend their time on it. That kind of presence gives permission for teamwork to flourish, because people take their cues about what is genuinely valued from where leadership chooses to spend attention, not from where leadership chooses to spend budget.

I have seen the opposite play out just as clearly. When leadership delegates everything related to culture and teamwork to HR, to a committee, to anyone but themselves, employees notice the absence even when nobody says anything out loud. The message received is rarely the message intended, but it is received all the same: this is not actually a priority. And once that belief settles into an organization, no amount of trust-building exercises or team offsites can undo it, because people do not believe in what leadership merely says. They believe in what leadership visibly chooses to do with its own time.

The Pattern Underneath All Three Signals

The more I think about these three signals together, access, speed, and presence, the more I see them as three expressions of the same underlying quality: trust distributed throughout a system. Access reflects whether leadership trusts its people enough to let them speak freely. Decision-making speed reflects whether leadership trusts its people enough to let them act without excessive oversight. CEO involvement reflects whether leadership trusts the work enough to personally invest in it rather than delegate it away.

None of these signals are really about teamwork in isolation. They are about the conditions that make real collaboration possible in the first place. You cannot build a strong team culture on top of restricted access, slow decisions, and absent leadership, no matter how good your team-building exercises are. Teamwork is not a program you run. It is an outcome that emerges naturally once trust has been distributed correctly through an organization’s structure, and it disappears just as naturally when that trust is withheld.

This is the part of Meridith’s framework I find most valuable, and honestly, the part that quietly reframes how I think about assessing any organization I work with. She is not assessing team health by asking people whether they feel like a team. She is evaluating it by looking at the structural evidence: who gets heard, how fast things move, and where leadership spends its attention. Those three data points will tell you the truth about teamwork faster than any survey ever could, because surveys measure what people say, while these signals measure what an organization actually does.

Building Teamwork That Survives Pressure

This reminded me of something I have seen repeatedly across very different industries. The organizations that hold together under real pressure, a market downturn, a leadership transition, a sudden shift in customer demand, are rarely the ones with the most polished culture decks. They are the ones where trust had already been distributed long before the pressure arrived.

Teamwork that is only performed during calm periods tends to dissolve the moment things get difficult, because it was never structurally embedded to begin with. Teamwork that is built into how decisions get made, how information flows, and how leadership shows up tends to hold, because it does not depend on anyone remembering to be a good teammate. It is simply how the system already operates.

If you are a leader trying to strengthen teamwork inside your own organization, Meridith’s three signals offer a surprisingly actionable starting point. Ask yourself honestly whether frontline employees have real access to leadership, or whether that access is filtered through layers designed to protect a narrative. Ask how long it genuinely takes for a reasonable idea to become an approved action, and whether that timeline reflects thoughtful diligence or unspoken distrust. And ask where you, personally, as a leader, are spending your own time and attention, because your team is watching that far more closely than they are listening to what you say about teamwork in a meeting.

None of these fixes require a large budget or an outside consultant, although working with someone who has spent a career studying these patterns, the way Meridith has, can accelerate the process considerably. What they require is a willingness to look honestly at your own structures and admit where trust has quietly narrowed over time. Teamwork does not break all at once. It erodes gradually, one restricted conversation, one delayed decision, one absent leader at a time, until an organization wakes up one day surprised that the team it thought it had is not the team that actually shows up when it matters.

Reading the Room Before the Room Reads You

The lesson that has stayed with me from this conversation is a simple one, even if it is not an easy one to act on. Teamwork is not a feeling you cultivate. It is a structure you build, revealed in the smallest operational choices an organization makes every single day. Access, speed, and presence are not soft signals. They are hard evidence of whether trust has actually been distributed through a system, and trust is the only foundation strong teamwork can be built on.

What I appreciate most about Meridith’s approach is that it removes the guesswork. You do not need a culture survey to know whether your organization has real teamwork. You need to look at who gets to speak, how quickly good ideas become action, and where your leaders choose to spend their time. Those three answers will tell you the truth, whether or not you are ready to hear it. And if you are serious about building teamwork that can actually withstand pressure rather than just look good in a mission statement, that honest look is exactly where the work has to begin.

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