he Scoreboard Doesn't Measure Talent. It Measures What the Team Produces Together.
At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, the United States men's 4x100 relay team was disqualified.
Not because they lacked speed. They had four of the fastest humans on the planet. They were disqualified because they could not pass the baton cleanly. Individual brilliance, collective failure. The scoreboard does not measure talent. It measures what the team produces together.
I have thought about that image a lot over the years. Not because it is a neat metaphor, but because I have seen its equivalent play out in sales organisations more times than I can count. A team stacked with individual performers who cannot pass the baton — who hoard accounts, protect commissions, compete internally, and treat every shared opportunity as a threat to their personal number. The pipeline looks full. The culture is quietly rotting. And at the end of the quarter, the scoreboard reflects what the team actually produced together, which is less than it should have been.
The teams I am most proud of were not the most individually talented. They were the ones that learned to move together. And the difference was not chemistry or luck. It was a decision — made early, reinforced constantly, and eventually internalised until it no longer required enforcement.
Identity is built, not declared
Most sales leaders will tell you their team has values. Accountability. Customer focus. Excellence. These words appear on slides. They are mentioned at kickoffs. They do not, by themselves, produce anything.
What produces team identity is the chain that begins with shared experience. A team that communicates relentlessly — where the group chat is always churning, where someone who has a deal in trouble asks the team for help rather than hiding it — builds something through those interactions that cannot be engineered from the top. The experience of being covered when you need it, and covering someone else when they do, creates a belief. The belief that this team operates differently. That belief shapes behaviour. And the accumulation of those behaviours, repeated consistently over months and quarters, becomes identity. Culture is not what you announce. It is what your team does when no one is watching — and whether it matches what they do when you are.
I had a team early in my career that I still think about with something close to parental pride. They were wildly committed to being the best team in the country. Not the best individuals — the best team. The group chat never stopped. When someone's forecasted deal looked shaky, the question was immediate: does anyone have something they can pull forward to help cover? Forecast calls were sharp, focused, and built around collective accountability rather than individual report-outs. Everyone knew where everyone else stood because they chose to know.
At the end of that year, every single person on the team made President's Club. Not most of them. All of them. Club is designed to be exclusive — typically the top ten to fifteen percent of performers. When an entire team gets there together, it is not luck. Something structural was different about how they operated.
The beach celebration was one of the best professional experiences of my life. Standing there with that group, watching them celebrate together the way they had competed together — I felt like a proud parent. I also knew, clearly, that I had not produced that result. They had. I had only built the conditions for it.
The question that replaced a thousand arguments
For the last decade-plus of my leadership career, I used team before self as a formal pillar — a named, stated operating principle the team committed to explicitly, not a vague aspiration tucked into a values document.
The practical result still surprises me when I describe it to other leaders.
In that entire period, I did not deal with one conflict over a deal, a commission split, or a disputed account. Not one. In a function where territorial disputes are practically a management discipline — where arguments over who owns the lead, who gets the credit, and who takes the commission are practically a rite of passage — there was nothing. Silence.
What happened instead was this: the team resolved their own conflicts. They brought me results, not problems. Shared deals, already negotiated between the reps involved. Agreements made before anyone came to me. When they did bring me something, I had one question ready, and they knew it was coming: "With what you are proposing, explain to me how you have put team before self."
That question did something important. It did not accuse. It did not take sides. It assumed the person in front of me was capable of the answer, and it put the burden of reasoning on them. A team that knows that question is coming learns to ask it of themselves before they walk through the door. The principle became the decision-making framework. The culture became self-enforcing.
People voluntarily split commissions. They gave up money because the team mattered more than the individual transaction. In a commission-driven profession, that does not happen by accident. It happens when the identity is real — when team before self is not a slogan but a deeply held belief about how things work here.
The person the team was working around
I once inherited a seller who had just won the top salesperson award in the entire company. One large deal, exceptional timing, a number that made the board very happy. Four months later, I let that person go. They were shocked. I was not.
The path to HR had been well-worn. Teammates had complained, repeatedly and specifically, about how this person operated. Meetings became exercises in managing their reactions. Information was hoarded rather than shared. Decisions about accounts and opportunities were made unilaterally in ways that created problems for everyone around them. The team was not working with this person. They were working around them — absorbing the friction, covering the gaps, and spending energy on navigation that should have been spent on customers.
The number on the commission report looked excellent. The number on everything else did not.
Research from Harvard Business School, analysing nearly 60,000 workers across 11 companies, quantified what most experienced leaders already sense. Avoiding a toxic worker — or removing one — saves a company an estimated $12,489 in turnover costs alone. Hiring a top 1% superstar performer adds $5,303. The math runs almost two to one in favour of removing the person who is degrading the system over finding the person who excels within it. And that figure does not include the harder-to-count costs: the good people who leave quietly, the ideas that stop being shared, the trust that erodes. The same research found that good employees are 54% more likely to quit when a toxic colleague is present and the proportion grows by even one person on a team of twenty.
A high performer who poisons the team is not a high performer. They are a short-term asset generating long-term damage. The individual metric looks good. The team metric does not. And in every sales organisation I have ever run, the team metric is the one that determines whether the year was actually successful.
The decision to let that person go was one of the clearer ones I have made. What I did not expect was how the team responded. Not with relief exactly — with expansion. Like a room that had been slightly too small, and someone had quietly removed a wall.
What this requires of the leader
Building a team that operates this way does not happen because you want it to. It requires three things that are less comfortable than writing values on a wall.
The first is naming it explicitly and early. Team before self needs to be a stated operating principle, not a vague aspiration. The team needs to know it is not decorative. It is the standard against which decisions get made and behaviour gets evaluated.
The second is modelling it consistently. The leader who says team before self and then takes credit for the team's results, protects their own relationships over the team's interests, or looks the other way when the top performer is treating colleagues as obstacles — that leader is building a culture too. Just not the one they intended.
The third is having the conversation nobody wants to have. Most leaders know the toxic high performer is a problem six to twelve months before they act. In that window, the people most likely to carry the culture forward are the ones watching the leader do nothing. Every week you do not act is a message about what is actually valued here. The team hears it even when nothing is said.
McKinsey research on team effectiveness found that the dynamics of how team members interact are equally — and often more — important than individual performance. A team of superstars does not inherently produce great results. How those superstars choose to relate to each other determines whether their individual brilliance compounds or cancels out.
What team identity actually produces
The team that made President's Club together did not do it because they were told to care about each other. They did it because they had built, through hundreds of small interactions across a year, a shared belief about who they were and how they operated. That belief changed what they were willing to do. Split a commission without being asked. Cover a colleague's forecast when their deal fell apart. Show up to a team call with information rather than just status updates.
The experiences accumulated into beliefs. The beliefs shaped behaviour. The behaviours, repeated consistently, became identity. And the identity — the collective sense of being a team that operates a certain way — produced results no individual talent could have produced alone.
The scoreboard does not measure talent. It measures what the team produces together. Build something worth measuring.
Sources
1McKinsey & Company, Go Teams: When Teams Get Healthier, the Whole Organisation Benefits (2024) — team interaction dynamics are equally or more important than individual performance; US 4x100 relay disqualified at 2024 Olympics2Housman, M. & Minor, D., Toxic Workers, Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-057 (2015) — analysis of 60,000 workers across 11 companies; avoiding a toxic worker saves $12,489 vs. top 1% superstar adds $5,3033Cornerstone OnDemand, Toxic Employees in the Workplace (2015) — analysis of 63,000 employees; good employees are 54% more likely to quit when a toxic employee is present if the proportion grows by as little as one on a team of 204McKinsey & Company, Go Teams (2024) — team health drivers explain 69–76% of difference between low- and high-performing teams across efficiency, results, and innovation
Andrew Devlin is the founder of ScaleTech CRO Ltd. and a fractional VP of Sales working with B2B companies between $10M and $100M. He has led sales organisations at Cisco, Splunk, and Cloudflare, and holds a Certified Advisor and President's Circle designation with Sales Xceleration. He teaches B2B Sales at Okanagan College.