Cohesion Isn't a Waiting Game. It's a Contract.
LET'S GROW · ISSUE 04 · BY OMAR L. HARRIS
In 2019 I bet that the stages of team formation could be hacked. Seven years — and a system taken from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia — later, I'm more convinced than ever. Now I'm looking for ten leaders to build with.
§ 01 · The bet I made in 2019
If you've been following my journey, you know I'm fairly obsessed with high-performance teaming.
That obsession has a starting point. In 2019 I wrote Leader Board: The DNA of High Performance Teams around a single hypothesis: the stages of group formation — forming, storming, norming, performing — don't have to be endured. They can be hacked.
Most leaders treat those stages like weather. Something that happens to the team. Something you wait out.
I didn't believe that then. I believe it even less now.
The bet was simple. If you could name what each stage actually requires — and install it on purpose — you could compress the timeline. Reach cohesion sooner. And, more importantly, hold high performance once you got there.
Faster. Sustainable.
§ 02 · Why most teams wait
Here's what happens by default.
A team forms. Everyone is polite. Expectations stay unspoken, so everyone assumes theirs are shared.
Then the work gets real. The unspoken expectations collide. Storming begins — and because nobody agreed on how disagreement would be handled, it lasts far longer than it needs to.
Eventually, norms emerge. Not chosen. Inherited. Accumulated from whoever talked loudest, whoever stayed latest, whatever the last leader tolerated.
Months of friction. Energy spent navigating each other. Performance that arrives late — if it arrives at all.
Is that a people problem? Rarely.
It's a design problem. The team was never given the agreements that would have let it move faster.
§ 03 · What Foundational Teaming installs
Foundational Teaming™ is the system I built to take the 2019 hypothesis into the field. At its core, it helps a team intentionally establish four contracts — the agreements most teams leave to chance.
The Trust Contract. What we will do to earn and protect trust with each other — made explicit, so trust stops being a feeling we hope for and becomes a set of behaviors we can see.
The Communication Contract. How information moves, where it lives, how quickly we respond, and how we disagree without damage.
The Collaboration Contract. Who owns what, where the handoffs happen, and how we combine our strengths instead of duplicating them.
The Chemistry Contract. The rituals, shared language and small moments of connection that turn a group of capable individuals into a team people want to belong to.
The structure is fixed. The words are the team's own. That's the point. A team that writes its agreements owns them — and a team that owns its agreements doesn't have to rediscover them in every hard meeting.
Teams don't need more time to become great. They need the agreements that make time work for them.
With those four contracts in place, something shifts. The work itself becomes far more straightforward. Not easier — straightforward. The energy that used to go into working around each other goes into the work.
§ 04 · From San Francisco to Saudi Arabia
I've now taken this system around the world — from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia.
Different industries. Different cultures. Different languages in the room. Different ideas about hierarchy, about conflict, about what respect looks like.
The contracts read differently in every room. The need for them never changes.
Everywhere I've taken it, I've met the same thing: capable people carrying agreements they never actually made — and a team ready for more than its defaults allowed.
So the conclusion I've reached isn't tentative anymore. Every organizational leader needs this system. Not as an offsite. As the foundation the rest of the work stands on.
§ 05 · Ten leaders. Ninety days.
Which brings me to the invitation.
I'm looking for ten leaders who want to transform their teaming outcomes over the next three months.
Why ten? Because I want to be close to the work. Close enough to watch your team's contracts take shape — and close enough to see what changes when they do.
If your strategy is clear but execution feels heavier than it should.
If your people are strong but the whole isn't yet adding up to more than its parts.
If you've inherited, built or merged a team — and you'd rather design its culture than wait for one to happen.
This is for you.
Send me a DM. And read more about the system at foundationalteaming.com.
Your team is already capable of more than the version of itself it's running today. Let's build the version that's next.
Let's grow.
— Omar
Omar L. Harris is the founder of Intent Consulting, the creator of Foundational Teaming™, and the author of Leader Board: The DNA of High Performance Teams. He spent more than two decades as a pharmaceutical executive across four continents before building the diagnostic and design instruments he wished he'd had. Explore the system at foundationalteaming.com, or take the free Character Signature™ Assessment at growwithwhom.com.
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