Epicenter Built to Scale Campfire - High-Performing Teams Are Built, Not Hired: A blueprint for growth that no recruitment can buy.
You can’t hire your way to a high-performing team. Even with strong CVs, clear roles, and proven experience, many teams struggle with friction, exclusivity, slow execution, biased decision-making, and underwhelming results. The reason is rarely talent. It is the absence of shared understanding and, more importantly, a clear strategy and mechanism to build teams that continuously evolve and enable scaling. This second session of the Built to Scale series moves from how individuals think differently to how high performance is actually created at the team level. Exceptional teams are built on a foundation where people know how to collaborate, challenge each other productively, keep biases in check, and deliver results beyond expectations, even under pressure. This Campfire reveals the often invisible mechanics that separate average teams from those that scale companies to the next level.
While recruitment frameworks like competency models, role fit, or SMART goals help bring people in, they do not create alignment, trust, or effective collaboration once the team is formed. Through practical examples, interactive discussion, and real-world cases, this Campfire makes clear what must be built before and after hiring, and how leaders can deliberately shape teams that perform, adapt, and grow together.
Why do these matter?
“High-performing teams” is often a label: In practice, the term is frequently used to describe teams with senior or impressive hires. But hiring strong individuals does not define high performance. Without a clear definition, organizations cannot set meaningful objectives or build a strategy regarding team performance.
Diversity is a requirement, not a slogan: What matters most is not who people are on paper, but how they perceive problems, process and communicate information, and approach projects, their thinking patterns.
The double edge: Thinking diversity is neither inherently good nor bad. It can raise good conflict, which can improve outcome quality, but if unmanaged, it can easily slip into destructive conflict. Leaders who make thinking differences usable can prevent groupthink and turn diversity into stronger collaboration, creativity, and decision-making.
The missing link: Most organizations rely on CVs and individual assessment systems, or on surface-level diversity like demographics and skillset, which fail to capture actual potential and often work against productivity systemically. Without a clear way to recognize and discuss these differences, teams cannot remain high-performing.
High-performance is to last: True high-performing teams sustain results over time, adapt under pressure, and evolve as the organization grows. Teams built primarily through hiring often degrade or lose performance when conditions change, without deliberate mechanisms in place.
What you’ll learn
What a high-performing team really is and how to measure it.
How to identify and include the diversity that truly matters for team performance.
How to facilitate the building of teams, culture, and ways of working that produce high performance, even under pressure.
How to build a scalable foundation and lead highly diverse teams successfully, even in remote teams.
This session is held at our Revelation Space on the 2nd floor.
Our campfire membership is for those who want to explore meaningful questions alongside other leaders. These monthly gatherings offer a space to connect, share insights, and discover new ways of working together. You'll also have access to a variety of knowledge-focused events to deepen your learning and conversations.
