Phil Jackson coached some of the most talented rosters ever assembled. Jordan and Pippen in Chicago. Shaq and Kobe in Los Angeles. Eleven championships between them.

And if you ask what made those teams work, the answer is almost never the talent.

The talent was obvious. Every opponent knew exactly what was coming. What was harder to see, and much harder to build, was that a group of enormous personalities had somehow been persuaded to believe in something bigger than their own numbers.

That is a coaching achievement, not a recruiting one. And there is now a decade of data explaining why it was the harder job.

What everybody assumes

Ask people whether more talent produces a better team and they will say yes, obviously, and they will describe a straight line. More stars, better results, and the line never turns downward.

Researchers actually tested that belief before testing reality, and that is exactly what people predicted.

Then they went and looked.

The researchers put it in one line I have never been able to improve on. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

Why it happens

The mechanism is status.

When you put a lot of people in a room who are each accustomed to being the best one there, a question forms that nobody says out loud. Where do I rank here?

And working that out takes attention. Attention that was supposed to be going into the pass, the rotation, the handoff. Players start competing for standing within the team instead of cooperating against the opponent, and the coordination that makes a team more than five individuals quietly degrades.

The researchers reached for an unexpected comparison, and it stuck with me. In agricultural studies, a coop of the highest-performing chickens, put together, produces fewer eggs and higher mortality than an ordinary group. They spend their energy establishing dominance over each other.

Assemble only alphas and you do not get the sum of the alphas. You get a pecking order.

The question is not how much talent

This is where it gets useful, because the finding is not that talent is bad. Baseball proves that.

The real question for any leader is: how interdependent is the work?

If your people genuinely operate alone, if success is a series of individual contests with a shared logo on the shirt, then stack talent as high as you can afford. That is a sales floor with individual quotas. That is a group of specialists with separate caseloads.

But if the work only functions when people hand off cleanly to each other, then talent past a certain point starts costing you more in coordination than it returns in ability. That is a nursing unit. That is a surgical team. That is a leadership team trying to agree on a strategy. That is most teams.

Most leaders never ask the question. They recruit as though every team were a baseball team, because more talent always sounds like the safe answer.

What the good coaches actually do

Which brings me back to Jackson, and to every coach who has managed to make a superteam function rather than combust.

They are not squeezing more ability out of anyone. Jordan did not need coaching on how to score. What they are doing is removing the status question from the room, so the attention that was going into rank goes back into the game.

That happens through role clarity, mostly. When everyone knows exactly what they are responsible for and how it is measured, there is much less to negotiate. Ambiguity is what invites the jostling.

It also happens through what gets celebrated. If the only thing publicly valued is individual output, you have guaranteed a status contest. If the assist counts, if the cover counts, if the person who made somebody else effective gets named, the calculation changes.

Talent without trust can still fall apart. Talented people who trust each other are the strongest thing in any organisation, and the gap between those two states is entirely a leadership problem.

The lesson from the roster

Every season a team assembles what looks on paper like the best group in the league, and every few seasons one of them underperforms badly enough that everyone spends the winter asking what went wrong.

Usually the answer is not effort and it is not ability. It is that a group of people who were each used to being the centre of it never worked out how to be a team, and nobody made them.

Meanwhile a less talented group somewhere else is beating them, because they know exactly who does what and they trust each other to do it.

Talent gets you into the game. What you do with it decides the season.