Chris Paul has been in the NBA for two decades and has had a storied individual career. But one stat sets him apart: Four times he has joined a new team, and each time that team has posted, within two years, its best record ever. No other player has had that kind of impact. It’s now known as the Chris Paul effect.

Paul might be unique in NBA history, but most of us have encountered people like him: teammates who make everyone around them better, combining each member’s unique strengths into a sort of cognitive superorganism that accomplishes what no one could do alone. Let’s call these people super-facilitators.

In recent years, a new wave of research has revolutionized our understanding of group success, and it showcases facilitators as much more than just talented team members. If the supercommunicators described by the best-selling author Charles Duhigg help people understand one another optimally, super-facilitators are architects of group performance who bring people together optimally. Super-facilitators integrate diverse expertise, promote equitable contributions, and cultivate trust. In doing so they generate collective intelligence, or a group’s ability to reason, innovate, and solve problems. They are often team leaders but can also be teammates—like Paul—who bring out the best in their peers.

In this article I’ll present key findings about super-facilitators, collective intelligence, and team performance, some of which my lab has generated. One of the most important of these findings is that super-facilitating is a skill, not just a trait. That’s good news, because it means not only that people who are already natural super-facilitators can be identified and empowered but also that anybody can be trained to become one.

The Team as Superorganism

Our culture tends to view innovation as a solo endeavor: a lonely climb up to an intellectual mountaintop. Great innovators toil in obscurity, misunderstood or ignored by others until they make a breakthrough—and then the world follows.

This stereotype, when applied to leaders, can result in toxic organizational practices. In a 2019 study, my colleague Carol Dweck and others analyzed the mission statements of 433 Fortune 500 companies and compared them to Glassdoor ratings. They found that when companies emphasized a “culture of genius,” spotlighting individual brilliance, they earned lower reviews. In follow-up work, the researchers found that those same companies also showed weaker collaboration, trust, and integrity. Also damaging is the leadership style in which a visionary CEO controls every level of a company. In 2024 Paul Graham, a cofounder of Y Combinator, coined the term “founder mode” to describe this style, which leans heavily into individualism and can be used to justify authoritarian, even abusive, behavior.

Genius, it turns out, is often a team sport. In 2010 the psychologist Anita Woolley and her colleagues developed an IQ test for groups. Like individual tests, this one examined the ability to excel at multiple types of problem-solving—for instance, making savvy economic choices, solving complex equations, and coming to consensus on ethical decisions. Groups that do well on some of these tests, Woolley found, tend to do better on others as well, suggesting that the teams possess collective intelligence.

You might assume that brilliant teams are made up of brilliant individuals. The data says otherwise. In Woolley’s research, supergroups did not consist of especially talented individuals but rather of those with a “meta-talent” for organizing themselves based on each person’s skills and trust in one another. Super-facilitators optimize these synthetic strengths.

This new insight differs from the “wisdom of crowds”—the idea that the average of people’s answers to a given question will tend to be correct. Collective intelligence doesn’t average people’s differences. It integrates them like the organs and limbs of a superorganism, each with its own specialty. Rather than duplicating effort, intelligent teams form transactive systems, in which each member holds on to the information they know best, pays attention to dimensions of a problem they understand deeply, and brainstorms solutions based on their own expertise. In transactive systems, people are assigned specialties, conduct deep work alone, and reconvene in bursts of interaction, during which members share information and converge on a plan. When teams use these strategies, members don’t duplicate efforts. They use their time and minds efficiently. Instead of vying for power, they combine diverse knowledge and expertise and learn from one another.

But here’s the key: To generate collective intelligence and harness its power, team members have to understand and believe in one another. In one classic set of studies, teams were asked to perform a series of tasks ranging from launching a mock product to assembling radios. The best performers were those who trusted their colleagues’ expertise instead of looking over one another’s shoulders.

A classic example of this process involves Pixar, the animation mega-studio. It’s described in detail in Collective Genius (2014), by the Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill and her coauthors, and in the September 2008 HBR article “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” by Ed Catmull, a former head of Pixar. The Pixar story is often used as an illustration of what great teams can achieve. But today, with the benefit of all sorts of new research on teams, we can see it in a new light: as a model of collective intelligence that reveals a set of best practices for super-facilitating.

Central to the story is the Brain Trust—a group of directors, writers, and creatives Pixar brings together to sound out each of the company’s projects. The Trust itself functions as a kind of super-facilitator: Today, whenever a new script is brought to the Trust, its members spend hours in a freewheeling back-and-forth about how to make it better. Are the characters fleshed out? The visuals evocative? Does the storyline cohere, surprise, and delight?

Several features of the Brain Trust encourage collective intelligence. First, it has no formal authority; its members can suggest but never demand. This flat structure frees Trust members to be both candid and kind, and it frees the people presenting their script to feel both challenged and supported. Second, the Trust relies on what Catmull has called “catalytic questions,” which serve as expressions of curiosity rather than criticism. Saying “That character doesn’t work” flattens a conversation, but if you ask, “What role is this character playing in the scene?” or “How does he grow during the film?” then the whole room can respond. The Trust’s focus on deep collaboration also scales up to Pixar as a whole: Each project brings together hundreds of people with highly specialized technical and creative skills—all part of an effort, as Catmull has put it, “to make something together that no one can make alone.”

A Super-Facilitator Playbook

Any organization can emulate the Brain Trust’s super-facilitating principles—of nonhierarchical conversation, catalytic questions, and collaboration first—to amplify the brilliance of their own teams. Here are three tactics that can help you get started.

Learn and play to each person’s strengths.

The first principle of super-facilitation is that difference is a strength, not a weakness. Teams thrive when individuals play unique roles each suited to their strengths. To make that happen, leaders must first understand those strengths. This can begin through a deeper approach to hiring and onboarding, in which managers learn not only what a person has done but how they think and the types of tasks and knowledge that come most naturally to them.

After building a team with complementary talents, engage in “role-crafting.” The idea is this: After you launch a project or initiative, don’t merely carve up the work and distribute it across your team. Build out each person’s tasks with an eye toward what drives them and where they function best. Ideally, bring the entire team into the process of role-crafting. When people have agency over their part of the job and knowledge of everyone else’s, they commit more deeply and are less likely to duplicate effort—allowing collective intelligence to bloom.

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Chris Paul is a star player in his own right, but he’s also a star-maker for his team. In his presence, others shine more often and more brightly. His super-facilitating skills might be preternatural, but we can all find, elevate, and celebrate super-facilitators in our midst. Even better: We can become them ourselves. With the right mindset and a few key practices, anyone can turn talent into trust, and groups into something greater than the sum of their parts.