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.