What Is Your Team's Identity?

Hi Nik,

Every week I share one thing I have observed in the field of commercial leadership. This week it is about team identity as a performance lever.

In my experience, the teams that quietly pull ahead each quarter are rarely just the ones with the strongest individual performers. They tend to be the ones with a clear, shared sense of who they are as a team and what that team stands for. Most commercial leaders treat that as background noise rather than something worth their attention, and this week the research gave me a reason to say otherwise.

This week in the field

I have been struck this month by how openly England's players have talked about culture as something built on purpose, not something that happens by accident. Dean Henderson pointed to "the culture, the togetherness of the group" as what has changed most over his years with the squad. Anthony Gordon put it more simply, saying the group is "holding each other accountable," and Dan Burn described a squad built from the very first camp around "having this brotherhood and being together." None of that sounds like an away day exercise. It sounds like a group treating identity as something to build, deliberately, over time.

That is what shared identity looks like before anyone ever measures it. What I keep noticing is that team identity does not show up as a single dramatic moment: it shows up in the numbers over time.

Research from the Centre for Team Excellence and identity researchers at the University of Sussex found a 53% performance gap between teams with the strongest shared identity and those with the weakest.

That is the kind of gap that turns a good team into a great one, and can make or break a quarter.

What it means in practice

What seems to shift things is treating identity as something you build rather than something you happen to have. A 2023 controlled trial found that leaders trained to actively build shared identity saw stronger engagement and psychological safety than those who only worked on their personal style. What I tend to see is that once leaders accept it is buildable, they start giving it the same deliberate attention they already give forecast accuracy.

The question to sit with this week

If someone asked you right now what your team's identity actually is, what would your answer be, and when was the last time you gave it any real thought?

Curious where you'd score on this? Take the free CODE Leadership Scorecard, five minutes, free.