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Corporate teams hire for cognitive diversity, but are terrible at harnessing its power

August 20, 2026

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Shane Snow, author of Dream Teams,  loves data. He is founder of the management skills training business Snow Academy and a serial entrepreneur in the media space.  Based on results from his work with 1,225 corporate teams' self-assessments from 2019 to 2025, Snow has shared some striking findings in the just  published The Team Potential Gap in Corporate America.

Snow has had teams self-score 9 factors:  4 Complex Teamwork factors that he developed through his work on Dream Teams plus 5 long-established ones. 

Complex Teamwork factors

  • Productive Conflict: Willingness to engage, dissent, & debate without  getting personal
  • Intellectual Humility: Willingness to revise viewpoints in light of new information
  • Shared Purpose: Alignment on a superordinate goal & its “why”
  • Shared Consciousness: Transparent, un-siloed knowledge sharing about the team and its resources
     

Table stakes Teamwork factors

  • Trust and Commitment: Belief that others on the team are capable and will do what they say they will do
  • Accountability: Willingness to take responsibility for team results
  • Psychological Safety: Belief that others on the team will treat each other benevolently through conflict disagreement or risk-taking

Two of the report's detailed findings: 
Cognitive diversity “is not currently the biggest bottleneck for team outcomes; it’s the ability to make use of diversity…that constrains most teams’ success.”  

  • “Sharpest cut of this whole study. Among cognitively-diverse teams, those with High Shared Consciousness have 39% higher Team Potential overall than teams with Low Shared Consciousness. A team cannot add up to more than the sum of its parts if it doesn’t know what its parts are.

Teams that have high levels of Productive Conflict (tolerance for dissent, frequency of team debates, ability to speak up with differing views) also score 15X to 20X scores on a majority of factors. 

  • “What I think is interesting about the study we did is we actually asked the deeper questions that add up to psychological safety [than standard studies], which paints a more real picture of what's actually going on,” said Snow by email.  “Our results show that only 9-11% actually experience high psychological safety. About 66% score "moderate" and 25% score "low."

Read many more interesting findings in the full study here.  Check out Snow’s newsletter here. 
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