Tools, duels, and rules: 3 steps for driving a higher-performing team

Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation, and almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. To understand what actually makes those teams work, BTS analyzed 6,702 leader coaching goals and 3,211 leadership team survey responses using our High-Performing Team Assessment model, comparing what leaders say they are working on with what teams say is getting in their way.

Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy? At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to. Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:

• Do teams meet regularly?
• Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?

Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?

What the data revealed

Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior. The results were striking:

• Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
• But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
• And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)

Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.

Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.

A simple shift that pays dividends

The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:

• Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
• Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
• Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.

When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective. In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.

Co-authored by Cilsy Harris, Senior Vice President, CIO Insurance & Service Applications, The Hanover Insurance Group

At one time, most of us probably thought that a year into the pandemic we’d be back in the office and the virtual solution we employed as an emergency measure would be a thing of the past. However, it’s become very clear that virtual is here to stay – either as companies adopt fully-remote business models, or as is likely to be the case more often, they move to hybrid models that blend the best of remote and in-person work. Regardless of which model they choose we think smart companies will preserve the best aspects of the virtual experience to continue to create equality in communication and facilitate greater sharing of ideas.

This virtual environment has been a great equalizer. In many ways, our ability to meet and work virtually has helped us eliminate pretenses and share our authenticity to create more human connection. We’ve become less self-conscious and more down to earth in our business interactions. We’ve learned more about our colleagues’ personal lives, enabling us to recognize and truly treat each other as humans, not simply as the means by which work gets accomplished.

Creating big wins for important business goals

This new environment has created six big wins for achieving important business goals:

1.  Driving engagement/connection:

Authentic connection is the secret sauce for senior executives. It’s what drives trust, engagement, and execution. Our research shows authentic leaders build trust and put others at ease by sharing their own emotions and experiences, and by revealing stories and life lessons that resonate with others’ own situations.

A byproduct of the virtual world is that some of the barriers to sharing have been removed. The close-up camera creates eye-to-eye contact and a more personal interaction. Our insight into each other’s daily lives outside the office through the view of the camera has changed the tone and ease of our connection.

Virtual meetings also foster authentic connections across geographically dispersed teams in the organization in more efficient and meaningful ways. Regularly scheduled meetings with teams in Europe, Middle East and Asia/Pacific in the morning and those in the Americas in the afternoon, create cross-pollination of ideas and connections that previously would have required weeks of travel.

2.   Enabling collaboration among large groups, across geographies:

Dick Lavey, executive vice president of Agency Markets at The Hanover, relays how forums are being reinvented. “Picture a traditional sales planning meeting, held in a large, cavernous hotel room with 40+ people spread out in a big square, using microphones,” he says.

“It was intimidating for the presenter and difficult for the audience to track the dialogue. Now, this same meeting is transformed into an intimate and engaging experience for both the presenters and the meeting participants.”

Well-facilitated meetings create forums for dialogue that lead to better outcomes. The outcome of this shift is understanding that for certain events and forums, choosing a virtual model can create greater intimacy and engagement. Choosing the right forum for the purpose is our call to action.

The virtual world has delivered the impetus to rethink and reimagine how we design forums to optimize attendance and participation, and to offset some of the challenges presented by geographic location. “Events that once were considered feasible only when they were held in person, like our annual Innovation Expo, saw big gains in attendance across all geographies,” according to Will Lee, EVP and Chief Information and Innovation Officer at The Hanover.

“It also has enabled all attending Hanover employees to experience the event in the same manner, regardless of location. One of the most significant outcomes of this new approach was creating a live example of how we can design environments to make space for innovative thinking that cut across the entire organization and include all roles and levels.”

We are also able to meet with more people, more quickly. At the Hanover, our agent road shows, no longer limited by time and space, can be held on back-to-back days–in Georgia one day, Upstate NY the next, and Washington State the very next day. This meeting line-up would have been impossible in person. “We ‘cover more ground’ by not covering any ground,” says Lavey.

At BTS, we’re hosting highly collaborative senior executive team meetings and leadership development programs that enable leaders to create greater impact. After only a few half days, global executive teams decide strategic direction, tackle sticky issues, form agreement on how to better work together, make important decisions, and create strategic action plans–launching the organization on a new trajectory.

3.   Attracting talent:

For Lee, finding great talent has gotten a real boost with hybrid operating models, and at The Hanover, we are seeing this have a meaningful impact. As we’ve eliminated geography as a defining factor for those hard-to-find roles in security, innovation, and even executive leadership, we’ve become an attractive employer to a much larger pool of talented candidates. Candidates are now able to choose roles based on company culture and specific opportunities, without being restricted by the proximity of the job to their homes.

4.   Retaining top talent:

A client recently told me that he lost a great employee because this person was assured a role with another company in a work-from-home arrangement. Top employees have demonstrated great commitment to their work, high productivity and skillful leadership while enjoying the greater work/life balance that work-from-home enables. This has become quite important to many people of all ages, especially working parents, employees who care for elderly parents, and those helping family members with physical and mental health issues. Remote work is an increasingly valuable way to attract and retain great talent.

5.   Creating efficiencies:

Even reimagining how products are launched has delivered more tangible benefits than we previously thought possible. At The Hanover, our virtual launch events have attracted much higher attendance and generated strong satisfaction ratings. At BTS, we’re able to help more clients in a single day and our clients appreciate spending less time traveling.

6.   Improving interactions:

Lastly, the equalizing effect has improved many daily interactions as well.

• We’re all the same on video, take up the same space, and our stature at the table is the same. No one is at the head and no one has a second-row seat.
• Rather than having some in the room and some on video, we’re all in the same room, and we’re able to meet with our global teams, on equal footing, at any time.
• Those with differing communication and work styles, such as introverts and extroverts, find the capabilities of collaboration technology suit their ability to participate either by chat, raising their hand, or amplifying the comments of another person. Everyone can contribute and be heard.

As many companies transition to their future work models—whether they are fully-remote or hybrid—the virtual experience and confidence we have gained over the course of the pandemic will help us be even more efficient and effective.Many employees are anxious to get back to the workplaces that are the backbones of our society. We look forward to seeing faces and having meaningful in-person interactions. And, we have the opportunity to make this transition in a thoughtful way, to leverage all we’ve learned about authenticity, efficiencies, and connection through technology.

Tips for maintaining the equalizing benefits of virtual work

Here are a few tips to pull through some of the equalizing benefits as we make our way back to the office:

1.   Be mindful and intentional about continuing to connect with people on a personal level.

Schedule time regularly in your calendar to get together with a small group for lunch, organize a skip-level group for coffee, or host an informal, or one-on-one conversation. Set no real agenda other than to see how people are doing, get their feedback, listen to what they are working on. Be sure to share personal stories and experiences as part of this two-way interaction.

2.   Commit to creating an environment in your meetings where everyone can contribute and be heard.

Assign an individual in your team meetings, on a rotating basis, to play the role of monitor, to encourage the quiet or remote individuals to participate more, and to reign in the overly strong voices. Make a point of sitting in a different place each time to shake up the room. Set up a team chat channel for each of your regular meetings and encourage follow up comments and conversation in between meetings, for those less comfortable sharing in the room. Participate regularly yourself to model the behavior.

3.   Don’t be afraid to keep the new virtual paradigm where it makes sense.

The lessons about productivity and efficiency, whether you are hosting a virtually based product launch, sales meeting, or training program, should inform how to choose the format. And fewer, shorter, more effective meetings will energize people and afford them more time to get more done.Now is the time to preserve the good that has come out of our virtual working environments, even as we migrate back to the traditional office. We will all be more engaged and connected as a result.

If you want to understand where the pressure is building in your organization, look at your middle managers. They sit at the center of it all—and that center is under strain.

They’re expected to lead strategic change, drive culture, retain talent, and hit performance goals—all while translating executive vision into everyday action. But they’re often doing it without clear direction, real-time feedback, or consistent development support.

And now the data confirms it: the squeeze is real—and getting tighter. In 2025, 45% of middle managers report burnout—higher than any other group. Only 21% say they’re thriving. (Future Forum, Gallup) That’s not just a warning sign. It’s a leadership risk.

The rising cost of holding the middle

Middle managers aren’t just task owners—they’re the force that connects vision to execution. And we’re asking them to do more than ever:

• Lead through ambiguity
• Coach and develop teams
• Champion DEI and hybrid culture
• Balance employee expectations and business constraints
• Prepare for next-level leadership roles

They’re expected to model the organization’s values while delivering results. But the systems designed to support them haven’t evolved at the same pace. They rely on outdated perspectives on learning and capability building, and are often informal at best.

The result? Too many managers are being asked to grow faster than the organization is growing its capacity to support them.

Burnout isn’t a side effect—it’s a signal

When middle managers burn out, business performance suffers.

• Middle managers are 3 times more likely to leave (Future Forum, 2025)
• Their teams underperform or disengage
• Innovation, development, and inclusion efforts lose momentum

Burnout isn’t just about wellbeing—it’s about organizational readiness.

It’s not just about removing pressure. It’s about reinforcing strength.

The most common response to manager burnout is to “lighten the load.” But that doesn’t address the structural issue. You can remove a few books from the shelf. But if the structure was never designed to hold the weight, it still bends under pressure.

Managers don’t just need less work. They need better support systems.

What effective support looks like in 2025

The most forward-looking organizations are shifting away from ad hoc fixes and leaning into investing in structured, measurable capability-building. It’s not about more content. It’s about developing real, sustained leadership capacity. The organizations who are embedding development into the flow of work are developing managers who don’t just cope, they grow.

What’s working:

• Co-created goals between managers and senior leaders
• Ongoing reflection and feedback loops that build self-awareness
• Development experiences that stretch leadership capability in real time
• Targeted support that improves coaching, communication, and decision-making

When support is consistent and measurable, managers build the adaptability, clarity, and presence needed to lead through complexity—not just react to it.

Coaching interventions

Managers who are truly effective aren’t just trained—they’re supported by coaching that strengthens behavior change over time, connects individual development to real business goals, and builds a sustainable leadership pipeline. It’s massive part of how organizations move from check-the-box training to actual transformation. For years most organizations have understood the value of coaching their senior executives. It’s those enterprises who have figured out the power that coaching unlocks at the manager level are ahead of the game now.

Building stronger foundations, not just lighter loads

The middle manager squeeze isn’t going away, but it can be addressed.

That shift starts when organizations move beyond burnout mitigation toward embedding strategic development systems that build real leadership capacity—and track progress along the way.

Because when you strengthen the center, you strengthen the whole organization.

Want to see how leading companies are building manager capability at scale?

Now part of BTS, Sounding Board brings a clearer, data-backed view of what’s working—and where high-performers need to grow next via:

1. Goal alignment – See progress tied to your strategy
2. Behavioral growth – Track real shifts in how leaders show up
3. Self-awareness – Build reflection through feedback and assessments
4. Cohort insights – Spot trends, surface gaps, and scale what works

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Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.

In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.

Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.

Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.

Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.

But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.

Why judgment matters more than ever

Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.

If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.

What organizations must do

To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:

• Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.

• Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.

• Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.

• Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.

What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.

P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.

Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.

BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.

“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”

“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.

Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.

The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.

BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.

For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com

Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

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