When leadership team performance stalls, most teams think they know why.

Execution feels slow. Decisions drift. Accountability feels unclear. The instinct is to push harder, add structure, or tighten controls. Yet McKinsey’s research into team effectiveness points to a different issue. Performance problems are rarely mysterious. They are behavioural and often misdiagnosed.

McKinsey identifies 17 observable team health drivers that explain up to 75 percent of the performance gap between low and high-performing teams. The challenge for leaders is not accepting that these drivers matter. It is knowing which ones require strengthening to unlock the next level of performance in their context, and how to act on them consistently.

Why Insight Alone Rarely Changes Performance

McKinsey groups the 17 health drivers into four areas:

  • Configuration: how the team is set up
  • Alignment: shared direction and priorities
  • Execution: decision-making and follow-through
  • Renewal: learning, energy, and adaptation

These categories are analytically sound, but they can feel distant from the reality of weekly leadership meetings and competing priorities. Teams often understand the theory, yet struggle to translate it into practical ways of working.

This is where performance improvement efforts tend to stall. Insight exists, but behaviour does not change.

The Hidden Risk of Being “Mostly Good”

One of McKinsey’s most revealing findings is that leadership teams are, on average, strong in only 11 of the 17 behaviours.

This is normal. But it creates a trap.

When teams are competent across most dimensions, they often assume remaining issues are minor or situational. In reality, a small number of weak drivers frequently constrain the entire system. Performance feels frustratingly close, but never quite clicks.

High-performing teams do not try to improve everything at once. They focus effort where it will unlock disproportionate impact.

When Assumptions Get in the Way

A common example is teams that believe they have an execution problem.

Meetings feel busy but inconclusive. Initiatives drag. The instinctive response is to push for faster delivery. Yet closer examination often reveals that execution is not the real constraint. Decisions are being made, but leaders are not fully aligned on goals, success measures, or priorities.

Energy is expended, but in different directions.

When alignment is restored, performance improves not because the team works harder, but because effort is finally applied to the right constraint.

Turning Health Drivers into Everyday Leadership Practice

What separates high-performing leadership teams from average ones is not awareness of best practice, but consistency of behaviour over time.

PerfX was designed as a practical operating system to help teams translate drivers into a repeatable leadership rhythm. Rather than adding new processes, it embeds the behaviours that matter into how teams already meet, decide, and review progress.

A diagnostic helps surface which health drivers are genuinely limiting performance, allowing teams to focus attention where it matters most, rather than relying on assumption or instinct.

Over time, abstract concepts become visible, measurable, and actionable.

From Myths to Metrics

The myth is that leadership performance problems are too complex, contextual, or intangible to diagnose clearly.

The evidence suggests otherwise. A relatively small set of observable behaviours explains most outcomes. The real challenge is not knowing that team health matters, but understanding which drivers are constraining performance right now, and embedding focus on those drivers into everyday leadership practice.

Research such as McKinsey’s helps clarify what healthy teams tend to do differently. PerfX addresses a different but related question: how leadership teams turn that understanding into a practical operating rhythm that holds under real-world pressure.

Rather than starting with theory, PerfX works from the inside out. It helps teams surface their actual constraints, challenge assumptions about where performance is leaking, and build consistent habits around priorities, alignment, execution, and renewal. Not by adding more frameworks, but by making behaviour visible and actionable.

For leadership teams serious about closing the gap between intent and impact, the question is no longer whether team health matters. It is whether you are working on the right drivers, in the right order, with a rhythm that sustains focus over time.

That is where myths give way to metrics, and where leadership choice becomes visible in results.