Is Your Team Composition Right? Balancing the 5 Dimensions for Success

The Structural Failure of the "All-Star" Team

Leaders often believe that assembling a team of high-performing individuals guarantees success. Yet, many "all-star" teams fail spectacularly, suffering from internal friction, bottlenecks, and chronic project delays. This is not a failure of individual talent, but a failure of Strategic Design—specifically, an imbalance in Enabling Structure and Real Team composition.

If your team is experiencing friction, and everyone seems to be stepping on each other's toes or, conversely, leaving critical gaps unfilled, your diagnostic score for "Composition" is likely low. The truth is, a high-performing team isn't about assembling the best people; it’s about assembling the right roles to match the complexity of the work.

Mapping Work Complexity to Behavioral Styles

The Kaltcha Five Dimensional Teams (5DT) framework helps leaders move beyond personality to understand the five essential behavioral styles that must be present, or intentionally outsourced, for a team to succeed. These styles describe how individuals naturally contribute to the work, and when a structure is flawed, the pain is felt within these roles.

Imagine a new product launch:

• Dreamer: Is crucial for defining the 'what if' and the possibility space.
• Designer: Must translate that possibility into an intuitive, elegant user experience.
• Developer: Builds the robust, scalable systems that power the solution.
• Doer: Executes the launch plan and brings the solution to market efficiently.
• Driver: Provides the overarching guidance and goal-orientation to keep the entire process aligned with the outcome.

When you have three Dreamers and zero Developers, you have a beautiful vision that cannot be built. When you have two Drivers and one Doer, you have relentless urgency without adequate execution capacity. The team composition is fundamentally mismatched to the task.

The Problem of Role Redundancy

A low "Composition" score often reveals redundancy, which creates more friction than gaps. For instance:

• Too many Dreamers: Leads to "analysis paralysis," where the team constantly explores new ideas instead of committing to one. This paralyzes the Doers who crave execution clarity.
• Too many Drivers: Leads to turf wars and conflict over whose goal-setting methodology will prevail. This can create anxiety for Designers who need space and autonomy to craft quality solutions.

The friction you see is merely the symptom of the system pushing against itself. To fix it, you need to deliberately map your project requirements (the ends) against the 5DT roles (the means) to identify the critical gaps or overlaps.

Fixing Your Team Composition: The Strategic Audit

Addressing a low "Composition" score is a structural audit, not a hiring spree. The steps are:

1. Define the Task Complexity: Clearly outline the key stages of your current project. Does it require more innovation (Dreamer/Designer input) or more execution and analysis (Doer/Developer input)?
2. Map the Current Reality: Use the 5DT framework to objectively identify the primary behavioral style of each current team member. Be ruthless about roles: a person might want to be a Designer but is currently functioning as a Doer.
3. Identify Gaps and Overlaps: Look for essential styles that are missing or styles that are duplicated. Crucially, address overlaps first. You may need to formally delegate the secondary styles to individuals (e.g., asking a primary Driver to consciously adopt a Developer's mindset for a specific system audit).

The goal is not to change people, but to change the Enabling Structure that allows them to use their natural contributions without conflict.

Stop Guessing Who Needs to Step Up

If your team is suffering from role confusion, bottlenecks, or overlapping mandates, the only way to fix it is through a systematic diagnosis. You must stop guessing who needs to change their behavior.

The solution begins with data.

Take the free, 5-minute Team Diagnostics Check today.

The Check not only measures your overall Composition score but also breaks down your team's current mix across the five dimensions. This gives you the verified data to identify structural gaps immediately and begin the process of redesigning your team for success.