5 Essential Reads on Coordination, Managers, and Teams That Perform in the AI Era
Every month brings a flood of new research, talks, and reports on leadership and team building … and almost no time to actually read them. So each month we cut through the noise and gather a handful of the most useful, credible, and thought-provoking pieces for leaders at mid to large organizations.
This month: Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 on the coordination “tax” quietly draining the AI-era workplace, McKinsey on why simplifying the overloaded middle-manager role unlocks performance, Gallup’s three practical strategies for rebuilding engagement, MIT Sloan on why hybrid’s problems are really leadership problems, and Adam Grant’s conversation with NHL coach Jessica Campbell on giving tough feedback without breaking people.
Here are five pieces worth your time, and what each one means for the teams you lead.
1. AI is making individuals faster — and quietly fracturing your teams
Atlassian’s Teamwork Lab surveyed 12,035 knowledge workers and 173 Fortune 1000 executives and surfaced a paradox that should reframe how leaders think about the AI era. Individuals are moving faster than ever, yet the coordination between them is breaking down: 87% of workers say that with everyone in execution mode, they lack the capacity to actually coordinate. The resulting “fragmentation tax” — speed without alignment — is estimated to cost enterprises roughly $161 billion a year. Atlassian’s prescription is a shared “system of work” built on aligned goals and visible work, so that individual velocity compounds into collective progress instead of scattering into duplicated effort and rework.
Why it matters: Faster individuals mean little if your teams lose the shared context that turns effort into results — coordination is now the differentiator worth investing in.
Source: Atlassian. The State of Teams 2026 (Research report)
2. Your middle managers are overloaded — simplify the role before you ask for more
If coordination is the problem, middle managers are the people expected to hold it together — and McKinsey argues we have made their job nearly impossible. The role has been loaded with so much administrative work that the actual management — coaching, developing people, building the team — gets squeezed to the margins. McKinsey notes that the overwhelming majority of employees report to a middle manager, and that manager quality is the single biggest determinant of team performance and satisfaction, yet many managers now spend under a quarter of their time managing people. The fix is not another training program; it is deliberate subtraction — stripping back the role so your best people can do the part only they can do.
Why it matters: Managers are your highest-leverage asset — protect their time to lead instead of burying them in administration.
Source: McKinsey. Middle Managers Can Succeed by Simplifying the Role (Article)
3. Engagement is rebuilt locally — one team, one manager at a time
Free up your managers, and this is the work you want them spending that time on. Against a backdrop of global engagement sliding to a decade low, Gallup lays out three priorities leaders can act on immediately: rebuild the manager role so it is sustainable rather than overwhelming, reconnect employees to purpose and clear expectations, and treat wellbeing as inseparable from performance rather than a separate perk. The through-line reinforces a theme running across this month’s picks — engagement is won or lost inside individual teams, in the daily experience of the work, not through company-wide campaigns or all-hands announcements.
Why it matters: A credible, actionable playbook for reversing disengagement where it actually lives — in the daily experience of each team.
Source: Gallup. 3 Employee Engagement Strategies for 2026 (Article)
4. Hybrid work isn’t the problem — leadership capability is
As the return-to-office debate flares again, MIT Sloan Management Review offers a reframe worth pinning to the wall: most of the complaints pinned on hybrid work — weak collaboration, unclear expectations, disengagement — are really symptoms of underdeveloped leadership, not of flexibility itself. The organizations thriving in hybrid settings have deliberately built the capabilities to run it: explicit norms, intentional in-person moments designed for connection and problem-solving, and managers coached to lead across distance. In other words, the same leadership gaps that surface in the office simply become more visible when a team is distributed. The piece recasts a policy fight as a leadership-development question.
Why it matters: Before you tighten the office policy, ask whether your managers have actually been equipped to lead a distributed team.
Source: MIT Sloan Management Review. Hybrid Work Is Not the Problem — Poor Leadership Is (Article)
5. Tough love, done right: feedback that stretches people without breaking them
Every theme so far comes down to something deeply human: whether a leader can have an honest conversation. To close, organizational psychologist Adam Grant sits down with Jessica Campbell — the first full-time female assistant coach in NHL history — for a candid discussion of what it takes to lead and develop a high-performing team. Campbell breaks down her three core tenets of leadership and offers a nuanced view of delivering feedback and “tough love”: how to hold a high bar and push people hard while protecting their confidence and the relationship. It is a refreshingly concrete listen on the everyday craft of coaching individuals toward their potential.
Why it matters: A vivid, real-world model for giving direct feedback that raises performance without eroding trust.
The thread that ties it together
If one idea runs through this month’s picks, it’s this: in an era of faster tools and flatter organizations, competitive advantage still comes down to coordination, capable managers, and the honest conversations that hold a team together. AI raises the stakes on getting the fundamentals right; it doesn’t replace them.
That’s the work we care about most at Summit Team Building … designing experiences that turn insights like these into habits your teams carry back to the office. If any of this sparked an idea for your own team, we’d love to talk.