223: Mark Murphy - The Five Roles of Great Teams and How Leaders Activate Them

Mark Murphy is a leadership researcher, author, and founder of Leadership IQ, a company dedicated to studying why some leaders and teams consistently outperform others. His work focuses on using data-driven insights to help leaders build effective, motivated, and high-performing teams. In this episode, he breaks down the difference between leadership success driven by skill and success driven by circumstance, emphasizing that true leadership effectiveness must also be measured by culture, growth, retention, engagement, and contribution — not just outcomes.

Mark introduces a compelling framework built around five critical team roles: Director, Achiever, Stabilizer, Harmonizer, and Trailblazer. Through extensive research, he explains that the best teams are not made up of identical individuals, but of diverse contributors who each bring unique strengths. The episode explores how leaders can identify, assign, and balance these roles to create high-functioning teams, avoid power struggles, improve accountability, enhance innovation, and resolve conflict more effectively.

Mark also discusses how modern leaders must adapt based on context, recognizing when to lead from the front and when to empower others based on their strengths — a principle he refers to as adaptive hierarchy. Whether hiring, assembling project groups, or leading executive teams, he stresses the importance of intentionally designing role-based collaboration rather than relying on personality similarity or conventional hierarchy.