FROM THE STAGE: TEAM PERFORMANCE DYNAMICS. REMA LOLAS ON THE ELEPHANT IN YOUR TEAM'S ROOM

Team performance dynamics are what sit underneath the problem most leaders name as communication. Rema Lolas told CultureCon 2026 that communication is usually the symptom rather than the cause, and that the real work is in the dynamics nobody has said out loud yet.

Key takeaways

• Talent, engagement, and personality tools all measure individuals. None of them measure the space between people, which is where team performance actually lives.

• We measure outcomes, not conditions. Revenue, KPIs, and eNPS are real, but by the time they move it's too late to change anything.

• Communication is usually the symptom, not the disease. The environment and the norms inside it are what kill communication.

• Conflict doesn't disappear when it's ignored. It goes underground and shows up in every meeting and every interaction after that.

• Your high performers may be the productivity problem, because over-responsibility for other people's work quietly kills their own.

• Live from the room: 57% of attendees named communication as what they hear most often. 45% named productivity.

Rema Lolas took the CultureCon 2026 stage having travelled farther than anyone: she'd come from San Diego, but she'd been in Australia the week before, and she told the room the jet lag had her genuinely confused about where she was.

Then she asked a question that set up the next half hour. Who's got an elephant already?

Lolas is the founder and CEO of Grozaic, a name she built from growth and mosaic combined into one word. She has spent more than two decades across the technology industry working with leadership teams, and from thousands of team performance data points she developed the Team Dynamics Assessment, a framework for seeing how teams are actually functioning beneath the surface. The elephant, in her framing, is the thing everyone in a team can feel and nobody names.

Every tool we have measures individuals

Her opening argument is a short history of how organizations have tried to improve performance. Hire better talent. Measure engagement, because engaged people perform better and strong engagement drives productivity. Layer in personality frameworks so everyone understands how everyone works.

All of it moved thinking forward. All of it shares one blind spot.

“The thing that they all have in common is that they focus on individuals and their experience and their individual sentiments and what's happening inside of them. What they're not focused on is what's happening in the team and in the space between people.”

We got very good at understanding teams as a collection of individuals rather than as a whole.

Outcomes are too late

The second blind spot is timing. Organizations have become excellent at measuring outcomes: revenue, KPIs, employee net promoter scores, revenue performance. All valuable, and all lagging.

“They're also too late to make meaningful change. All of the tools that we've had have absolutely helped us to measure the outcomes, but not necessarily the conditions that lead to those outcomes.”

Her analogy for the gap is a good one to keep. Trying to fix the outcome is like trying to treat someone's temperature without ever understanding what's causing the fever.

What the room said out loud

Rather than tell the audience what their problem was, Lolas ran a live poll and let them pick which pillars she'd cover. The options: communication, accountability, alignment, productivity where people are overwhelmed and burning out, and team culture.

The results from that room, live:

• Communication — 57%

• Productivity — 45%

So those were the two she taught. It's worth noting what it means that a room of HR and People leaders, given five real options, put communication first by a wide margin.

Communication: usually the symptom

Her treatment of communication is the sharpest reframe in the session, because she spends it arguing that communication is rarely the actual problem.

The things that live underneath it:

• Feedback skills. People often don't have the skills to give feedback well. The discomfort leads to assumptions or badly delivered feedback, that creates resentment, and resentment stops the communication.

• Power dynamics. “If I don't feel like it's my place to say anything because of hierarchy, or someone who's got a more dominant personality in the room, that's going to kill communication as well.”

• Conflict dynamics. When two people on a team are at odds and nobody's talking about it, the leader sees a communication challenge. They're not seeing what's underneath.

• Psychological safety. Whether people believe there will be repercussions for making a mistake.

And the line that should change how leaders respond to it:

“Communication often isn't the problem, but it's the environment and the norms that are happening within that environment that are killing the communication.”

Which produces a better question than the one most organizations ask. Instead of can we run some communication training, ask what communication in this team might be trying to tell us.

Her warning about conflict is worth sitting with: those dynamics don't go away. They just go underground, and they exist in every meeting and every interaction from there on in.

Productivity: your high performers may be the problem

The second pillar the room chose has causes that are just as indirect.

• Prioritization and clarity. People need to know what the priorities are and be rowing in the same direction.

• Ownership. Think about the high performers in your organization. How many of them are doing way more than they should be, because they're over-responsible for other people's work, or because it's faster to just get it done and get back to their own? “That's killing their productivity as well as the productivity of the organization.”

• Balanced performance, which she named as one of the lowest-performing levers she sees. You can't be productive if people are exhausted. “People need downtime in a world where we're constantly uptime.”

• Emotional regulation. Sitting like a stress ball, ruminating on a list that's too long, reaching the end of the day having done nothing. If you can't regulate your own state, productivity goes with it.

Ten pillars, two hours short

Lolas closed by pointing out she'd only had time for two of the five options on the board, and that the full framework runs to ten performance pillars, along with what she calls the ten team performance misdiagnoses, available in an ebook with reflection questions for each.

The through-line of the whole session is that leaders keep solving for the visible thing. The elephant is the invisible one, and the work is learning to see it.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Rema Lolas?

Rema Lolas is the founder and CEO of Grozaic and Unstoppable Leadership, and a leadership advisor focused on the dynamics behind high-performing teams. She has more than two decades of experience across the technology industry and has worked with organizations in technology, finance, consulting, and professional services. Drawing on thousands of team performance data points, she developed the Team Dynamics Assessment. She presented at CultureCon 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin.

Why aren't engagement surveys and personality tests enough?

Because they measure individuals rather than the dynamics between them. Lolas argues team performance is not the sum of individual capability but a function of how people communicate, make decisions, navigate tension, and align. Engagement scores and personality profiles also measure outcomes and sentiment rather than the conditions that produce them.

What does it mean that communication isn't the real problem?

In Lolas's framework, communication breakdowns are usually symptoms of environment and norms: missing feedback skills, power dynamics and hierarchy, unaddressed conflict, and low psychological safety. Communication training rarely fixes those. The more useful question is what the communication pattern is trying to reveal about the team.

What hurts team productivity most?

Lolas points to four causes beneath the surface: unclear prioritization, unhealthy ownership where high performers absorb others' work, a lack of balanced performance and recovery time, and poor emotional regulation. Notably, several of these show up in an organization's strongest performers.

What is the Team Dynamics Assessment?

A framework Lolas developed from thousands of team performance data points that reveals how teams are actually functioning beneath the surface, organized around ten performance pillars including clarity, accountability, communication, trust, and team climate.

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This recap was written with the help of AI from Rema Lolas's session at CultureCon 2026, then reviewed by our team.