This blog post has been 20 years in the making. Two decades ago, an idea formed that was so powerful it completely reshaped how we understand team dysfunction, effective leadership styles, and the path to building truly high-performing teams. This is the story of how that initial concept overcame massive obstacles to become a go-to framework for modern organizational leaders.
The Origin Story: What Are Extra-Dependent Teams?
The breakthrough came in 2006 on my way home from a standard team-building session. Our group had just concluded what so many teams realize: we weren’t actually an interdependent team—we were a collection of specialists, yet we felt forced to “fix” our apparent team dynamics. This exact conversation happens every day in organizations worldwide. But my realization was different: I concluded that we weren’t a conventional team, and that was completely fine. We were actually operating as a community of practice.
Why It’s OK Not to Be a Traditional Interdependent Team
In the late 1990s, while completing my Master’s in Management and Organisational Learning at Lancaster University Management School, academics were deeply interested in learning through context, social interaction, and identity creation. This research coined the phrase “communities of practice,” combining knowledge, skills, tools, and social interaction toward a collective endeavor. Etienne Wenger and other pioneers made one point clear: a community of practice is not a traditional team.
My cohort displayed many characteristics of a community of practice, but we were not an interdependent team. Traditional teams work together, rely on each other, and succeed or fail as a single unit. My cohort, by contrast, worked separately on different projects. Each of us could succeed or fail independently without impacting the others. Yet we learned collectively by sharing insights, reviewing papers, and presenting together. It wasn’t a conventional team, but it delivered many of the core benefits of teaming.
Moving Beyond Binary Team Development Thinking
Having experienced both military teaming in the British Army and communities of practice in academia, I realized after that team away day that we didn’t need to force an interdependent structure. We could succeed as a community of practice—a group benefiting from shared practice to perform better individually in our respective domain areas.
This realization challenged the binary leadership mindset dominating corporate culture. Traditional team development models assume a strict dichotomy: you are either an underperforming group or an interdependent high-performing team. Groups are often labeled as flawed, while interdependent teams are idolized. Forcing every collection of professionals into a traditional interdependent mold creates artificial silo thinking, misdirected team building, and unnecessary frustration.
While this breakthrough reframed my own perspective, helping others break free from traditional team assumptions proved to be a larger challenge.
Overcoming Initial Obstacles in Team Coaching
The primary roadblock was simple: executive leadership was unfamiliar with applying community-of-practice frameworks to formal team structures. Conventional team building routinely pushed every group toward mutual interdependence, even when individual roles required independent execution outside the team.
My attempts to share the idea fell on deaf ears and without support the idea nearly faded, but I continually observed that my team’s experience was far from unique.
As an executive and team coach, I routinely met leaders struggling with team management and perceived team dysfunction. One regional sales manager wanted to transform his sales force into a tightly integrated, interdependent unit. Applying traditional interdependent team models would have actually damaged their sales performance. But I hadn’t organised my thoughts into an alternative. I needed clear terminology and a framework to help leaders develop these specialized units effectively. What should we call them?
Finding the Right Name: Interdependent vs. Extra-Dependent Teams
Initially, I tried calling them “odds” and “evens” to capture difference and similarity, but nobody wanted to lead an “odd team”! Next, I experimented with horizontal and vertical team descriptions based on matrix structures, until I encountered organizations with inverted matrix designs. There had to be another option.
While prominent management authors promoted interdependent teams bound by mutual accountability, matrix organizations were full of single-function specialists—sales teams, project managers, engineers, and legal advisers. These professionals shared similar roles and skills, but their daily operational reliance was on stakeholders outside their direct team. Because their core dependencies lay externally, the concept of Extra-Dependent Teams (EDTs) was born.
Early Breakthroughs and Real-World Impact
In May 2013, I partnered pro-bono with an Engineering Manager to test these approaches over four months. Mapping the learning dynamics of communities of practice directly into Extra-Dependent Teams was a revelation. Using this simple framework, we explained why leadership felt so challenging, why individual members operated independently, and how to address complex team dynamics constructively.
Similarly, I observed a weekly meeting where the manager really struggled to get the team engaged. He did all the right things, things that happened in the senior leadership team he was part of, yet such things didn’t seem to work in the engineering team. I was able to explain why this was. It wasn’t him, it was the way the team was.
When the engineers expressed frustration about collaborating with external project managers, community-of-practice principles explained why they shared common experiences yet struggled to address them collectively as an interdependent unit.
By adjusting meeting formats, addressing performance concerns directly, and tailoring leadership to extra-dependency, the manager dramatically enhanced team effectiveness and his own leadership presence. The impact was clear – the dynamics of communities of practice directly applied to certain teams. Communities of practice and teams were not different after all.
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The DidCOP Experiment: Proving High Performance in Extra-Dependent Teams
In 2013, I formed a collaborative learning group with eight independent consultants in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Meeting six times over eight months in an action-learning-type format, the group developed deep trust, psychological safety, and open knowledge sharing. We started to call it “DidCOP” a play on words with the location and Communities of Practice. The initiative proved so successful that meetings continued for over three years.
The experiment demonstrated that treating an Extra-Dependent Team appropriately—rather than forcing traditional team-building or false interdependence—significantly increases cohesion, performance, and belonging. EDTs can reach levels of excellence on par with high-performing interdependent teams when supported by the right development pathway.
Translating EDT Concepts Into Training & Practical Tools
In 2015, I launched the first dedicated training program for EDT leaders and practitioners, receiving outstanding feedback from participants who finally had a framework for their team structure.
To expand awareness, I hosted breakfast workshops in London. Using a pack of playing cards as an analogy, I illustrated matrix organization structures: suits represent multi-functional, interdependent teams working toward a shared outcome, while four Aces represent an Extra-Dependent Team of specialists who share a role but deliver results in separate contexts. This visual representation helped leaders instantly grasp the core difference.
Mastering Leadership Styles for Extra-Dependent Teams
Late in 2015, while preparing a book proposal, I joined the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) as a team leader. This provided a live environment to apply EDT leadership principles across a team of executive coaches executing similar roles independently.
Rather than centering meetings on routine accountability checks, we focused on collective peer learning, sharing materials, and refining practice. This established a robust common practice. Instead of forcing a single common goal, individual performance objectives aggregated into overarching organizational results.
Unlike traditional interdependent teams requiring a single shared goal, Extra-Dependent Teams thrive by uniting around common practice. Successful EDT leaders replace status reporting with knowledge exchange, capability building, and mutual coaching.
During team expansion, we observed a classic EDT team archetype: “The Coven,” where a small, highly specialized trio unintentionally resists new members. Recognizing this dynamic enabled us to deliberately scale membership to 15, introducing fresh vitality and confirming how community-of-practice dynamics govern EDT development.
Publishing the Framework: “Extra-Dependent Teams”
Following articles in Coaching at Work and online platforms, Routledge accepted my book proposal. Writing 65,000 words to synthesize twelve years of research and field testing was intense, but it provided a definitive statement on teaming in organisations.
In 2018, Routledge published Extra-Dependent Teams: Realising the Power of Similarity. The book filled a critical gap in management literature, providing a fresh lens for organizational development and offering tailored strategies for leaders managing teams of similar roles.
Where We Are Now: Transforming Team Effectiveness Globally
Since publication, the EDT framework has been adopted across global enterprises in banking, pharmaceuticals, technology, healthcare, legal services, and higher education. Leaders, teams and team coaches worldwide now use the framework to diagnose team structures accurately before designing intervention strategies.
Extra-Dependent Teams are now part of the curriculum for global team coaching programmes such as those offered by the Academy of Executive Coaching. It is also increasingly being requested by those commissioning team coaching and development within organisations, because they know that traditional approaches will not move the dial.
As team coaching matures as a discipline, expanding beyond one-size-fits-all models is essential. By recognizing whether a group requires interdependent collaboration or extra-dependent practice sharing, coaches and leaders can unlock genuine high performance without imposing unnecessary friction.
What should you do if you’re in an Extra-Dependent Team?
Does your team sound like it’s Extra-Dependent? Are you frustrated that the team doesn’t seem to improve? Sick and tired of throwing the same old team-solutions at the same old problems and getting the same old results?
Perhaps this is the time to explore Extra-Dependent Teams. You could try out our free eLearning modules, or use our free Team Dependency Diagnostic (Lite) tool.
If you’d simply like to hear more, then we’d be delighted to organise an in-house lunch and learn event. Please get in touch and we can arrange one soon.
