You Do Not Need to Like Your Team.

I claimed you do not need to be friends to be a high performing team. Then I found a study that, at first read, told me I was wrong. It looked at the most intense small work group that exists, the professional string quartet, and what it revealed turned out to be sharper and more useful than the claim I started with.

Published 2026-06-25 by Bernhard Kerres

A week ago, on my podcast Coffee & Coaching, I made a claim. I said you do not need to be friends with the people you work with to perform at your highest level.

Then I went looking for evidence, and I found a study that, at first read, told me I was wrong. I want to be honest about what it taught me, because the truth turned out to be sharper than the claim I started with.

The Hardest Possible Test

To test whether teams need to like each other, you want the hardest possible case. You want a group so small, so intimate, and so completely dependent on one another that if friendship matters anywhere, it has to matter here.

That group is the professional string quartet.

Four people, completely and immediately interdependent. They cannot produce a single bar of music on their own. They use each other's output as their own input, in real time, simultaneously. They rehearse up to six hours a day. They tour together. They share buses, trains, and flights. They sit beside the same three people for years, sometimes decades. One quartet in the study I am about to describe had the same four members for thirty-four years.

The musicians themselves describe it as a marriage. Not to one person, but to three. Many said the best part of being in a quartet was being able to interact so closely with three other people. And many added, in the same breath, that the worst part was also having to interact so closely with three other people.

In 1991, J. Keith Murnighan and Donald Conlon published a study in Administrative Science Quarterly, one of the most rigorous journals in management research. They studied twenty of the twenty-one professional string quartets working in Great Britain. They interviewed eighty musicians individually, sometimes for as long as four hours, in their homes, their cars, the local pub. Then, nine years later, they went back to see which quartets had survived and which had folded. Over half had folded.

So what did the survivors do differently?

The Complication, and the Reframe

Here is the part that, at first, seemed to contradict my claim. The successful quartets did tend to be friends. The members of the best groups described genuine closeness. One viola player said he could not imagine playing chamber music with someone he did not like.

On the surface, then, I was wrong.

But dig into why they were close, and the real finding appears. The successful quartets were not held together by friendship. They were held together by something the researchers heard again and again: an obsession with and for the music. The members of the best groups described their enthusiasm for the quartet repertoire, independently and almost unanimously, as an obsession. They said the reason they were together was to play this music, and that everything else was secondary.

The friendship was not the engine. The shared, non-negotiable commitment to excellence was the engine. The friendship grew out of it.

That is the sharper version of my claim. It is not liking each other that produces performance. It is a shared, obsessive commitment to excellence. It is a passion for an unreachable high standard. Friendship, if it comes, comes afterward.

There is a second detail worth keeping. The successful quartets played first to please themselves. Their primary audience was each other. They paid less attention to what the audience wanted than the unsuccessful groups did. The internal standard came first. That is a striking inversion of the usual wisdom that the customer comes first, and it is worth a longer conversation another time.

Three Tensions Every Team Lives With

The study identified three tensions that every quartet faces and none can resolve. The successful quartets managed them quietly. The unsuccessful ones tried to fix them, and broke.

Leader versus Democracy

The music gives the lead, most of the good material, to the first violinist. But every player joined the quartet to have an equal voice. Four people, each expecting a quarter of the say, and yet one of them structurally has more.

What the successful groups did was fascinating. The first violinists led, in fact, totally. In recording sessions, they stopped the group, decided when a phrase was right, and controlled everything. And yet, in the same breath, those same first violinists sincerely advocated democracy. The researchers called this an effective inconsistency. The members felt they had an equal say while objectively giving the first violinist more influence, and that inconsistency was adaptive. It was not dishonesty. It was how they held a genuine contradiction without resolving it.

The unsuccessful groups did the opposite. Their first violinists insisted that being the leader did not make any difference, while the rest of the group was desperate for them to take more control. One group went through the trauma of firing their first violinist before they folded.

The lesson for any team, and any flat organization, is this. There is always a hidden hierarchy, and it may shift through a project or even through a single meeting. The danger is not that the hierarchy exists. The danger is pretending it does not. That pretense is what breaks groups.

The Second Fiddle

The phrase "second fiddle" exists in our language as an insult. The study shows why it is exactly backward.

The second violinist often needs to be more technically skilled than the first. The parts are harder to play well, requiring you to echo the first an octave lower, to support without ever leading. And yet the second violinist gets none of the acclaim, rarely the attention, almost never the recognition. Many quartets are named after their first violinist. Nobody names a quartet after the second.

A famous second violinist gave the study its best metaphor. A quartet, he said, is like a bottle of wine. The first violin, out front, getting all the attention, is the label. The cellist, the foundation, is the bottle. The second violin and the viola are the wine. The actual contents.

The finding: in the successful quartets, the second violinists accepted their role and were openly, genuinely appreciated by their colleagues. In the unsuccessful ones, the seconds were given little credit, and one first violinist was almost insulting about his. The researchers noted that the broader issue of the talented but subordinate professional had received almost no study. It still gets almost none.

Every organization has a second fiddle. The deputy who will never be CEO. The chief of staff who really knows what is happening. The specialist whose work holds the whole thing together, and who is told in their review to be more visible. A great team makes the second fiddle feel essential. A failing team treats them as a lesser first.

Confrontation versus Compromise

Conflict is inevitable in any group. Too much open confrontation injures and destroys. But too much compromise produces mediocrity. Everyone gives way, nobody is satisfied, and the result is grey.

This is the tension that most complicates the standard story about psychological safety, and I want to be honest about it. We are often told that healthy teams challenge each other openly. The successful quartets did not resolve their conflicts through open confrontation. They managed them quietly, often by not talking. They had a saying: either we play, or we fight. When they hit a real disagreement, they often dropped it and discovered that the trivial conflicts dissolved on their own for lack of importance, while the ones that genuinely mattered found their way back or worked themselves out in the playing. As one player put it, when you play, what is right and what is wrong emerges.

They had strict, unspoken rules about what could not be said. One player put it vividly: you know where the sore points are, and if you press on them, it is a massacre. They protected the group by not confronting everything.

The unsuccessful groups did the reverse. They talked too much and played too little. They compromised constantly and satisfied no one. Or they fought openly and continuously. One group estimated they had perhaps one rehearsal in ten without a serious argument, and the first violinist described every rehearsal as a lesson with three teachers who disagree with each other. That group folded.

I do not think this contradicts the idea of psychological safety. I think it refines it. The ability to challenge openly is not the same as challenging everything all the time. The best groups built enough safety that they could challenge, and then had the wisdom to choose what was worth challenging and what to let dissolve in the work.

The Deeper Pattern

The prevailing advice when this study was written was that groups should confront and openly work through their paradoxes. The data said something more subtle, and I think truer. The successful quartets recognized their contradictions but did not try to untangle them. They understood them, tolerated them, and managed them quietly. They sat on the fence between conflicting forces rather than forcing a resolution that does not exist.

That is a hard thing for leaders to hear, because we are trained to resolve things. To fix. To align. To get to clarity. This study suggests that the highest performing intimate teams do the opposite. They develop the maturity to live inside unresolved tension, without pretending it away and without blowing themselves up over it.

And they worked through disagreement not by talking it to death, but by playing. By doing the work. That is the whole thesis behind deliberate practice and the platform I built, RolePlays.ai. You do not resolve the hard things in discussion. You resolve them in the doing.

What I Tell Executives

When I bring a string quartet into a leadership workshop, and I have done this for a global chemical company, a German bank, and others, the executives always think they are going to learn about harmony. About people blending, getting along, and being in tune.

What they actually learn is the opposite. They learn that four people can produce something transcendent without being friends, as long as they share an obsession for excellence. They learn that the most skilled person in the group is often the one nobody applauds. And they learn that the strongest teams are not the ones that resolve their tensions. They are the ones mature enough to live with them.

So I will correct what I said a week ago and make it sharper. You do not need to love the people you work with. You need to be obsessed, together, with the same excellence. The friendship, if it comes, comes afterward.

Ask it of your own team. Do we actually share a drive for excellence that we are all obsessed with? Or are we just trying to get along?

That question is the difference between a quartet that lasts thirty-four years and one that folds.

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If you would like to explore what this looks like in your own team, book a conversation here (https://book.bernhardkerres.com/meetings/).