Building winning investment teams

“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”— Ralph Nader

One of the most important lessons from the CIO Chair podcasts is appreciating just how much of the decision‑making is done before a CIO signs off on anything. Our interviewees emphasised that doing their role involved shaping systems.

There does not appear to be a one-size-fits-all playbook. Each institution serves different stakeholders, and has different investment aims, liability structures and risk tolerance. There is, however, a fairly consistent root to all the themes: investment performance is a function of a deliberate decision‑making system.

Deconstructing a decision-making system

A strong system cannot be cobbled together without a whole in mind. It requires joined‑up choices about people and processes, and of course the dreaded C word.

Before people roll their eyes, we do need mention culture. To make it more palatable let's try and bring it to life with definition. Culture is a feeling of:

1. What information is shared or suppressed

2. How challenge is expressed and received

3. Who feels accountable for outcomes

4. How judgement is exercised under uncertainty or stress

The four pillars of winning investment teams

1. Hire for judgement, honesty, and collaboration

Someone being smart is not reason enough to hire them. CIOs consistently pointed out value people who were not only smart but also comfortable highlighting uncertainty, surfacing uncomfortable facts, and engaging others to get new perspectives.

This matters because who you allow in the front door shapes the kinds of interactions downstream. Simon Pilcher (USS) is explicit that mis‑hires do more damage than analytical mistakes:

“I’ve probably said goodbye to more people for cultural reasons than for investment incompetence. If people won’t collaborate or won’t tell the truth, they poison the organisation.”

Rob Groves (PIC) reinforces the same point:

“You need people who can put their ego aside and work for the best outcome for the whole organisation, not their patch.”

Put differently, CIOs want people who can be trusted with imperfect information. Lone geniuses optimising their silo tend to add complexity without improving decisions.

2. Train people to solve problems for the system, not for their sleeve

Great hiring determines which characters you have around you, and great training helps direct them towards thinking about how their skills can benefit the organisation as a whole.

A recurring insight from the podcasts is that CIOs are not trying to optimise asset classes in isolation — they are trying to run resilient portfolios that survive stress. Pilcher puts it plainly:

“We’re not trying to optimise individual pots. We’re trying to construct a total portfolio that survives and thrives across very different futures.”

Chetan Ghosh (Schroders) makes the same point through scenario thinking:

“We don’t talk about volatility in isolation. We talk about what breaks, where liquidity disappears, and whether you can live with the outcomes.”

High‑performance environments train people to focus on how what they do impacts the overall result, not just within their area of direct responsibility. That means considering second‑order effects and material risks. Precision is valued only where it improves judgement — not for its own sake.

3. Challenge is rewarded

Another consistent insight is that strong organisations treat constructive disagreement as a sign of healthy collaboration rather than a lack of it. Peter Drewienkiewicz captures this succinctly:

“If people aren’t disagreeing, that’s not alignment — it’s a warning sign.”

At PIC, Rob Groves links this directly to risk:

“If people don’t feel able to question things outside their area, risk builds silently.”

Importantly, challenge should not be confrontation. CIOs emphasise that well‑reasoned decisions are not punished simply because outcomes disappoint. An environment where challenge is rewarded encourages people proposing ideas to sharpen their arguments and also get the honest perspective of others.

4. Senior leaders ratify decisions not make them

A striking commonality across the podcasts is how ideas flow. Winning CIOs set direction and guardrails, then trust capable team to get on with it. Richard Tomlinson describes this explicitly:

“My job is not to make every decision. It’s to build people I can trust to make serious decisions — and then get out of the way.”

Rob Groves is even blunter:

“If the CIO is making most of the decisions, something has gone wrong.”

This is culture expressed through accountability. People with the CIO's team feel empowered to do the analysis and propose well-formed and well-reasoned ideas. The system allows them to have it challenged and if it makes it that far, to the CIO for ratification.

The inverse: what are red flags within an investment team

Turning it around is revealing too. Underperformance often emerges when environments degrade judgement:

• Hiring rewards polish over honesty

• Training encourages people to keep out of other people's business

• Disagreement is uncomfortable or dependent on the crowd

• Decision‑making only occurs at the top

In these environments, uncertainty is glossed over rather than explored, leaving risks to accumulate quietly. As Drewienkiewicz’s comments consistently imply, judgement cannot survive for long in weak systems.

So what?

High‑performance investment environments are created by coherent and well-oiled organisations.

Across the CIO Chair podcasts, the same pattern repeats:

• Hire for judgement, honesty, and collaboration

• Train people to think systemically

• Normalise and reward real challenge

• Push decision‑making down with accountability

Next week, will be "The certainty trap". As always get the blog delivered directly to your inbox on Home | Deciders | for mental fitness | change your mind.