Assembling A Superhero Team: A FIRO Practioner Case Study

Tony Stark lets very few people in and controls everything once they are in.

Steve Rogers includes everyone and means it every time.

Natasha Romanoff wants belonging more than either of them and has spent twenty years making sure nobody can tell.

Three superhero Avengers. Three completely different interpersonal operating systems. One team that is always one pressure point away from fracturing.

You've sat in this room. The executive who curates their inner circle and calls it standards. The leader who rallies everyone around mission until the mission becomes the only thing that matters. The operator who sees everything, says the right thing at the right moment, and has never once told anyone how close she is to done.

I just became a certified FIRO-B practitioner. It maps three core interpersonal needs — Inclusion, Control, Affection — and the distance between what people express and what they actually want. High performing teams aren't teams where everyone gets along. They're teams where that distance is understood and managed before it becomes a crisis.

I use it alongside Hogan Assessments in my org design work at M. Hatter because the org chart never tells the whole story.

Most leadership teams don't have a cinematic Civil War moment. They just quietly lose their Natasha one day and wonder why everything got harder.