Beyond the Org Chart: Dane Groenveld on Leadership and the Future of Teamwork

Most conversations about leadership start with titles, org charts, and strategy. Dane Groenveld’s story starts somewhere else entirely — with movement, uncertainty, and the instinct to bring people together. 

Growing up across eight schools in mining towns throughout Australia, Dane learned early how quickly communities form, fracture, and reform. 

That lived experience would later shape a career spent building global teams across dozens of countries — and a conviction that the future of work isn’t about hierarchy at all, but about how humans connect, collaborate, and carry one another through constant change.

The Tailspin:

For Dane, the roots of his work on teamwork go back long before boardrooms or podcasts.

“I always like to start with childhood,” he says, “because I've found the more I've worked in this space, around people and teams, the form of our childhood and who we are naturally tends to lead into the careers that we can excel and find energy in.”

Dane grew up in Australia, moving frequently as his father worked in the mining industry.

“I think I had eight schools by the time I was 15,” he recalls. “So I was kind of the guy that would run around and find people in any new community or park and gather them and play games together.”

That instinct — to convene people — never left him.

Instead of following his father into engineering, Dane stumbled into recruiting while at university and spent more than two decades building teams for massive oil, gas, mining, and infrastructure projects around the world.

“At one stage I think we had 8,000 employees in 70 different countries,” he says.

Those projects were technically complex and geographically remote — jungles, deserts, snow-covered regions — but what stood out most wasn’t the engineering.

“What I've found through time is that the best teams — the ones who can drive good safety, good quality, good budget management — tend to be teams that come together for more than just the work,” he shares. “They've worked together before, and so there is this kind of community of sorts. And it's powerful.”

Community, culture, and connection weren’t optional — they were essential to safety, quality, and success. But Dane doesn’t believe that happens by chance.

“Intentionality is very important,” he says. “I found project teams that came in knowing the technicalities of the project, but also the community that they were going to be embedded in and where they built some of those bridges or threads, they tended to do far better.” 

The Work:

As Dane’s career evolved, so did his understanding of what it takes to build teams that last.

Early recruiting was about “find the right talent,” but managing thousands of people across dozens of countries quickly changed the equation.

“It became important that you knew not just what talent to put on the job, but who was going to last in that role.”

That insight carried Dane into private equity–backed businesses, M&A work, and eventually into a family-owned staffing company, where growth came through both acquisition and organic expansion.

“We quadrupled it in size,” he says, “and we just sold that this year.”

Today, as CEO of Leader and through his Future of Teamwork podcast, Dane is focused less on org charts and more on what he calls “teaming.”

“In the workplace, most people are now saying that they would attach themselves to between five and seven teams,” he explains. “But ‘teaming’ is much more dynamic than the people I work with and report to on a daily basis.”  

Dane’s definition of a team relies on two factors — shared objectives and building a connective relationship.

“If they don't have a shared objective, if they're just coming together to brainstorm around a problem and they're just throwing a few things out asynchronously, I wouldn't really call that a team.”

Dane again stresses the importance of intention.

“The ‘figure it out' model rarely works,” he offers.

Instead, Dane emphasizes cultural sensitivity, energy awareness, and basic team agreements — when to meet, how to communicate, how feedback flows — as the foundation for healthy performance.

“If you can create a playbook of sorts,” he says, “I think you can set teams up for a lot of success.”

The Tailwind:

Looking ahead, Dane believes the pace of change — especially driven by AI — will force organizations to rethink how work gets done.

“I think there's a lot of pain coming, and not just because AI replaces jobs,” he says. “AI actually breaks the way that we work as humans if it's not implemented right.”

But Dane sees the challenge as an opportunity for current and future leaders.

“Think about the unit of the team and get clear about what their work is, how their work feeds into the wider corporate organizational mission,” he suggests. “Leaders that are investing time in that over the next few years are going to see that their teams are far more capable of navigating changing markets and changing times.” 

For Dane, leadership is shifting away from control and toward coaching.

“The role of a leader in picking who's on the team and being clear about their role,” he says, “is becoming far more important than the role of a leader in having knowledge to disperse in the technical sense.”

“We're still going to need leaders who are very technically competent and do certain roles, but I think we're going to see more and more of that as we go forward.”

Health — personal and collective — is central to that shift. Dane is candid about burnout, anxiety, and what happens when teams run too hot for too long.

“I think slack is something that we haven't created enough of in teams,” he says. “You need to be designing the work and the projects with some of that.”

As he looks ahead, Dane hopes his work helps counter what he worries about most.

“I want to remember that I shook off the chains of fear and realized that I can actually take some time for myself and for my family,” he says, stressing the importance of the other “teams” in our lives.

He also hopes to inspire lasting change in the workplace.

“I really want to know that at this point in time,” he offers, “I started something. I started a movement. I started building a community.”

His goal isn’t perfection — it’s less misery and more connection.

“I can help create just a little less misery and a little bit more opportunity,” he says, “that would be awesome.”

To hear more from Dane Groenveld on teaming, leadership, and the future of work, listen to the full episode of re:Purpose with Buddy Teaster — and check out The Future of Teamwork podcast for deeper conversations on how teams really thrive.