When I came across an article stating that the US Military is conducting trials and research on application of swarm technology in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), to neutralize an adversary’s air defences, I couldn’t help but think that the same also applies to high performance teams.In swarm technology, a large number of small drones operating together are used to attack and neutralize high value targets of an opposing military force.This was inspired by the behavior of insects in nature. The unique thing about swarm technology is that all drones in the group operate autonomously, at the same time in a unified manner as a whole. Hence if one drone gets knocked out, it doesn’t affect the operations of the others in the group. The rest just cover up for the lost drone in the battle space.This is made possible by advances in artificial intelligence. These are not pre-programmed synchronized individual drones, but are in fact a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature.This ensures that the loss of any one drone doesn’t compromise the mission.As a keen student of human behavior, team dynamics and leadership, I couldn’t help but think of how high performance teams actually operate in a similar manner.In my experience, the one most critical aspect of high performance teams is distributed leadership.The key differentiators for high performance swarm teams are,1. Such teams are highly empowered and all team members operate like a swarm, ensuring continuity of business on hand even if some team members are on leave or get transferred.2. These teams are agile, due to delegated decision making that enables collective leadership, with distributed authority. This enables the whole team to operate as one compact unit.3. Most importantly autonomous swarm teams free up leadership bandwidth in an organization, to focus on areas of strategic priorities, aimed at building long term sustainable competitive advantages.Hence Organizations would do well to incorporate learnings from swarm technology, into their team building initiatives, project management and business planning processes, for enhanced organizational effectiveness, operational execution and strategic alignment.