Elucidating the design principles of regulatory networks driving cellular decision-making is of fundamental importance in mapping and controlling cellular behaviour. Despite their size and complexity, large biological regulatory networks often lead to a limited number of cell-states/phenotypes. How this canalization is achieved remains largely elusive. Here, we investigated multiple different networks governing reversible cell-state transitions during cancer metastasis, and identified a latent design principle in their topology that constrains their phenotypic repertoire – the presence of two "teams" of nodes engaging in a mutually inhibitory feedback loop. These "teams" are specific to these networks and directly shape the phenotypic landscape and consequently the cell-fate trajectories. We also present the experimental evidence of such "teams" in bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic datasets across many contexts (cancer cell plasticity in breast cancer, melanoma, lung cancer etc.), including those in perturbation studies. Overall, we propose these "teams" as a network design principle that drive cell-fate canalization in diverse decision-making processes, and drastically reduce the dimensionality of the phenotypic space, with implications in cancer cell fitness and patient survival.