The anatomy of a high-performing team

Dr Stefan Cousquer, Eddy de Waart, Clare Carpenter, Leah Henderson

The power and energy of a high-performing team lies in the unique combination of its people. So, by virtue of the multiple unique individuals that make up a team and their relationships with each other, there’s no one formula.

“Everyone in the team is working in one direction – not necessarily in the same way, but in a way that allows their unique qualities to deliver the output that everyone is looking for,” says Clare Carpenter, Executive Coach at Hult Ashridge.

But there are a few commonalities that we can see in high-performing teams:

• There’s a team identity. This is the sense of the way ‘we’ do things. It’s based on shared purpose, collective accountability, the sense of belonging, as well as a sense of personal ownership.  

• There are clear goals – and congruence in what’s said and done. “The team can define what it wants to excel at,” says Cousquer. “It may be different by team and context, but getting that clear and holding each other to account is helpful practice.” Consistent follow-through promotes focus and accountability. 

• Relationships are strong and balanced. Cousquer says this shows up in “the quality, robustness and energy of their conversations, the trust to talk about the ‘undiscussable’, and their ability to coach each other live.” 

• You hear plenty of honest feedback. Problems don’t fester. This means there are “honest and challenging performance conversations that are purpose-driven, not personality-driven, with the understanding that constructive conflict about the way of working and cooperation, for example, or about the intentions and motivations of the team member, is good for growth and improvement,” says de Waart.  

• Conflict has a place. But, Carpenter specifies, “it’s conflict that has a purpose: intellectual conflict rather than personal conflict – so disagreeing about systems and process, rather than disagreeing with each other.” 

• There’s a strong level of psychological safety. Strong relationships, open feedback, and intellectual conflict aren’t possible without psychological safety and trust. 

• They have a culture of learning. This means curiosity, creativity, innovation, and experimentation. “They build learning into their everyday practices as opposed to a sideshow,” says Cousquer. This is what gives teams the capability to grow. 

• And they make mistakes. In a true learning culture, mistakes are accepted. “You see new things being tried and then abandoned or built on,” says Carpenter. “It's not to say there are more mistakes in a high-performing team,” she clarifies. “But it's safe to bring them to the table. Otherwise, they may be hidden.” 

This is where ‘secrets’ can emerge – what Carpenter describes as “the other side of feedback”. While feedback is based on trust and psychological safety, “secrets start to come in when we feel like we can't say what's not working.”

De Waart says there’s a lot to be found by focusing on what you don’t see on the surface. “If I see a team that's completely in harmony with each other, I always doubt what is going on here. What is not being said? What’s under the table? What is said in duos or trios, but not in the group?”

Often, it comes from fear of judgment. “Judgment (and fear of it, even when it’s absent) is really poisonous,” says Carpenter. “If I feel like I am going to be judged, I'm likely to be frightened to say if I've made a mistake.” In fact, fear accounts for much of what jeopardizes a team, according to Carpenter.

Change can amplify this, especially if there’s a sense of loss. “When the purpose of the organization or the team itself feels disconnected from the values of the people within it, psychological barriers go up between team members or between groups that hinder connection building.” It can result in possessiveness in the workplace and people in the team start to behave as individuals rather than as one.

“All of these things are like bacterial infections in a high-performing team that you've got to get in and treat straight away as a leader,” says Carpenter.

To enable teams to flourish, you have to get underneath the behaviors you see visibly and engage with underlying mindsets. While it’s very human to see things from our individual perspective, high-performing teams require a less egocentric and more relational view – one that takes into account yourself, the relationships with people around you, the group’s place within an organizational ecosystem, and even the organization’s place in the wider world.

It's known as a ‘meta position’, says de Waart. “The meta position is like a helicopter looking at team dynamics – who says what, who has more power, what is not said, what are the interactions like? This reflective capacity is very important to build first as a team member, to have more perspectives about the work that’s being done.”

Above all, “a team leader has a requirement to learn to be a master observer,” says Carpenter. The team leader needs to be able to occupy both spaces – the immediacy of what’s in front of them and the holistic view of the room.

After the awareness, there has to be emotional fluency too, in order to nurture and maintain strong relationships. “You need a level of empathy to be able to understand somebody else's world as they experience it rather than as you experience it,” says Carpenter.

For teams to be able to share their perspectives openly, there needs to be a high level of trust. “Feedback happens when we feel psychologically safe to say things that we like and don't like, and things that are working really well or not,” says Carpenter. “Where that kind of level of trust is in place, growth can really happen.”