By Chris Lloyd, Director of Consulting & Josh Trebilcock, Head of Marketing
When you’re leading a business, pressure is a constant.
You’re expected to deliver growth, meet targets, and provide strategic direction – all while aligning an executive, senior leadership or functional team, that for a variety of reasons, might not yet be operating at its full potential. Many of the teams we work with are made up of highly capable individuals, but they lack cohesion. They might have a team of stars, but they don’t have a star team. A range of blockers can get in the way of a team’s ability to work together effectively be it interpersonal team dynamics, a lack of trust or politics. Each of which can lead to friction, misalignment, and ultimately, stalled progress against goals.
For a team at the top, how well they come together as a team can make or break how well a strategy is brought to life – or rather whether it falls at the first hurdle and fails to materialise at all. When team dynamics quietly interfere, they can slow key messages down into the business. Communication might become cautious or performative. And that next level of performance – the one that feels just within reach but remains ever-elusive – never quite materialises.
If this sounds familiar – you’re not alone. But solving this challenge isn’t about adding more meetings, working harder or hiring top talent. It requires something deeper, collaborative and deliberate.
This article first shares our ethos as to why high performance in teams is so elusive, our approach to solving this, and five key strategies on how you can build a high performing team:
- Start with clarity of direction: Mutual Purpose, not just strategy
- Create the conditions for challenge and trust
- Shift from role clarity to collective accountability
- Make learning your competitive edge
Measure what matters – and use it to drive progress
Why High-Performing Teams Matter More Than Ever
The demands on senior teams are ever increasing and evolving. It feels a cliché to say unprecedented.
In the senior teams we work with, we see what can feel to the teams as overwhelming complexity caused by the combination of seismic changes happening at macro and micro levels, but a need to deliver improvements in performance and results in ever narrowing timescales (with the stakes of success or failure feeling almost impossibly high). At the same time, it’s become an increasingly common expectation that senior teams need to ‘do more with less’. The level of patience for getting results within those conditions has seemingly never been less. This actively translates to a higher degree of pressure on the people within them.
Whilst we can’t remove the sources of these external pressures, what we can do is to help teams navigate it more effectively together. To help teams focus on what’s most important, to reframe, to better support and stretch each other to succeed given the symbiotic relationship between the team and its members. We succeed if I succeed / I succeed if we succeed.
The ability to adapt, align, and execute at pace is no longer a luxury – it’s a competitive necessity. Especially in fast-changing markets or during periods of organisational transformation.
And yet, most leadership teams are not structured – or supported – to perform at that level. Through our work with 100s of executive and senior leadership teams across a variety of industries, we regularly encounter familiar patterns in teams where they:
- Look strong on paper but are hampered by politics, interpersonal tensions or ambiguity.
- Have never had the time and space to build how they work together. They may have formed quickly and expected to hit the ground running, but not had the chance to form the ways of working, behaviours and trust that are needed to perform effectively.
- Have once performed well but have become fragmented over time or performance is plateauing – an underlying feeling that “what got us here won’t get us there”.
- Are entering a new era and need the behaviours to accelerate that.
- Are going through a change of guard within the team’s membership.
Not every team is in crisis. But when performance stagnates or stalls, the same questions tend to surface:
- What’s holding us back?
- Why aren’t we delivering as well as we could?
- How do we move from just functioning / doing ok to high-performing?
This article is designed to help you explore those questions – diagnose where you and your team might be – and act on the answers.
The Significance of Teams within business
Great teams are the building blocks of outstanding organisations. They must perform as high-functioning units in their own right – but they also sit within a broader system, relying on seamless collaboration with other teams to create outcomes that exceed the sum of their parts.
In many ways, teams are the most tangible way we experience organisational culture. Whether good, bad, or forgettable (!), our team experiences can shape us – and they stay with us. Being part of a truly high-performing team is a rare experience, but one that leaves a lasting impact.
Not All Teams Are Built the Same – Executive Teams Are Different
Before we go further, it’s important to recognise that while many high-performance principles apply across teams, executive teams face similar and yet distinct – and often underestimated – challenges. Working within an Executive Team means individuals often need to be wearing more than one hat. Rather than binary thinking, they need to consider things from multiple perspectives and often engage what we call ‘both/and thinking’. Senior leaders need to navigate:
- Competing tensions often pull leaders in different directions, such as:
- Club vs country thinking – balancing accountability to their own function with commitment to the wider enterprise. enterprise.
- Short-term performance and long-term future thinking/business needs
- Functional objectives and broader business goals
- Membership is typically based on individual achievement, not team fit – usually by virtue of hierarchy or a strong track record in a specific domain, rather than the collective skills required at this strategic altitude. ‘My job’ is far more clear cut and easy to commit to than ‘our job’.
- The team’s purpose is often unclear or conflated with the organisation’s purpose, making it harder to define what work truly belongs to the team.
These dynamics can make mutual accountability harder to build, obscure the ‘real work’ of the team, and reduce the perceived value of spending time together. As a result, Executive Teams often prioritise efficiency over effectiveness in meetings – avoiding the deeper, collaborative work that underpins genuine progress.
Recognising these realities is essential. Building a high-performing Executive Team isn’t about applying generic team-building techniques – it requires intentional effort to address the systemic and structural frictions unique to senior leadership.
What Defines a High-Performing Team?
High-performing teams aren’t defined by titles, intellect or experience alone. You can assemble a group of highly talented individuals – and still fall short. What separates the best teams isn’t just who’s in the room, but how they work together, especially under pressure.
So what makes some teams consistently outperform others?
We often begin by referencing the classic definition from Katzenbach & Smith to get teams thinking:
It’s a solid foundation. But in our experience, truly high-performing teams go further.
They don’t just commit to shared outcomes – they genuinely and consistently commit to each other’s growth and success. There’s a deeper level of trust, mutual accountability and interdependence. It’s not just about hitting the target; it’s about how they show up for one another on the way there.
Getting to this level is hard. As Aristotle observed, ‘we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, it’s a habit’. It takes intentional work to develop the principles, behaviours and habits that drive collective performance. Many leaders understand this in theory – but far fewer embed it in practice.
Our co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis’s Olympic rowing crew is a powerful case study of what this looks like in action. In 1998, they were a group of ordinary athletes consistently finishing 7th or 8th on the world stage. Two years later, they won Olympic gold in Sydney. The shift wasn’t down to talent alone. Ben’s the first to admit they weren’t the most naturally talented, nor the best physically. He does suggest they were better than their anyone in the world at one thing – learning. Ben attributes their ability to learn from challenging everything they did and focusing relentlessly on the team dynamic: how they communicated, behaved, and worked together to raise their collective level.
As Ben neatly puts it to become high performing:
From our experience across high performance in sport and business, the highest-performing teams consistently get five conditions right:
- A clear, shared goal that unites the team and directs their focus
- Mutual accountability, where contribution is visible and shared
- Trust and psychological safety, enabling open, constructive challenge
- Clear roles aligned to a mutual purpose, so that each member understands their unique value – and how it connects to others
- The ability to learn faster than their competition – A regular cadence of review, feedback and course correction, which sustains momentum
When these elements are in place, the team can align behind decisions quickly, stay resilient under pressure, and course-correct together when things go off track. They develop the clarity and cohesion needed to have the right conversations – and the culture that allows those conversations to happen openly and constructively.
High Performing Teams are Built, Nurtured and Refined - It Takes Focus and Energy to get Right
It’s a common misconception that high-performing teams form organically – as long as the right individuals are in the room.
In reality, the most effective teams are intentionally developed. They are shaped through sustained attention to behaviour, structure, and trust. And they are led by people who are willing to challenge not just what the team does – but how it works together. It doesn’t happen by chance – it takes ongoing energy and focus to get it right. But it can happen in your business.
And when it does, the impact is unmistakable – in decision-making, in team energy, and ultimately, in results. As Patrick Lencioni wrote in the seminal The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, trust, accountability, and shared commitment are not soft qualities – they’re strategic differentiators for performance and resilience. (Patrick Lencioni — The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002))
Teams Are More Than Meetings: So, How Do You Build a High-Performing Team?
There’s no single blueprint. But there are consistent patterns that high-performing teams follow – and that underperforming teams tend to overlook.
Here’s what we’ve learned over more than a decade of supporting ambitious senior leaders to get the best out of their teams.
1) Start with Clarity of Direction: Mutual Purpose, Not Just Strategy
There’s no shortage of language in the corporate world about vision, mission, and strategy – but a lofty statement alone is rarely what drives performance. While these are important, High-performing teams are anchored by a clear, meaningful mutual purpose: a goal that is specific and clear enough to guide decisions and shared enough that everyone feels ownership over it.
This goes far beyond a mission statement gathering dust. It requires clarity not just in the leader’s head – but in the team’s collective understanding. In many teams we work with, the purpose is assumed, but not embedded. Everyone nods, but beneath the surface, there are competing interpretations, unspoken priorities, or role confusion.
When purpose lacks clarity or buy-in, teams drift. Siloed thinking can take root. decision-making becomes inconsistent and collaboration is replaced with “club before country” thinking – where personal or functional goals override shared success.
McKinsey research consistently shows that teams with a clearly articulated, shared purpose outperform their peers – especially during periods of uncertainty, transformation, or growth (McKinsey & Company -“Organizing for the Future: Nine Keys to Becoming a Future-Ready Company”, 2021)
Olympic teams don’t win because each rower is chasing their own definition of success. They win because they’re all pulling toward the same goal – something that matters to everyone in the boat. That’s why many of our clients come to us: to get crystal clear on what they’re trying to achieve as a team, and how to align every member behind it.
You can explore more why every team needs a shared goal here.
2) Create the Conditions for Challenge and Trust
Psychological safety is one of the most widely researched and cited foundations of team performance – and for good reason. Without it, collaboration becomes performative, conflict is avoided, and problems stay hidden.
In simple terms: people need to feel safe to speak up. To share a concern, raise a disagreement, admit a mistake – and trust they won’t be punished or undermined for doing so.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term, defined psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” (Amy Edmondson, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, 1999).
More than a decade later, Google’s Project Aristotle – a landmark multi-year study into what makes teams effective – reached a striking conclusion: psychological safety was the single most important factor. Teams where people felt able to speak up outperformed those where they didn’t – regardless of experience, intelligence, or technical skill.
And yet, we regularly work with senior teams where conversations are civil but constrained. Difficult issues sit just beneath the surface. Feedback is filtered. Decisions go unchallenged.
It’s important to be clear: psychological safety isn’t about being ‘nice’ or avoiding friction. It’s about creating the conditions for truth to be spoken – and heard – especially when pressure is high or time is short.
One important supporting component of psychology we work with teams to define is a clear set of Team Rules – explicit agreements on how the team wants to operate, challenge one another, make decisions, and move forward. We challenge hard to ensure these aren’t generic buzz words or empty sentiment. They’re lived behaviours that help teams create safety and raise standards – in service of a shared goal.
3) Shift from Role Clarity to Collective Accountability
Lack of role clarity is one of the most common performance barriers in senior teams. Assumptions go untested. Accountability blurs. Projects stall or duplicate.
But high performance requires more than just clarity around individual responsibilities – it demands mutual reliance. Team members must not only understand their own role, but how it supports, intersects and relies on others. That mutual reliance is what transforms a group of capable individuals into a cohesive team. Research from Harvard Business Review (The Secrets of Great Teamwork, 2016) highlights that high-performing leadership teams operate on “joint ownership” of strategy and delivery – not individual agendas. When accountability is shared, execution accelerates and silos shrink.
It also requires a mindset shift: from personal achievement to collective delivery. That means shared goal clarity and/or team KPIs, not just a functional focus. It might mean a shift in how role, remit and how teams review performance, rather than a perhaps more isolated update approach. It might also mean that feedback loops need to be built to serve team performance – not just by individual department.
It’s not unusual for leadership teams to be made up of highly capable individuals – each with deep expertise and strong track records. But that doesn’t guarantee team performance and how they come together to work as a collective.
Many teams don’t fail due to a lack of talent – they fail because they overlook the importance of how they need to work collectively to win together.
You can learn more about How Winning Executive Teams Stay Aligned and Focused here.
4) Make Learning Your Competitive Edge
If there’s one thing that separates high-performing teams from the rest, it’s this: they learn faster than anyone else.
Learning isn’t a one-off intervention or a leadership offsite – it’s a habit. High-performing teams treat every interaction as an opportunity to improve. Feedback is not reserved for annual reviews or formal 360s. It’s timely, direct, and built into the rhythm of their work. When done regularly and in the right way, it’s not seen as a correction, but as a shared commitment to growth.
It’s no surprise therefore in Gallup’s findings that teams that receive regular, strengths-based feedback experience 12.5% higher productivity and 14.9% lower turnover (State of the American Manager, 2015).
Ben’s Olympic rowing crew is a case study in learning at speed. Their transformation wasn’t about talent – Ben’s the first to say they weren’t the strongest. What set them apart? They learned faster than the Aussies, Italians and any of the other crews. They challenged everything they did, worked relentlessly on how they operated as a unit, and created a team culture where no opportunity to improve went unspoken. They had a philosophy that summed this up as a crew:
To help put this ethos into action, Ben and the crew regularly performance reviewed as a team. Regularly reviewing together allowed them to have open conversations with a focus on adding boatspeed:
What does this look like in your leadership team? How might you have these conversations with your functional teams?
Time is such a precious resource for senior leadership teams. As such, we suggest leadership meetings are a good ‘performance moment’ to analyse. How efficiently do you use the scarce time you do have to come together? How well are you able to make decisions? Are you talking about the right things/on the same level of understanding going into them? Try using 5 minutes at the end of your meetings to use the above performance review questions to open up discussions.
By making feedback a regular part of a team’s routine, leaders can make sure that learnings are harvested and capitalized on. This isn’t always easy. It requires vulnerability, honesty, and trust. But in our experience, it can become a powerful
performance enhancer as people start to become curious around their own performance, what works well, and what could be better or approached differently. As we like to say, “Success leaves clues”, and this exercise can be valuable in making those clues clear and obvious to follow the next time round.
In high-performing teams, feedback is not personal, it’s crucial information to help them learn. It’s a vital part of how they stay sharp, move fast, and raise the bar – together
5) Measure What Matters – and use it to drive progress
Measurement matters – but what you choose to measure sends a powerful signal about what really counts. In high-performing teams, measurement isn’t just about tracking outputs. It’s about defining what success looks like, and using that clarity to move from where you are now to where you need to be.
We often say: if you want to raise performance, you first need to understand your current reality. That means establishing a baseline — not just of delivery metrics, but of the behaviours, alignment and ways of working that drive performance beneath the surface.
Measurement can enable teams to:
- Get clear on their current state vs the future state they’re aiming for
- Track progress against shared team goals, reviewed regularly
- Define success indicators that are owned and understood by everyone
- Create the mechanism – and permission – to adapt quickly when progress stalls
Without that rhythm and visibility, underperformance becomes easier to ignore. Energy drifts. Teams can lose momentum on the path to their goals.
By contrast, when teams commit to meaningful measures, it becomes easier – and safer – for anyone to call out when something isn’t good enough. Measurement becomes a tool for shared accountability and course correction, not just reporting.
As our co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis reflects:
“When I think back to our rowing crew, we were crystal clear on what we wanted to achieve – we wanted to be Olympic champions. We broke that down into specific focus areas, and within that, we identified exactly what we needed to measure that would help us generate boatspeed. Whether it was a part of our technique or how we communicated, we tracked it. That clarity meant that every one of the nine people in the boat – and the 70 supporting us – could direct every conversation, action and decision towards making the boat go faster.”
Real-World Example: Primark’s Leadership Shift
When we partnered with Primark, they weren’t facing a crisis – but they recognised that performance had plateaued. Primark’s People and Culture team engaged us to work on a set of new strategic priorities from a restructuring to equip over 2,000 Department Managers (DM’s) to lead their teams more effectively. Initially, we designed and launched a bespoke leadership programme to three cohorts of DM’s in the UK and Ireland, before rolling out a wider programme to over 2,000 DMs in 17 countries.
Through a targeted programme of workshops and diagnostics, we supported the team to:
- Define a shared team goal that provided clarity and focus
- Identify and shift unproductive patterns of behaviour
- Build deeper trust and alignment across the senior group
- Create team rhythms that supported pace and accountability
The result was a more cohesive, commercially-focused leadership team – with greater alignment, resilience, and strategic impact across the business.
Interested in exploring this further?
We support senior teams to transform their performance – through tailored programmes that align your people, behaviours and goals. Book a conversation with our team if you’d like to understand more about how we can help you apply this to your team and the context of what you’re trying to achieve.
