High Performing Teams Programme
Our Team Development Programme for Executive or Leadership Teams
Build trust, align focus, and transform your team’s performance
This programme is designed to create the conditions for high performance. We provide the framework for your team to collaborate better, make sharper decisions and overcome challenges as a unit. By getting everyone pulling in the same direction, we enable your team to deliver a higher level of performance with confidence, to achieve results with greater consistency.
Watch Co-founder & CEO Ben Hunt-Davis and Senior Performance Consultant Natalie Macaluso share more about our High Performing Teams programme.
Tried and tested by over
100
teams
Impacting over
3,000
people
+97
Average NPS (considered world class)!
*from scores received in 2024 & 2025.
Who is it for?
In our work with teams we’ve seen it all. Your team may be newly formed or long-standing, in-person or completely hybrid. Whether you see your team as dysfunctional or looking to go from good to great, we’ve helped teams of all shapes and sizes to become high performers, quicker.
Our High Performing Teams Programme is commonly bought by ambitious strategic company and people leaders who are looking to transform their team performance.
Teamwork takes work! Great teams don’t happen by chance. They’re built – with discipline, trust, and shared motivation in pursuit of a goal. We help teams focus on the areas that deliver the greatest performance improvement.
Is this you?
| Your challenges | Your opportunities |
|---|---|
| A lack of strategic focus, apparent short term thinking and misalignment around purpose of direction | To create a clearly defined purpose and vision that unites the team |
| Decision-making feels unclear, slow, or is dominated by certain personalities or group think | A team that’s excited by the future, with shared and agreed upon ways of working to enable them to consistently be at their best |
| Ambiguity & conflict – ‘club before country’ thinking, politics and ego hold you back | Deeper trust, psychological safety, and motivation |
| Unspoken truths – lack of honest conversations, siloed mentality, breakdowns in trust | Create a culture of open and honest conversations that drive forward the key initiatives |
| Accountability and performance – Lack of buy-in, agreed upon actions not taken | Turn intent into action that matches your wider strategic ambition |
Our story: ordinary people in an elite team achieving the extraordinary
In 1998, Co-founder and CEO Ben Hunt-Davis MBE was part of a GB rowing crew that consistently underperformed, until they changed everything. To win gold in the 2000 Olympics, the crew knew they had to become more than just talented individuals. They had to become a world-class team and they had precious little time in which to do it.
That meant confronting ego, tension, and misalignment head-on (as Ben famously shares in the book at one point, he had to be restrained from swimming around the boat mid-race to argue with the Cox!). The breakthrough came when the team created a shared goal and focused on their mutual purpose. By agreeing how they’d work together, challenging and holding each other to account, they were able to hone their collective focus into one question:
Ben and his crew captured gold on the waters of Sydney and their ethos soon became a mantra far beyond sport. Their change journey is a water-tight case study of how a group of ordinary people can achieve something extraordinary and this became the foundation of our philosophy for team performance.
What makes this programme different?
Unlike traditional team development and coaching, this programme combines diagnostics, facilitation, live coaching, and a real-time Team Challenge that acts as a catalyst for change, tailored to your context and what you’re trying to achieve.
It’s structured to give your team:
- Real-world progress on a business-relevant challenge
- The opportunity to practice and embed new ways of working
- Momentum that continues beyond the workshops
What we cover
Our High Performing Team programme isn’t simply a training course, we help shift how your executive teams think, function and perform to drive lasting change for your business. To do this our course needs to flex to your needs and each programme is unique as a result, but a typical journey includes:
- Diagnostic interviews + team performance diagnostic tool
- A series of interactive team workshops (virtual or in-person)
- A bespoke Team Challenge worked on during the programme
- Facilitated sessions covering:
- Defining team purpose and mutual goal
- Understanding motivations and team dynamics
- Agreeing how to work together (e.g. behaviours, meetings, decision-making)
- Handling pressure, conflict, and feedback with skill
- Building resilience and “bounce-back-ability”
- Live coaching, feedback, and reflection
Why now?
If your leadership team is stuck in silos, under-delivering on potential, or struggling to lead your business forward as one, this programme can help you.
We’ve worked with over 100 teams and 3,000+ leaders. The impact is real, fast, and lasting.
Whether you’re preparing for a new phase of growth, a change of guard, cultural or political frictions are holding you back, or building a gold-medal team from scratch – we can help you get there.
Results That Speak for Themselves
Do reach out if you’d like to find out more about our work in this area. Below is just a snapshot of some of the recent outstanding results we have achieved with our clients teams.
180%
uplift in
‘having clear ways of working’
238%
uplift in
‘having a clear set of agreed team rules that we use to guide how we work together’
70%
uplift in
‘feeling aligned and clear on what is most important to drive success’
Let’s build your high-performing team
If you’re ready to unlock the full potential of your team, we’d love to explore your context, what you’re trying to achieve and design the right programme for you.
Working with the Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? team has been nothing short of exceptional. Their energy, wisdom, and deep expertise in high performance have been truly inspiring. Over the past two years, they’ve become more than just external partners, they feel like an extension of our own team. From content creation to design and delivery, their support has been incredible. What sets them apart is their ability to translate the principles of high performance from the world of elite sport into the workplace with clarity and relevance. It’s all about mindset and how you show up, and they help us do just that, every time.
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
We’d love to discuss how we can make your boat go faster,
get in touch so we can help you find the right solution
FAQ
Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?’s High Performing Teams Programme is a structured, practical programme designed to help executive, senior leadership and/or leadership teams to work better together and deliver stronger collective performance. It focuses on alignment, trust, decision-making and accountability, all directly linked and tailored to the organisation’s strategic priorities and what they are trying to achieve.
This is not a one-off team-building event or tick-box exercise. The programme is designed to create sustained performance improvement, not short-term motivation or a one-off intervention. It focuses on the performance transformation of a group to impact real business challenges, behaviours and outcomes over time, rather than activities that feel disconnected from day-to-day work.
The programme is usually sponsored by the CEO, Managing Director or a senior HR, People, Culture / L&D leader. This programme is often sought out in response to growth, change, performance challenges or the formation of a new leadership team.
It is designed for executive teams, senior leadership teams and functional leadership teams who want to improve how they work together and how effectively they deliver results.
Yes. Some teams use the programme to accelerate the performance of a newly formed leadership team, while others use it to reset behaviours, alignment and focus in long-standing teams. Our team have a wealth of experience who supported companies across a variety of sectors, shapes and sizes from fast growth startups through to the complexities of multi-regional, matrix FTSE 100 companies.
Yes. The programme is sector-agnostic and has been delivered across a wide range of industries. The focus is always on Olympic-winning performance principles, proven leadership theory and human behaviours rather than sector-specific theory.
Teams typically see clearer strategic alignment, stronger trust, improved decision-making and greater accountability. These changes translate into better execution, fewer unproductive tensions and stronger overall performance.
The programme is designed around the team’s real objectives and challenges. Sessions are anchored to what the team needs to deliver, not abstract models, ensuring improvements show up in day-to-day leadership and decision-making.
Our High Performing Teams Programme typically combines diagnostics, facilitated workshops and structured follow-up to build momentum over time. The exact design and structure is tailored to the team and organisation but typically runs from 6-12 months.
The majority of our work is delivered in the UK and Europe, however we do deliver our programmes globally. The programme can be delivered in person or virtually. Many organisations choose a blended approach.
The length and structure vary depending on the needs of the team. This is discussed during an initial exploratory conversation and diagnostic phase to ensure the programme fits the organisation’s context and objectives.
The best starting point is a conversation. We’ll explore your team’s context, challenges and goals and advise whether the High Performing Teams Programme is the right fit.
