It is inescapable: teamwork. Whether you are volunteering at an event for your kid’s school or leading a business unit or company, one thing you will need to not only understand, but dial-in on is how to lead teams. 

Sure, it’s easy to get things done yourself, and some might even prefer it that way. But when you have to inspire and guide a whole team, like an orchestra conductor, to deliver on some outcome, you will quickly find out it’s hard and messy. It can take years to develop good team-leading skills. 

Now, once you manage to get leading teams down, the next level up is fostering a high-performance team. That’s another magnitude of a challenge. It’s easy to hire world-caliber people, but it is not easy to achieve high-performance. 

A high-performing team can produce unimaginable outcomes. It’s essentially a state of flow, which is described as being in the zone or the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity according to Wikipedia.  In this case, it’s not individually experienced, rather a collective partnership that emerges through teamwork. 

But what gives way to being a high-performance team? What components are vital for crafting a team in which each player operates to their fullest potential? 

As a high-performance team coach, I spent a lot of time in the laboratory testing out what actually enables teams to leapfrog into high-performance, and it’s not what you may think: hire top talent. Sure, it doesn’t hurt, but what absolutely needs to be present are the factors below, and those don’t always come organically in a business setting:    

The importance of psychological safety 

“Psychology Safety”, a term coined by Harvard Business School leadership Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson, means the shared belief that a team is a safe space for interpersonal risk-taking. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Edmondson on a recent episode of my podcast, Unmessable, and we got to talking about teamwork and the importance of feeling empowered in collaborative environments. According to Dr. Edmondson, psychological safety is the foundation upon which people are willing to speak up, without fear of looking bad, being dismissed or, worse, face consequences. 

“You need talent plus psychological safety to thrive and innovate in the knowledge economy. Psychological safety plays a critical role. It’s not the end in itself. It’s not even a driving force of effectiveness. It’s a moderator. It’s the key that unlocks that talent,” said Dr. Edmondson.  

From taking ownership of a failed project to disagreeing with your boss on a subject you are particularly passionate about, or even bringing a long-shot idea to the table during brainstorming when there is a culture of psychological safety, it gives way to vulnerability. Being vulnerable, as I outlined in this piece, increases your ability to effectively lead. 

[Listen to the full podcast episode with Dr. Amy Edmondson] 

Openness and authentic connections

Studies have shown that a large part of why people love their jobs is because of the authentic relationships they developed and the collaboration they get to experience in teamwork. Sure, you have to love the actual job itself, but more than that you have to love the people you work with. When authentic relationships are present, it tends to lead to openness and transparency, which resonates for teams.  

Trust and Integrity

According to Dr. Edmondson, trust is a cornerstone of successful teamwork. There’s no way a team can function to its fullest capacity without a high level of trust holding it all together. The same can be said about integrity. Members of a team need to feel like they all have the same common goal ahead of them and more importantly, have each others’ backs. 

A Mix of Personalities

While having high-caliber talent on the team helps to perform well, having the right mix of characters will help make things gel.  Diversity in teams can be a tremendous asset. An effective way to quantify somehow that you have the right mix is by taking personality tests like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, now taken by thousands of people and used by leading organizations to determine hiring processes and team dynamic. The only issue with this is people are not static objects and predictably will change, and, hopefully, evolve over time. So while initially useful, it’s not a long-term tool.

It is well-known that hiring world-class people helps in building a strong team, but what pushes teams into high-performance beyond effective leadership is having psychological safety, trust, authentic relationships and the right mix of personalities present. That’s why work is required to have these factors present by design.