High-performing teams come from deliberate leadership and the right conditions. Away days and star hires rarely deliver them alone.
Many organisations invest mainly in individuals. Yet a strong individual in a struggling team will often underperform. Team conditions can multiply individual talent or waste it.
The conditions that matter
Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety was the most important factor in its effective teams. Edmondson's research explains why: safe teams share information, raise problems early and learn from mistakes.
J. Richard Hackman's research adds five structural conditions:
- A real team. Clear membership and work that truly needs collaboration.
- Compelling direction. Goals everyone understands and cares about.
- Enabling structure. The right size, mix of skills and norms.
- Supportive context. Information, resources and rewards that fit the team's goals.
- Expert coaching. Help at the right moments.
What leaders do
Build safety through your own behaviour. Admit uncertainty, ask for input before giving your view and thank people who challenge you. Workshops rarely outweigh unsafe daily behaviour.
Check for clarity. Ask each person to state the team's priorities and their own part. The gaps show where to be clearer.
Hold short, frequent feedback conversations. Delay makes performance conversations harder and less useful.
Decide with the team when it counts. Hackman found leaders often decide alone when collaboration would serve better. People commit more to decisions they helped shape.
Hold people to account without blame. Set clear expectations, review honestly and ask "What do we need to do differently?"
Build this capability in your organisation
Growth Performance designs bespoke programmes that turn insight into measurable behaviour change.
Build learning into the rhythm
High-performing teams pause to learn. Tannenbaum and Cerasoli's meta-analysis found well-run debriefs improved performance by around 20% to 25%.
Three useful structures:
- After action reviews after significant projects or milestones.
- Weekly retrospectives of 20 minutes: what went well, what did not and what to change.
- Monthly learning forums where people share experiments and lessons.
A skilled team coach can speed this up by helping the team see its own dynamics.
Handling underperformance
Leaving underperformance unaddressed signals that standards do not matter. Start by finding the cause:
- Skill gap. The person lacks the capability. Offer training and coaching.
- Will gap. Motivation is low. Explore what has changed.
- Situation gap. Something in the environment blocks them. Remove the obstacle.
Then agree what must change, by when, with what support and what happens next.
Teams with AI in them
AI changes how teams interact. In Ju and Aral's 2026 experiment, human-AI teams produced 50% more ads per worker.
Those teams also sent 18% fewer interpersonal messages, and their outputs were more alike.
AI agents are not yet good teammates for each other either. The 2026 CooperBench study found coding agents had 30% lower success working together than working alone.
Leaders now need to design who does what between people and AI, and how work is checked. That is Adaptation. Our team effectiveness workshops help teams work this through together.
Try this
Ask each team member privately: what do we do particularly well, and what most gets in the way of our performance? Share the themes and ask the team to design the response.
For a baseline, run the free Team Psychological Safety Audit.