How leaders can build high-performance teams

Performance reviews are inherently individual. They lead us to think of "high performers" as individuals rather than members of a team. But high performers rarely work in isolation. They're typically a cog in the greater machine of a high-performance team.

Building such a team may not be as simple as putting a few high performers together and calling them a team, but any effort put into putting a high-performance team together inevitably brings a massive return on your investment.

Here’s your guide to high-performance teams, from what they are to how they’re built and the challenges that come with that.

What is a high-performance team?

You know a high-performance team when you see their work. They can complete just about any project you put in front of them, no matter how complex or difficult. They work together seamlessly, finishing tasks much faster than other teams. They adapt quickly to changing circumstances and even come up with insightful solutions when the organization hits a rough patch.

Just like any other team, they’ll have their conflicts. However, high-performance teams navigate these with maturity and professionalism. They always have the highest output in the organization and need little oversight. This gives their managers the bandwidth to focus on a broader strategy rather than constantly resolving conflicts or guiding them in the minutiae of their work.

You can easily identify your high-performance teams by what they get done and how much of it they do. But do you know what goes into building these teams?

What is a high-performance team?

You know a high-performance team when you see their work. They can complete just about any project you put in front of them, no matter how complex or difficult. They work together seamlessly, finishing tasks much faster than other teams. They adapt quickly to changing circumstances and even come up with insightful solutions when the organization hits a rough patch.

Just like any other team, they’ll have their conflicts. However, high-performance teams navigate these with maturity and professionalism. They always have the highest output in the organization and need little oversight. This gives their managers the bandwidth to focus on a broader strategy rather than constantly resolving conflicts or guiding them in the minutiae of their work.

You can easily identify your high-performance teams by what they get done and how much of it they do. But do you know what goes into building these teams?

The high-performance team model

According to this model from consultants at Triaxa Partners, every high-performing team has the following characteristics.

Clear roles

This goes beyond making sure everyone has a job title reflecting their work. Everyone needs to feel like their work contributes to the team’s overall goals while knowing exactly how to contribute to each task. Having clear limits between roles also lets people know when to take something on themselves and when to pass it on to a teammate with more expertise.

This doesn’t end with strictly role-related responsibilities. If someone on the team is particularly skilled at running meetings, deploying new processes, or planning team outings, then making that part of their role can help your team’s overall performance.

Accepted leadership

Leaders make or break a team. Poor leadership turns what would be a team of high performers into disorganized, frustrated individuals who can’t seem to align on the simplest tasks, let alone more complex projects.

To lead a team of high performers, managers must strike the right balance between stepping in to guide their team and stepping back to let their people work. This is already challenging enough, but micromanagement can be especially tempting when high-performance teams take on multiple high-pressure projects.

“Accepted” leadership also means the team needs to recognize their leader’s competence. With your top performers, trust needs to go both ways.

Effective processes

High performers need processes that support their abilities. Dealing with outdated tools, excessive administrative work, or overly zealous stakeholders will make their work unnecessarily difficult. A high-performance team quickly becomes average—or worse—when ineffective processes weigh them down.

A high-performance team regularly evaluates and optimizes processes to keep working as efficiently as possible.

Solid relationships

You don’t need everyone on a high-performance team to be best friends. However, team members still need to build strong, professional relationships to collaborate effectively. These relationships are built on trust, positive experiences, and a shared sense of achievement.

Excellent communication

Communication is at the core of every task a team might handle. With high performers, that communication is nothing short of excellent. High-performance teams say exactly what they mean, use the best communication channel available to them, and are quick to clear up misunderstandings. High performers don’t lose sight of what’s important just because they think someone said something inappropriate.

Common purpose

Above anything else, high-performance teams are aligned on a single goal. This keeps people from getting distracted by secondary objectives, working on projects that overlap or contradict each other, and losing time on initiatives that don’t support the team’s responsibilities. Getting aligned on a goal and consistently realigning the team on that priority are essential for building a high-performing team.

Why build high-performance teams?

While every leader hopes that all of their teams will be high performers, they don’t always put in the effort to set up their teams for success. Turning an average team into a high-performing one can be challenging, but it comes with serious benefits.

They’re more productive

High performers get more done than average workers, and that effect is magnified when you put them in a team together. With just a few high-performance teams, you’ll see organization-wide improvements in productivity and business outcomes.

No challenge is too big

Give a high-performance team the most difficult challenge you can imagine, and they’ll start thinking about ways to beat it. As long as you trust them to get things done their way and give them the tools they need, you’ll be surprised by the problems they can fix.

They’re a positive influence

High-performance teams are inspiring. Having even just one team of high performers in your organization will give everyone else something to aspire to. You’ll need to do some extra work while building the first few high-performance teams, but as others see what those teams can do, they’ll be inclined to make their own progress toward that lofty goal.

They’re reliable

All teams experience occasional dips in performance, whether due to broader forces in the organization, complications with specific projects, or just a passing funk. But with high-performance teams, those dips are less frequent, less intense, and pass more quickly. That means they can be relied on for just about any task or project, and you know they’ll either achieve great things or give you great insights into why a project failed.

They can help you cut costs

All too often, organizations that need to cut costs start looking at which roles they can cut. But the sharp increase in productivity you get from having a few high-performance teams can lead to massive efficiency gains in budgets and resourcing.

The challenges of building high-performance teams

Having an organization stacked with high performers is more than just a desirable goal; it can make the difference between you and your competition. So why doesn’t every organization have nothing but high-performance teams?

It’s much easier said than done.

Higher standards

High performers are held to higher standards than everyone else. Those standards make them high performers in the first place, keep their performance steadily improving, and make them some of the most trusted contributors in your organization. But those high standards apply to every aspect of building these teams, from the initial recruitment of the right people to running effective one-on-one meetings and keeping your leaders accountable.

Those standards are tough to establish and tougher to stick to.

A need for strong leadership

Not every leader is suited to heading a team of high performers. That means your organization needs to improve at identifying the right leaders, cultivating their leadership skills, and putting them in charge of the right teams.

The pressures of leadership are greater for leaders of high-performing teams, which can lead to organizations needing to give these leaders more support or, worse, replace them more often.

Turnover

A team of high performers is more than the sum of its parts, but those parts are essential to keeping the team running. Every member has a wealth of institutional knowledge and a skill set that fits perfectly with the rest of the team. Having just one of them leave can make it much harder to build your high-performance team. And if your organization is going through a season of high turnover, just setting the groundwork to build one of these teams can feel impossible.

Your organization’s weak points

High-performance teams stress test your organization. They push the limits of what’s possible and move quickly, closing projects faster than their colleagues. So you’ll quickly find out if any aspect of your organization isn’t conducive to building—and maintaining—high-performance teams. Whether it’s outdated processes, inadequate tools, or a struggling company culture, you’ll need to work out these kinks before building your high-performance team.

Lack of focus

When you have a high-performance team, every stakeholder wants to use them for their own projects. Whether it’s a marketing team contributing to sales goals or an HR team helping with leadership tasks, they’ll often suffer from a lack of focus. Remember that high-performance teams need total alignment to perform at their best, so having these scattered priorities can really bring their performance down.

Get everyone performing their best

A high-performing team can really turn things around for an organization. They complete projects in a fraction of the time it takes other teams, they’re up to any challenge you can put in front of them, and they push your organization to new heights. While building these teams can be challenging, they’ll be a beacon for everyone else, showing what’s possible with the right know-how and some extra dedication.