# How to Build a High Performing Team From the Team You Have Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-build-a-high-performing-team/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-build-a-high-performing-team.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving teamwork at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Building a high performing team is about norms, not the roster. Eight research backed moves: safety, clarity, visible commitments, and peer accountability. ## Key facts - Title: How to Build a High Performing Team From the Team You Have - Category: Teamwork - Primary skill: Teamwork - Related skills: Influence, Communication - Primary keyword: how to build a high performing team - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-build-a-high-performing-team/ ## What this page covers - Building a high performing team is about norms, not the roster. Eight research backed moves: safety, clarity, visible commitments, and peer accountability. - Practical guidance for how to build a high performing team - How this topic connects to Teamwork ## Detailed explanation You build a high performing team by changing how the group works together, not by upgrading who is in it. Make it safe to raise problems, make the goal and the roles unambiguous, make commitments visible, and let people hold each other to them. Those norms, repeated week after week, move performance further than any change to the roster. That is worth hearing if you have just been handed responsibility for a team's output and have no say over who is on it. Most advice on this assumes you can hire, restructure, and fund development. The largest study anyone has run on the question suggests you do not need to. ## What actually builds a high performing team Since 2012, Google's Project Aristotle has studied 180 teams — 115 in engineering and 65 in sales — measuring 250 different attributes across groups ranging from three to fifty people. The checklist you will find on most other pages (clear goals, trust, two-way feedback, recognition, development) broadly matches what that research found, with one crucial difference in emphasis. The eight moves below start from that difference. ### 1. Stop trying to build the team out of stronger people Aristotle's most useful finding is a negative one: no combination of individual traits, skills, or personalities reliably predicted how well a team performed. What predicted it was a set of shared behaviors and norms — how members treated one another. So the roster you inherited is a far weaker constraint than it feels like. The lever is not who is in the room but what is normal in the room, and what is normal gets set by whoever behaves that way first and keeps doing it when it is inconvenient. Begin by naming, for yourself, the two norms this particular group most lacks. ### 2. Make it safe to say the unwelcome thing Of the five factors Aristotle identified — [psychological safety](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-create-psychological-safety/), dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact — psychological safety was the single strongest differentiator between the highest-performing teams and the rest, ahead of talent, seniority, tenure, and size. It also gates the other four: where speaking up feels risky, a vague plan goes unquestioned and a slipping deadline goes unmentioned until it is expensive. It is built in small visible increments — asking for the objection rather than the agreement, meeting bad news with questions instead of blame, and saying plainly when you got something wrong. ### 3. Raise the standard in the same move Safety is routinely misread as softness, which is how teams aiming for it end up pleasant and mediocre. Amy Edmondson, whose psychological safety research is among the most heavily cited work in the field, is explicit that high standards and safety are partners rather than opposites: safety is the condition that lets people challenge each other's work, not an agreement to stop challenging it. Say both halves out loud, in the same conversation — the bar this work has to clear, and the fact that anyone may question anyone's work, yours included. ### 4. Check whether you actually have a team Katzenbach and Smith's *The Wisdom of Teams* sets five criteria for a real team: a small group with complementary skills, a common purpose, specific performance goals, a shared approach to the work, and mutual accountability — with typical size at five to nine people. Run your group against that list honestly. A set of people who share a manager, a channel, and a [weekly meeting](/knowledge/communication/effective-meetings/) but no joint goals is a working group, and most of what follows will slide off it. That fix comes first: one purpose everyone can state unprompted, and results the group succeeds or fails at together. ### 5. Fix structure and clarity before you fix motivation Structure and clarity — people [knowing their role](/knowledge/teamwork/role-clarity/), the plan, and what good looks like — is the Aristotle factor most often skipped in favor of something more dramatic. Underperformance gets diagnosed as attitude far more often than attitude is actually the problem. Before concluding that someone is not trying, check whether they could state the team's current priority, the decisions they are allowed to make alone, and the standard their work is judged against. Where any of the three is fuzzy, write it down somewhere the whole team can see it, and watch how much of the motivation problem evaporates. ### 6. Make commitments visible so dependability can exist Dependability — work delivered on time and to the standard agreed — was Aristotle's second factor, and it is the one most often left to chance. A commitment nobody heard is not a commitment; it is an intention. The mechanic is unglamorous: at the close of every discussion, who is doing what, by when, and to what bar, captured where the whole team can see it. That one habit turns private good intentions into public ones, and it is what makes the next move possible at all. ### 7. Move accountability sideways, not upward In Patrick Lencioni's widely used team model — a practitioner framework rather than a peer-reviewed one — peer accountability is described as both the strongest and the rarest element of effective teamwork. Rare, because it asks for courage, clarity, and enough trust that the relationship survives the conversation. Where accountability runs only upward through you, the team simply learns to wait until you notice. Teams that perform [raise a missed commitment](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-hold-someone-accountable/) directly, quickly, and specifically, between the two people it concerns. Most of us find that conversation genuinely uncomfortable, which is worth [gauging your own starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) on before asking a team for it. ### 8. Connect the work to meaning and impact The last two Aristotle factors are personal: whether the work matters to the person doing it, and whether they can see it mattering to somebody else. This is not recognition, and it is not a values poster. It is line of sight — the team knowing who receives what they make and what changes for that person. Ask people individually which part of the work they would want more of, and name concretely who benefited from the last thing the team shipped. Over months, this is what stops the other seven from decaying back into routine. ## The skills that make this possible from where you sit Read back over those eight and notice what none of them are: a system you can install, a template you can download, or a decision you can announce. Each is a behavior somebody has to model first and keep modeling when it costs them something. Which quietly moves the question from the team to you. **Teamwork** is the substance of most of that list. Putting the common purpose ahead of personal agendas, being excellent at your own role while respecting other people's, engaging the disagreements that need to happen without letting them go personal, committing loyally to decisions you argued against, and raising a missed commitment promptly and specifically instead of letting it pass — those are the norms above, restated as things people do. They are practiced in ordinary weeks, not installed at an offsite. **Influence** is how a norm spreads when you cannot simply require it. Whether or not you formally lead this group, you change what is normal by delivering consistently enough that your example carries weight, taking responsibility for more than your own slice of the work, and taking the initiative — volunteering to write the goals down, to run the review, to raise the thing nobody has raised. Then persisting: following up on what was promised, holding the momentum through the weeks when nothing visible changes. **Communication** is where those eight moves either happen or quietly do not. Being clear and direct, leading with the main point, choosing a conversation over a written message when the topic is sensitive or complex, listening with a real intention to understand, and handling the harder moments — voicing disagreement, giving feedback that lands, apologizing cleanly. This is the exchange between people in a room, not meeting logistics or how you format an email. The free Work Skills Test is the quickest way to find out which of those three is currently your thinnest. It maps all twelve of the work skills the framework treats as buildable, so you can [see which ones need work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than guessing — and influence, in particular, tends to be the one people underrate in themselves while depending on it most for exactly this task. ## What this asks of you Some of the eight will already describe how you work — one or two you do without thinking about it, one or two you would have to make yourself do. That mix is the useful part. None of this is a trait people are born with; these are behaviors, so the ones you are missing are learnable, and you can build them without becoming a different kind of person at work. They also compound. The further your responsibilities reach past your own output, the more your results depend on conditions you create for other people rather than on what you personally produce. By reading this far, you have already done the part most people responsible for a team skip: working out what genuinely drives performance before trying to change anything. What is left is knowing your own starting point. ## See where you are starting from So the only thing left is to check that baseline. The **free** Work Skills Test is a short self-assessment that shows where you stand across all twelve work skills — teamwork, influence, and communication among them — and which of them will make the biggest difference to the team you are trying to build. It takes about 7 minutes and gives you something far more specific to act on than a general sense that you should be doing this better. **Take the test** Free, about 7 minutes, no sign-up needed — your results come at the end. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Building a high performing team is about norms, not the roster. Eight research backed moves: safety, clarity, visible commitments, and peer accountability. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Teamwork. It also relates to Influence, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-build-a-high-performing-team/ Preferred summary: "Building a high performing team is about norms, not the roster. Eight research backed moves: safety, clarity, visible commitments, and peer accountability." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.