Characteristics of high-performing teams

Most lists of high-performing team characteristics read like a job advert: passionate, collaborative, aligned, empowered. The words are not wrong. They are just impossible to check. Every team believes it is collaborative, and no manager has ever looked at their own team and concluded it lacks passion.

A more useful list describes what you would see. The eight below come from the research that has held up best, mainly J. Richard Hackman's decades of work on teams, Google's Project Aristotle and Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety, translated into behaviour you can spot in a normal week.

The eight characteristics at a glance

If you cannot describe what a characteristic looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, you cannot tell whether your team has it.

Each characteristic, and why it matters

1. A clear shared goal

Hackman called this a compelling direction: a purpose that is clear, challenging and consequential. The test is not whether the goal exists but whether people would describe it the same way. Ask five team members, separately, what the team is trying to achieve this quarter. Five matching answers is rare, and worth more than any amount of motivational language.

2. Clear roles

Google's Project Aristotle listed structure and clarity among the five dynamics that set its effective teams apart. Clarity is less about job titles than about decision rights: who can say yes, who must be consulted and who simply needs to know. Most team friction blamed on personality is really two people who each believe a decision was theirs.

3. Commitments that are kept

Project Aristotle called this dependability, and it is the plainest form of trust. A team where commitments are reliably kept can move fast, because nobody has to check. Watch out for the fake: a team that runs on last-minute heroics looks committed but is actually unreliable, and it burns out the same two or three people.

4. Safety to speak up

Edmondson defined psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and Project Aristotle ranked it the most important of its five dynamics. It is not the same as being nice. A safe team is one where I think this is wrong and I made a mistake cost nothing, which is why problems surface while they are still cheap. If you want a measure, the psychological safety survey questions guide covers the standard one.

5. Conflict about ideas

This is the characteristic most often mistaken for a problem. Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team puts fear of conflict second only to absence of trust, because a team that avoids arguments makes worse decisions and then fails to commit to them. High-performing teams argue about the work and not about each other. If your team never disagrees, it is not aligned. It is quiet.

6. Fast, specific feedback

Feedback that arrives months later, or that names a personality rather than a behaviour, changes nothing. High-performing teams give feedback while the work is still warm and phrase it so it can be acted on. The SBI model is the simplest way to get there: the situation, the behaviour, the impact.

7. Decisions that stick

A decision is only made when someone owns it and there is a date for the first action. Teams that skip this have the same discussion three times. A useful discipline is to end every meeting by reading the decisions back, each with a name and a date, as covered in how to run effective meetings.

8. Learning from their own work

The final characteristic is the one that keeps the others alive. High-performing teams look back at what happened, honestly, and change one thing. The question is never who got it wrong but what would we do differently. A regular retrospective is the standard tool; the sign it works is that the list of problems changes from one session to the next.

What high performance is not

Three things are routinely mistaken for high performance:

• Harmony. Teams that never argue often feel high-performing from the inside. Usually they are avoiding the conversations that would make them better.
• Hours. Long hours and constant availability measure effort, and often signal a team that plans badly and recovers with heroics.
• A star. A team carried by one outstanding individual performs only as long as that person stays, and usually underuses everyone else.

The opposite mistake is also common: assuming a team in difficulty is failing. Newly formed teams go through a rough patch as a matter of course. Tuckman called it storming, and the stages of group development explain why a team can look worse for a few weeks just before it gets better.

How to tell where your team stands

The fastest honest check is to score each of the eight characteristics from 1 to 5, alone, and then have every team member do the same without seeing your scores. Then compare. The manager's scores are usually higher, and the characteristic with the biggest gap is usually where the real problem is. To track progress over time, pair this with the scorecard in how to measure team performance.

If you would rather have it scored and written up for you, the free team performance check asks eighteen questions about observable behaviour across six dimensions that map closely to this list, and gives you a written report naming the weakest one and three things to try this week.

Then work on one characteristic at a time, in roughly this order, because each depends on the ones before it:

1. Goal and roles first. Without them, every other conversation is about the wrong thing.
2. Then safety and commitments. These are the foundations of trust, and nothing else holds without trust.
3. Then conflict and feedback. Only safe teams can argue productively and hear hard feedback.
4. Then decisions and learning. These turn a good team into one that keeps getting better.

Where the research comes from

Hackman, a Harvard psychologist, argued in Leading Teams (2002) that a team's performance depends less on the people in it than on its conditions: being a real team with stable membership, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive context and expert coaching. It is a useful corrective to the idea that high performance is mostly about hiring the right people, and the basis of what is now called team effectiveness.

Google's Project Aristotle studied its own teams and published five dynamics on its re:Work site: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. Who was on the team mattered less than how the team worked together.

Be wary of the precise percentages that circulate about high-performing teams being some fixed amount more productive or profitable. They are usually vendor survey figures with no published method. The research above does not need them, and nor does your team: the eight behaviours are observable, and observable is enough.

Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide, online and in person. Talk to us, or play The Weekly Challenge from our gamified learning apps to see the method in ten minutes.