What Is a High Performing Team?
A high performing team is a group of people with complementary skills who share a common purpose and consistently exceed expectations through psychological safety, trust, and shared accountability.
A high performing team is a group of people with complementary skills who share a common purpose and consistently exceed expectations. They collaborate under pressure, maintain trust and accountability, and create psychological safety even when things get difficult. Unlike regular teams that complete tasks, high performing teams adapt, improve, and sustain excellence over time.
The difference isn't talent. It's culture. And culture is shaped by leadership.
McKinsey's research quantifies this: teams scoring above average on trust are 3.3× more efficient and 5.1× more likely to produce results.
The results speak for themselves. Gallup's research across 3.3 million employees found that high performing teams deliver 23% higher profitability, 51% lower turnover, and 78% less absenteeism. Google studied 180 of their own teams and found individual ability barely mattered. What mattered was how people worked together.
This article covers what high performance actually means, the five elements that research says matter most, why most teams never get there, and how yours can.
High Performing Team Definition
The formal definition: a high performing team is a group with stable membership, clear boundaries, and genuine interdependence who consistently produce superior results through shared accountability and psychological safety.
But definitions only get you so far. The real question is what makes them different in practice.
What the research says
Gallup's research across 3.3 million employees found that high performing teams don't just feel better. They produce measurably better outcomes: 23% higher profitability, 18% higher sales productivity, and 78% less absenteeism than bottom-quartile teams.
Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman found that six conditions account for up to 80% of variance in team performance — and they're designable. We break down Hackman's model alongside five other frameworks in our frameworks comparison.
See all 6 frameworks compared → →
What leaders experience
When we ask leaders to describe high performing teams they've been part of, the patterns are consistent. They talk about clarity. Trust. The feeling that mistakes could be discussed openly.
Everyone knew what we were trying to achieve. And we trusted each other enough to have hard conversations without it becoming personal.
— Leader in our program
What stands out is that these teams weren't necessarily more talented. They operated differently. Communication flowed. Feedback was direct but respectful. People took ownership without being asked.
Where leaders get stuck
Most leaders can describe what a high performing team looks like. Fewer can explain how they built one. The gap between knowing and doing is real.
Read our deep dive on the characteristics of high performing teams →
Team vs High Performing Team: What's the Difference?
A team is a group of people working together. A high performing team is something more specific.
What the research says
Hackman's research makes an important distinction: many groups are "teams" in name only. A real team has stable membership, clear boundaries, and genuine interdependence. Without these, you have a collection of individuals, not a team.
The performance gap is significant. Gallup found that business units in the top quartile for engagement more than double their odds of success compared to those in the bottom half.
What leaders experience
Leaders often assume their group is a team because it's called one. The org chart says "team." The Slack channel says "team." But when you ask whether everyone depends on each other's work, the answer is sometimes no.
We called ourselves a team, but we were really working in parallel. When we started actually depending on each other, everything changed.
— Leader reflecting on team transformation
Where leaders get stuck
The distinction matters because you can't apply team-building strategies to groups that aren't really teams. If people don't need each other to succeed, team interventions won't stick. The first question isn't "how do we improve?" It's "are we actually a team?"
The 5 Key Elements of High Performing Teams
Google's Project Aristotle studied 180 teams over two years. The researchers expected individual talent to matter most. They were wrong.
The five factors that predicted effectiveness, in order of importance:
- Psychological Safety — team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable
- Dependability — members reliably complete quality work on time
- Structure and Clarity — clear goals, roles, and execution plans
- Meaning — work is personally important to team members
- Impact — the team believes their work matters
The surprise wasn't just that psychological safety topped the list. Individual attributes, intelligence, personality type, even technical expertise, had far less predictive power than these team-level dynamics.
We explore each element in depth in our guide to the characteristics of high performing teams →
What High Performing Teams Are NOT
Misconceptions about high performing teams lead to strategies that don't work. Here's what the research contradicts.
They're not just talented individuals
Carnegie Mellon's Anita Woolley found that collective intelligence, a team's ability to perform across diverse tasks, is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members. Assembling your smartest people doesn't reliably produce your smartest team.
They're not conflict-free
High performing teams navigate conflict. They don't avoid it. Amy Edmondson's research found that high-performing hospital teams reported MORE errors than low-performing teams. Not because they made more mistakes. Because they discussed them openly.
They're not always harmonious
Productive disagreement within psychological safety drives innovation. Teams that avoid all friction often avoid the conversations that lead to better outcomes.
They're not formed overnight
Meaningful team development takes 6-12 months of sustained effort. Teams move through stages: forming, storming, norming, performing (Tuckman). Skipping stages doesn't speed things up. It creates problems later.
See our breakdown of high performing teams frameworks →
How These Teams Are Built
High performing teams are the outcome. Developing the leaders who build them is the work.
Why leaders? Gallup's research found 70% of the variance in team engagement comes from the manager. Not the organisation. Not the strategy. The manager.
Research on training transfer shows that when development is designed well, it explains 78.2% of performance variance. But transfer depends on three things: supervisor support, opportunity to practice, and organisational culture that reinforces new behaviours.
One-day workshops rarely create lasting change. The forgetting curve is mathematical reality. Memory decays exponentially without reinforcement. Ebbinghaus's research, replicated by Murre & Dros with R² = 0.987, shows that learners forget most new material within days without reinforcement.
The leaders who build high performing teams develop these capabilities over months, not days. They practice daily. They reflect on what's working and what isn't. They receive feedback and adjust.
Read our step-by-step guide on how to build a high performing team →
About the author
Ashley Leach is Founder of Leda. Leda's leadership development methodology was co-developed with Professor Anne Lytle (Monash Business School, Kellogg PhD) and has been recognised by AACSB's Innovations That Inspire. The platform has supported thousands of emerging leaders across Australia and New Zealand, with completion rates of 88-98% compared to 3-15% for typical digital learning.
Frequently Asked Questions
By outcomes (productivity, quality, customer satisfaction) and processes (psychological safety, trust, communication). Gallup's Q12 is one validated measure. The key is measuring both what teams produce and how they work together.
Typically 6-12 months of sustained effort. Teams move through stages: forming, storming, norming, performing (Tuckman). Research shows spaced learning significantly outperforms intensive workshops, so development needs to be spread over time.
Yes, with the right conditions: compelling direction, enabling structure, supportive context, and skilled leadership (Hackman). The research suggests team effectiveness depends more on deliberate design choices than on individual characteristics.
Psychological safety. Google's Project Aristotle found it was "by far the most important" predictor of team effectiveness. When team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable, everything else becomes easier to build.