High Performance by Design: Why Great Teams Don’t Just Happen
Nearly thirty years ago, I completed a PhD exploring a question that has stayed with me throughout
my working life:
Why do some teams achieve exceptional performance while others, containing equally talented
people, remain stubbornly ordinary?
At the time, teams were enjoying one of their periodic moments in the management spotlight.
Organisations were becoming flatter, work was becoming more complex, and teams were being
promoted as the natural antidote to hierarchy, functional silos and slow decision-making.
There was an appealing logic to this. Bring talented people together around a shared task and the
result should be greater creativity, flexibility and performance.
Except it often wasn’t.
For my doctoral research, I studied 49 project management teams working in the UK construction
industry. They provided an unusually useful research environment: real teams doing broadly
comparable work within the same organisation, but experiencing different projects, clients,
challenges and outcomes.
My aim was to understand what accounted for those differences in performance.
The research belongs to another era. The organisational world has changed enormously since the
1990s, and my own thinking about teams has developed with it. But one conclusion from that work
has become more important to me rather than less:
High-performing teams don’t simply happen. We have to create the conditions in which high
performance becomes possible.
A Team Is a Design Choice, Not a Guarantee of Performance
One of the starting propositions of my thesis was deliberately unfashionable.
Teams are not inherently good.
Putting people into a team does not automatically make work more collaborative, innovative or
productive. A dysfunctional team can make decisions more slowly, obscure accountability, suppress
dissent and consume extraordinary amounts of organisational energy.
The relevant question is therefore not:
How do we create more teamwork?
It is:
What does this work require people to accomplish together that they cannot accomplish as
effectively alone?
Teams make particular sense where the work is highly interdependent; where knowledge is
distributed across different people; where problems cannot easily be proceduralised; and where
people must continually interpret, adapt and solve problems together.
That was true of the project teams I studied. It is even more true of many teams today.
Increasingly, significant organisational challenges cross functional, geographic and stakeholder
boundaries. No individual possesses all the knowledge, authority or resources required to resolve
them.
Under those conditions, collective performance matters enormously.
But forming the team is merely the beginning.
Start with Performance, Not Teamwork
Another conclusion from the research was that it is surprisingly easy to confuse a good team
experience with a high-performing team.
We instinctively associate effective teams with trust, cohesion, participation, good communication
and strong relationships. All can be enormously important.
But none is the ultimate purpose of the team.
A team exists to create something of value.
In my research I therefore deliberately looked beyond people’s assessment of their own teamwork.
Team performance included customer satisfaction, productivity and financial measures.
That distinction mattered.
The research did not reveal a simple relationship in which teams with the healthiest internal climate
automatically generated the best external performance. Different outcomes were associated with
different combinations of conditions and behaviours.
This led me towards a principle that still shapes how I think about team effectiveness today:
Performance has to be understood from the outside in as well as the inside out.
A senior team may regard itself as collaborative while its stakeholders experience it as difficult to
navigate.
A leadership team may enjoy high levels of trust but fail to confront strategically important issues.
A project team may have excellent relationships while repeatedly disappointing its customer.
Conversely, a team experiencing healthy tension and vigorous disagreement may be producing
exceptional decisions and extraordinary value.
The purpose of team development is therefore not to create some universally desirable state of
“teaminess”.
It is to help the team become more capable of doing the work that matters.
Design the Conditions Rather Than Engineer the Behaviour
This became the central idea in my research.
If there were a small number of behaviours that reliably distinguished every high-performing team,
team development would be relatively straightforward. Diagnose their absence, teach the
behaviours, and reinforce them until everyone performs them consistently.
The reality proved much more complicated.
The 49 teams operated in different social, temporal and task conditions. The particular behaviours
that helped one team succeed were not necessarily those required by another.
Trying to specify the perfect set of team behaviours therefore seemed less useful than asking what
conditions increased the likelihood that teams would discover effective ways of working for
themselves.
Three broad areas emerged particularly strongly from the research:
Leadership. How the leader creates meaning, direction and an enabling context for collective
performance.
Team organisation. How roles, responsibilities, resources, decision-making and the work itself are
organised.
Performance orientation. How clearly the team understands the outcomes that matter, receives
feedback, learns and keeps its attention on performance.
Together these created an enabling architecture within which different teams could develop
different performance strategies.
I find that distinction even more useful today.
Rather than asking people simply to “be more collaborative”, we can ask what makes collaboration
necessary, possible and worthwhile.
Rather than telling people to “speak up”, we can examine what happens when somebody challenges
prevailing thinking.
Rather than demanding greater accountability, we can look at whether ownership and decision
rights are actually clear.
Rather than exhorting people to become more agile, we can examine the planning, information and
authority structures that make adaptation possible or impossible.
Behaviour matters enormously. But behaviour takes place within a system.
Change the conditions and different behaviour becomes possible.
Purpose Helps Teams Navigate Complexity
One finding from the research particularly interested me.
Shared vision was associated with lower perceptions of project complexity.
The projects themselves had not magically become simpler. The same dependencies, uncertainty
and technical challenges remained.
But teams with a stronger shared sense of what they were trying to accomplish appeared better able
to navigate that complexity.
This distinction feels increasingly important.
In complex environments, clarity does not mean knowing exactly what will happen next. Often that
is impossible.
It means having enough shared direction to make intelligent choices when circumstances change.
Purpose gives the team a reference point.
It enables people to interpret information, make trade-offs, decide where to focus attention and
coordinate without continually escalating every ambiguity upwards.
The role of purpose is therefore not simply motivational.
Purpose is part of the team’s operating system.
Leadership Creates the Conditions for Other People to Perform
My PhD gave the team leader a significant role, particularly through the ability to inspire a shared
vision.
My thinking about leadership has broadened since then. I am less interested today in the idea of the
leader as a person displaying a prescribed collection of transformational behaviours.
But I remain convinced that leadership has a profound effect on the conditions surrounding team
performance.
The more useful question is:
What does my leadership create in other people?
Does it increase their capacity to think?
Does it make difficult information easier or harder to surface?
Does it distribute responsibility or encourage people to delegate decisions upwards?
Does it create productive challenge or quiet compliance?
Does it connect people across boundaries or reinforce dependence on the leader?
What leaders repeatedly do becomes part of the team’s environment.
And practical behaviour matters more than rhetoric. Encouraging challenge means little if
disagreement is punished. Talking about empowerment means little if decisions are continually
reclaimed. Advocating collaboration means little if individual success is consistently rewarded over
collective outcomes.
Leadership is therefore not separate from team design.
It is one of its most powerful components.
Every Team Has to Discover Its Own Performance Strategy
Perhaps the finding from the thesis that has most influenced my later work was also one of the least
tidy.
I could not identify a universal team climate that explained exceptional performance across all 49
teams.
At first sight that sounds disappointing.
In retrospect I think it was one of the most useful findings in the research.
Teams operate in different environments, with different histories, stakeholders, capabilities,
dependencies and challenges. Even the same team will require different ways of working at different
moments in its life.
The search for one ideal model of teamwork is therefore probably misplaced.
What matters is the team’s capacity to understand its current reality and develop a way of working
appropriate to it.
For one team, the critical shift might involve surfacing conflict that has been suppressed.
For another it might mean reducing unnecessary discussion and making decisions faster.
Another may need stronger relationships with stakeholders outside the team.
Another may have excellent relationships but insufficient discipline around priorities and execution.
And another may need to stop optimising its own function and begin acting as part of a wider
enterprise.
The question is not “What do high-performing teams do?” in the abstract. It is “What does this
team need to become capable of, here and now?”
That is a much more demanding question.
But it is also a much more useful one.
Team Development Happens in the Work
The research also challenged the idea that team building should be treated as an occasional event.
A workshop can create insight. It can open an important conversation, establish relationships or help
a team recognise something it has been avoiding.
But insight alone rarely changes a team.
Development occurs when the team tries something different in its actual work and learns from
what happens.
A new way of discussing competing priorities.
A different decision practice.
A regular stakeholder conversation.
A more explicit way of raising concerns.
A changed meeting rhythm.
A deliberate pause after a difficult event to ask what the team should learn from it.
Small practices, repeated in consequential situations, gradually alter how the team works.
This means team effectiveness is never finally “achieved”.
Teams change. Their work changes. Membership changes. Stakeholder expectations shift. Successful
habits can become constraints as circumstances evolve.
Effective teams therefore develop a capacity to notice, interpret, experiment and adjust.
Assessment has a role, but diagnosis should lead to inquiry rather than judgement.
Intervention has a role, but it should create new practice rather than dependency on the facilitator.
And reflection has a role because experience alone does not guarantee learning.
Team development is better understood as a continuous cycle of understanding, action, reflection
and adaptation.
From Team Design to a More Relational View of Performance
There are things I would express differently today from the way I did in 1997.
My original research inevitably reflected the organisational language of its time. It conceived team
performance largely through an open-systems model: inputs and enabling conditions influenced
team processes, which contributed to outcomes.
I now see the system as more fluid and reciprocal.
Conditions shape relationships, but relationships also reshape conditions.
Trust affects what people say. What people say changes what the team knows. What the team
knows changes the decisions it makes. Those decisions affect stakeholders, whose responses change
the environment confronting the team.
The boundary of the team itself has also become more porous.
Much important work now happens between rather than within teams. People belong
simultaneously to leadership teams, functions, projects, networks and communities. Knowledge may
sit in one place, resources in another and authority somewhere else again.
So I have become increasingly interested in the relational infrastructure surrounding performance:
trust, voice, authority, dependency, challenge, connection and the quality of interactions across
organisational boundaries.
But I don’t see that as rejecting the argument I made nearly thirty years ago.
It extends it.
High Performance Is Continually Designed
The enduring lesson from those 49 project teams is not that there is a formula for producing high
performance.
Quite the opposite.
Teams are social systems operating in changing environments. Their effectiveness cannot be
reduced to a checklist of desirable behaviours or a single model of great teamwork.
But neither is team performance entirely accidental.
We can create better conditions.
We can connect the team’s purpose more clearly to the value it exists to create.
We can design roles, relationships and ways of working that enable people to contribute.
We can create enough trust for important things to be said and enough challenge for assumptions to
be tested.
We can connect teams more intelligently to the stakeholders and systems around them.
And we can build practices through which teams continually learn and adapt.
That is why, after nearly three decades of working with teams, I still return to the word that sat at
the centre of my doctoral research:
design.
Not designing a perfect team.
Designing the conditions, relationships and practices through which this particular group of people
can do extraordinary work together.
