The Secrets of High-Performing Teams

(And How You Can Be One Too)

Thanks to studies by Amy Edmondson (1999), Google (2023)and others, it is now well understood that the most basic prerequisite for high-performing teams is psychological safety. Organisations like NASA build this foundation with behaviours like ‘authentic appreciation’ and ‘establishing shared interests’ which create an environment of trust and respect (Pellerin, 2009), but this is not enough. Truly high-performing teams are four-dimensional, going well beyond the fundamentals…

In her more recent work, Edmondson (2018) makes reference to a second essential ingredient for high performance: Accountability. It is not enough for a team to simply feel safe in the knowledge of, “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999, p. 354). In The fearless Organisation, she suggests that it is a combination of psychological safety and accountability that actually produces high performance and illustrates this using a variation of the figure below (Edmondson, 2018, p. 23):

Once teams have established interpersonal trust, they need a process for establishing team standards and then holding one another to account for these, but even this is not enough. If psychological safety and accountability are two critical dimensions for high performance, then two more remain. These are:

1. Organising and belief systems; and

2. Clarity and commitment to the mission.

In NASA’s four-dimensional system for high performance, psychological safety and accountability are established in the people-building and team-building quadrants but taken to the next level by the acts of system-building and mission-building (see diagram).

System-building does not refer to coding or technological systems, but human organising and belief systems. In the first instance, the NASA 4-D system addresses role clarity, accountability and authority, with the express intention of eliminating confusion, duplication and misunderstanding from team operations. The goal here is to ensure that each team member is crystal clear on what they alone are accountable for and where they have authority to make decisions and can act with complete autonomy. The second element of this is the willingness to identify, challenge and replace dysfunctional beliefs (what NASA would call ‘red storylines’) before they progress into full-blown dramas.

Finally, the mission-building dimension introduces ‘reality-based optimism’ to ensure that there are no uncomfortable truths that the team are avoiding in their assessment of the current situation. Denial of reality can be an Achilles heel and so high-performing teams practice robust acknowledgement of what is not working before transitioning rapidly to more optimistic goals. This transition is equally important and is accompanied by a clear articulation of an audacious vision, with each of the team members expressing 100% commitment to the mission outcome. According to Amabile and Gryszkiewicz (1987) in their study of 120 high-performing research and development (R&D) scientists, having a strong sense of challenge was one of the biggest differentiators between creative and non-creative project outcomes. To quote one of the participants in this study, “We were put in a situation where we were told it could not be done – other companies had turned down the offer…so there was a challenge, and that challenge gave us our motivation.”

References

Amabile, T. M., & Gryszkiewicz, S. S. (1987). Creativity in the R&D Laboratory.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.

Google. (2023).  Retrieved 1/06/2023 from https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

Pellerin, C. (2009). How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams. https://www.amazon.com/How-NASA-Builds-Teams-Scientists/dp/0470456483