How to Build a High Performing Team (Without a Single Team Building Exercise)
When it comes to how to build a high performing team many leadership books will tell you to ‘hire the best people.’ Culture consultants will tell you to build psychological safety. HR will send you a team effectiveness survey. None of it is wrong, exactly. But none of it gets at the thing that actually determines whether a group of people performs as a team or merely occupies the same org chart.
In more than twenty years of coaching leaders and working with teams from start-ups to Fortune 500s, here’s what I know: high performing teams are built on the quality of the relationships between the people on them. Not talent. Not process. Not ping pong tables and away days.
Relationships. And more specifically, a particular kind of relationship — one where people are genuinely invested in each other’s success.
Here’s how to build a high performing team.
Start with an honest picture of where you are
Most leaders assume they know the state of relationships on their team. Most are at least partially wrong. The relationships people perform in meetings are not always the relationships that exist between meetings.
The Relationship Ecosystem™ — a framework I developed in Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships — maps relationships across four dynamics: Ally, Supporter, Rival, and Adversary. Allies are genuinely invested in mutual success. Supporters are well-disposed but less actively engaged. Rivals are in competition, not necessarily maliciously but not aligned either. Adversaries are actively working against you.
Before you can build anything, you need to know what you’re actually working with. Which relationships on your team are genuinely in Ally territory? Which ones have quietly slipped into Rival or worse? Where are the fault lines that nobody is talking about but everyone is working around?
That honest picture is your starting point. Not the team effectiveness survey. Not the away day feedback form.
Build the Ally Mindset™ practices into how the team works
In You, Me, We: Why We All Need a Friend at Work, my co-authors Eric Spencer, Ruby Vesely, and I identified five Ally Mindset™ practices that define what it means to genuinely show up for the people you work with:
Abundance and generosity: operating from the belief that there’s enough success to go around, and actively creating conditions for others to succeed.
Connection and compassion: staying curious about what’s driving people’s behaviour rather than defaulting to judgment.
Courage and vulnerability: having the honest conversations that most teams avoid, and being willing to show up imperfectly.
Candor and debate: saying what you actually think, even when it’s uncomfortable, and creating space for others to do the same.
Action and accountability: following through on what you commit to, and holding others to the same standard without drama.
These aren’t values to put on a wall. They’re behaviours — specific, observable, and developable. The leaders who build high performing teams are the ones who model these practices consistently and create the conditions for others to do the same.
Address the relationships that are costing you
Every team has at least one relationship that is quietly draining energy. A Rival dynamic between two senior people who have never fully resolved a territorial conflict. An Adversary who is managing the appearance of cooperation while undermining decisions. A pattern of unspoken disagreement that surfaces in passive resistance and slow execution.
High performing teams are not teams without these dynamics. They’re teams where leaders have the courage to name them and do something about them. That’s where most team building falls flat — it creates positive experiences without addressing the actual friction.
The Relationship Pulse Check — three questions: what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s one thing we can do to ensure mutual success — is a tool I use with teams specifically for this purpose. It creates a structured space for the honest conversations that teams need and rarely have.
Make relationship investment a leadership habit, not an event
The biggest mistake leaders make with team development is treating it as an event. The offsite. The team building day. The workshop. These things have value, but only if they’re reinforced by daily habits that keep relationships in good repair.
Connection before content — taking sixty seconds at the start of a meeting to actually check in with the people in the room before diving into the agenda — is a habit that costs nothing and compounds over time. It signals that the people matter, not just the work. And on a high performing team, those two things are inseparable.
Work with a team coach
The leaders who learn how to build a high performing team rarely do it alone. A team coach brings an outside perspective that is impossible to replicate from inside the system — someone who can see the dynamics that are invisible to the people living inside them, name what’s not being named, and create the conditions for the team to do work it couldn’t do without support.
If you’re serious about wanting to build a high performing team, I’d welcome a conversation about what that could look like. Book a call at skyeteam.com or reach me at morag@skyeteam.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you build a high performing team?
Map the relationships first using the Relationship Ecosystem™ — which dynamics are genuinely Ally, which have slipped to Rival or Adversary? Then build the five Ally Mindset™ practices into how the team works. Address relational friction before it hardens into culture. Treat relationship investment as a daily habit, not an annual event.
What are the characteristics of a high performing team?
Genuine mutual investment: people in Ally relationships, not just professionally civil. The courage to name problems early. Candor that debates without becoming personal. Accountability that follows through. High performing teams don’t avoid conflict — they make it productive. That’s the Ally Mindset™ in practice.
How long does it take to build a high performing team?
Most teams I coach see meaningful shifts in three to six months when the relational work is done deliberately. The timeline depends on the starting point and how consistently the leader invests. The mistake is expecting performance before the relationships are in place to support it.
Morag Barrett is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and USA Today bestselling author on a mission to create cultures of connection in a world of disconnection. She is the CEO and founder of SkyeTeam, an international leadership development firm, and has supported more than 15,000 leaders across six continents to achieve better results through the power of their professional relationships. Her books — Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships and You, Me, We: Why We All Need a Friend at Work — give leaders the frameworks and conversations that actually move the needle. Her signature keynote, Fine Is a Four-Letter Word, is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and industry conferences worldwide. A member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches — an exclusive global community of the world’s top leadership thinkers and coaches — she is also a regular contributor to Fast Company.
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