What Makes a High Performing Team? (It’s Not What You Think!)

In 2012, Google spent two years and significant research budget trying to answer one question: what makes a high performing team? Their answer — psychological safety — swept through the leadership world and hasn’t left since. You can’t attend a leadership conference or open a management article without bumping into it.

Here’s what bothers me about how it’s been applied: psychological safety has become a destination. A culture initiative. A thing you implement. And in becoming that, it’s been stripped of the one thing that actually creates it.

Psychological safety is not something you build. It’s something that happens when people feel genuinely safe with each other. And people feel genuinely safe with each other when the relationships on the team are working.

That’s the part nobody talks about. So let’s talk about it.

What high performing teams actually have in common

In more than twenty years of working with leaders and teams across industries and continents, the pattern I keep seeing isn’t psychological safety as a program. It’s a particular quality of relationship between the people on the team.

In my book Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships, I mapped workplace relationships across four dynamics: Ally, Supporter, Rival, and Adversary. High performing teams are not teams without Rivals or Adversaries — they’re teams where the dominant dynamic is Ally. Where people are genuinely invested in each other’s success, not just their own.

That distinction matters more than most leaders realise. A team of individually talented people who are fundamentally in competition with each other will underperform a team of less individually brilliant people who are genuinely pulling together. Every time.

Why psychological safety follows relationships, not the other way around

Here’s the sequence that actually happens on high performing teams: people invest in each other’s success — they show up as Allies — and as a result, trust builds. As trust builds, people feel safer taking risks, naming problems, and saying the uncomfortable thing. That safety is psychological safety. It’s a relational outcome, not a starting condition.

When organisations try to install psychological safety directly — through workshops, frameworks, culture surveys — they’re trying to create the outcome without building the foundation. It’s like painting over damp walls and wondering why the paint keeps peeling.

The foundation is the quality of relationships on the team. Everything else follows from there.

The relationship dynamics that predict team performance

When I work with teams, one of the first things I do is help them map their Relationship Ecosystem™. Not the org chart — the actual quality of the relationships between the people who need to work together to get results.

What typically emerges is a picture that surprises leaders. There are Ally relationships they didn’t know existed. There are Rival or Adversary dynamics that have been quietly draining energy and slowing decisions for months. There are people who are Supporters in some contexts and something else entirely under pressure.

That picture is the starting point for any serious conversation about high performance. Not a survey about whether people feel safe speaking up, but an honest look at whether the relationships on this team are actually set up for mutual success.

What this means for how you lead your team

If you want a high performing team, stop asking whether your culture is psychologically safe and start asking a more specific question: are the people on this team genuinely invested in each other’s success?

The Relationship Pulse Check — three questions I use with every team I work with: what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s one thing we can do to ensure mutual success — is a better diagnostic than most team effectiveness surveys. It’s direct, it’s specific, and it surfaces the relational friction that culture surveys are designed to smooth over.

High performing teams are built one relationship at a time. That work is never finished, and it’s never incidental. The leaders who take it seriously get results that look like magic to everyone else.

Ready to build a high performing team?

I work with leadership teams and organisations who are serious about performance — not the version that looks good on a culture survey, but the kind that shows up in results, retention, and resilience under pressure. If that’s the conversation you’re ready to have, reach me at morag@skyeteam.com or book a call at skyeteam.com.

Frequently Asked Questions about developing a High Performing Team

What makes a high performing team?

High performing teams are built on Ally relationships — people genuinely invested in each other’s success, not just their own. That relational foundation, from the Relationship Ecosystem™ in Cultivate, produces trust, psychological safety, and performance. It’s a relational outcome. Not a culture program.

Is psychological safety the most important factor in team performance?

Psychological safety is a symptom, not a cause. It’s what happens when team relationships are working. Try to install it directly — through workshops or culture surveys — without building the relational foundation, and you get compliance, not openness. Build Ally relationships first. Safety follows.

How do you measure team performance beyond results?

Results are a lagging indicator. A better real-time measure: are people genuinely invested in each other’s success? Are problems named early? Is conflict productive or corrosive? Those questions — grounded in the Relationship Ecosystem™ — tell you where performance is headed before the numbers do.

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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.