When a leader asks for help building a high-performing team, they are often thinking about the team's capabilities, its structure, or its processes. While these elements matter, the research consistently points to a different set of factors as the primary drivers of team performance. Google's Project Aristotle, which studied hundreds of teams to identify what made some more effective than others, found that psychological safety was by far the most important factor, followed by dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Coaching the leader to create these conditions is fundamentally different from coaching them to manage individual performance.
Starting with the Leader's Impact
Before focusing on the team, help the leader understand their own impact on team dynamics. Leaders profoundly shape the culture and performance of their teams through their behaviour, often without realising it. A leader who dominates discussions inadvertently silences voices that might offer crucial perspectives. A leader who responds to mistakes with criticism creates an environment where people hide problems rather than surfacing them early. A leader who is inconsistent in their expectations creates anxiety that drains energy from productive work.
Use 360 feedback, stakeholder interviews, or direct observation to help the leader see their impact from the team's perspective. This can be confronting, but it is essential. Until the leader understands how their behaviour affects the team, they will continue to look for solutions in the wrong places.
Coaching for Psychological Safety
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety provides a robust framework for coaching leaders to create the conditions for team performance. Psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding conflict. It is about creating an environment where team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes, without fear of punishment or humiliation.
Coach the leader to model the behaviours that create psychological safety. This includes admitting their own mistakes and uncertainties, asking genuine questions rather than rhetorical ones, responding to bad news with curiosity rather than blame, and explicitly inviting input from quieter team members. These behaviours feel risky to many leaders, which is precisely why coaching support is valuable. The coach provides a safe space for the leader to explore their resistance to vulnerability and to practise new behaviours before trying them with their team.
Developing Collective Accountability
High-performing teams are characterised by shared accountability for results rather than individual accountability for tasks. Coach the leader to shift from a hub-and-spoke model, where each team member reports individually to the leader, to a more networked model where team members hold each other accountable and collaborate directly.
This shift requires the leader to let go of being the central point of coordination and to trust the team to manage itself. It also requires creating structures that support collective accountability, such as shared goals, team retrospectives, and transparent performance metrics. Help the leader design these structures and anticipate the resistance they may encounter from team members who are accustomed to a more hierarchical approach.
Navigating Team Conflict
Conflict is inevitable in high-performing teams, and the leader's ability to navigate it constructively is critical. Coach the leader to distinguish between productive conflict, which involves passionate debate about ideas and approaches, and destructive conflict, which involves personal attacks, hidden agendas, and political manoeuvring. High-performing teams embrace the former while managing the latter.
Help the leader develop the skills to facilitate difficult conversations, to surface tensions before they escalate, and to create norms around how disagreements are handled. Role-play specific scenarios in coaching sessions so the leader can practise these skills in a safe environment before applying them with their team.
Sustaining Performance Over Time
Building a high-performing team is not a one-time achievement. It requires sustained attention to the conditions that support performance, regular investment in team development, and the ability to adapt as the team's membership, context, and challenges evolve. Coach the leader to build reflection and renewal into the team's routines, whether through regular retrospectives, team coaching sessions, or periodic away-days focused on how the team works together rather than just what it delivers.