Getting the Most Out of Your Work Teams

We have now spent the last few months of posts on building high performance teams within your organization and staff. These are echoes and main points from my mother, the late Deborah Mackin, who truly believed that a 1+1 model of humans working together - with the systems, relationships and expectations we’ve expressed in this series - could be more than the sum of their parts.  They could be a true team.

Teaming is a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities committed to their common goal and approach for which they hold each other accountable.

How teams come together — and how they work — makes all the difference.

As leaders, many of us are asked to form teams early in our careers: cross-department task forces, leadership committees, project teams, or community coalitions. The mistake we often make is assuming that smart, well-intentioned people will naturally figure out how to work well together.

They won’t — at least not without structure, clarity, and intentional leadership.

If I were building a highly adaptable, results-oriented, high-performance team today, here’s exactly where I’d start.

1. Break Down the Silos

Modern organizations require interdependence, not independence. No single person — no matter how experienced — has enough perspective to solve today’s complex, fast-moving challenges alone.

High-performing teams intentionally break down functional silos and replace them with shared ownership of outcomes. Finance, operations, HR, marketing, sales, and frontline voices must be represented — not to protect turf, but to strengthen decisions.

The old mindset of “How dare you play in my sandbox?” or “stay in your lane” has no place in a high-performance culture. Instead, teams must agree on cross-functional goals that transcend individual or departmental roles. These goals then become the foundation of a clear team charter — defining why the team exists, how it will work, and what success looks like.

Direct Application Moment: Before the New Year begins, audit your current teams. Ask one simple question: “Whose perspective is missing from this room?”

Then intentionally invite at least one voice from another function, department, or lived experience into your next team initiative.

2. Agree on the Approach, Not Just the Goals

Most teams can align on what they want to accomplish. Where they struggle is agreeing on how they will work together to get there.

High-performance teams understand that tasks, processes, and relationships are inseparable. When processes break down, relationships suffer. When relationships suffer, execution slows. Strong teams invest just as much energy in how they work together as they do in what they are working on.

This includes agreeing on team norms, communication standards, decision-making expectations, and behavioral commitments. It also includes investing in relationship-building — not as a “nice-to-have,” but as a performance driver.

Direct Application Moment: At your next team meeting, pause the agenda and ask: “What are 3 behaviors we expect from one another when things get hard?”

Write them down. Make them visible. Hold one another accountable to them.

3. Scan for Unused and Hidden Skills

Most organizations dramatically underutilize the talent already sitting in the room. Skills developed outside of work — through hobbies, volunteer roles, cultural backgrounds, or past careers — often go untapped.

High-performance teams make skills visible. They conduct regular “skill scans” to uncover strengths that may not appear on a job description but are incredibly valuable to the team’s success: facilitation, creative problem-solving, pattern recognition, calm under pressure, or systems thinking.

When people are invited to bring more of who they are to the table, engagement and ownership rise.

Direct Application Moment: Schedule one-on-one conversations with each team member in the first quarter. Ask: “What strengths or experiences do you have that we don’t fully use here?”

Track the answers — and intentionally match those strengths to upcoming challenges.

4. Learn How to Make Decisions Together

Many teams default to one of two ineffective decision-making models:

• Unspoken agreement (“Everyone nodded, so I guess we’re good”), or
  

• Command-and-control (“We’ll wait for the most senior voice to decide”).

High-performance teams use participatory decision-making. They intentionally separate divergent thinking (generating ideas) from convergent thinking (aligning on a path forward). While most people are comfortable sharing opinions, far fewer are skilled at listening for shared ground and building alignment.

Teams that decide well make disagreement visible, not personal — and commitment explicit, not assumed.

Direct Application Moment: Adopt a simple consensus signal immediately. At decision points, require everyone to show:

• 👍 Agreement

• 👎 Disagreement

• 🫳 Need more discussion

No silence. No ambiguity. This small habit dramatically increases clarity and accountability.

5. Invest in Teaming Competencies Through Training

One of the biggest myths in leadership is that teaming is natural. It isn’t.

Teaming requires skills — communication, conflict navigation, feedback, facilitation, and shared accountability — that most of us were never formally taught. High-performance organizations treat these as trainable competencies, not personality traits.

Research consistently shows that teams investing in structured development experience measurable gains in productivity, engagement, quality, and safety. This isn’t about “holding hands and singing Kumbaya.” It’s about building the hard skills required to work well together under pressure.

Direct Application Moment: Commit to at least one structured team-development investment in the next 90 days — whether it’s a facilitated session, training workshop, or focused off-site. Tie the learning directly to real work the team is doing now.

Closing Thought

High-performance teams don’t happen by accident. They are designed, practiced, and reinforced — over time (expect 15 months to 24 months of teaming before high performance and KPI return) — by leaders who understand that how we work together is the work.

As you head into the New Year, the question isn’t whether your organization uses teams. The question is whether your teams are truly equipped to perform.

If they are, the results will speak for themselves.