How To Build The Best Team Ever For Optimum Performance

Originally published by Forbes.

Every team faces unique challenges and performs distinct tasks, but regardless of the team’s industry or purpose, one aspect unifies them—they need to run smoothly and efficiently to contribute substantially to the company. Whether high or low, a team’s level of performance is a direct result of its leadership. What does that look like, and what must leaders do to achieve high performance?

David Burkus’s book, Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams, illustrates practices that “bring out the best in each member” to make a highly successful team. Burkus is a former business school professor and four-time bestselling author and ranks as one of the world’s leading business thinkers.

Burkus says the importance of team culture, rather than the overarching company culture, became evident during COVID, when people connected solely with the individual teams they were part of on Zoom rather than the whole company. The importance of team culture still applies now that many companies have brought employees back to the office, whether in a hybrid fashion or full-time.

In his book, Burkus presents his model of common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose: three key aspects to building effective and successful teams.

Psychological safety

Teams are only successful if individuals feel safe speaking when they have questions or concerns, disagree with someone else, or make a mistake. Trust is key to establishing psychological safety in a high-performing team. Burkus says, “Trust isn’t given, and trust isn’t earned. Trust is reciprocated. It’s a reciprocal cycle. You choose whether or not it’s a virtuous cycle or a vicious one.”

Trust is often built initially through shared similarities on the team. These similarities encourage individuals to take risks—put themselves in vulnerable positions by disagreeing with someone or speaking up with a new idea. How the other team members respond determines which way the cycle of trust will go. When met with respect, trust is built on all sides—the person who took the risk, the person responding, and everyone else observing the interaction. Mistrust in a team can lead to the team falling apart.

Common Understanding

High-performing teams create clarity and empathy, which requires connection and understanding. Burkus says a great way to achieve this is by composing personal manuals for each teammate describing how they work best, what happens when they’re at their worst, and what they might need from the team. When irritation arises about a specific teammate’s behavior, such as receiving a long-winded email, being able to look at the manual and understand where that person is coming from before responding can help create empathy and avoid unnecessary conflict—and navigate necessary conflict more compassionately and effectively. Establishing these types of norms for communication and collaboration, which will look different for every team, are essential to creating a successful team.

Leaders can achieve clarity by holding what Burkus calls team huddles or bursty communication. Each person takes ninety seconds to report on what they’ve completed, their current focus, and any obstacles that might be blocking them. When done weekly, it clarifies expectations and how everyone’s roles and work fit together, which ties directly into establishing his next point: prosocial purpose.

Prosocial Purpose

Burkus says, “One of our strongest drivers of motivation is the desire to protect or promote the well-being of other people.” Team members understand what their jobs are and why they’re doing them, but it’s also vital for them to see the impact they’re making in other people’s lives—who is directly affected and how their actions positively impact them. In many larger organizations, most employees aren’t serving the customer directly. Their work supports other organizational roles.

Burkus says that ensuring each team member understands how their role fits in—not just in their team but how it affects other teams and the company overall—creates an interdependent mindset. This mentality pulls all the individual teams together and unifies them, which is particularly important with remote and hybrid work, where teams interact far less than in a full-time office environment.

Fostering considerate communication, trust, and purpose within a team is vital to its performance. Leaders must ensure that team members understand their goals and how their performance affects others and be willing to work through problems together. By following David Burkus’s model in Best Team Ever, leaders can do just that.