Most advice about high-performing teams reads like a dating profile: trust, psychological safety, shared goals, aligned incentives, and good vibes all around.
And while none of that is wrong, I’ve found the more useful (and less often said) truth is this:
High-performing teams are not always harmonious. But they are always clear.
Let’s unpack that.
Myth: “High-Performing Teams Just Get Along”
In the early days of a new team, it’s tempting to optimize for team chemistry. You want people to like working together. You pair people based on complementary personalities. You try to minimize disagreement. You celebrate every small win. You remove blockers like it’s your job (because it kind of is).
But here’s the trap: when performance becomes synonymous with harmony, you lose the edge that comes from constructive tension.
A little bit of healthy disagreement—over priorities, implementation, even values—often signals a team that’s engaged and thinking critically. The goal isn’t to eliminate conflict. It’s to structure it.
Instead: Make Work Legible
Every high-performing team I’ve seen has three things:
1. Clear Priorities
Not just a quarterly plan, but a shared understanding of what matters right now. A team that knows what’s important can disagree productively because there’s an anchor for decisions.
2. Strong Review Loops
Fast feedback cycles, whether it’s pull requests, incident postmortems, or customer escalations. This creates continuous improvement without relying on heroism.
[Work Planned] → [Executed] → [Reviewed] → [Learned] → back to [Work Planned]The goal is to shorten this loop over time, so improvement becomes reflex, not recovery.
3. A Culture of Follow-Through
Execution is treated like a first-class skill. People don’t just start things; they finish them. The last 20% of the project usually takes 80% of the time, as the saying goes. We need to celebrate shipping.
The Manager's Role: Set the Floor, Not the Ceiling
When I was first managing, I spent a lot of time trying to inspire my team. I now believe my job is to make “pretty good” the defacto outcome.
I try to do this by raising the minimum expected quality of decisions, code, and collaboration—not through inspiration, but system design.
Examples:
- Templates for design docs that ask the right questions
- Team rituals that force exposure to real work early (e.g. demo every 2 weeks)
- Checklists before launch, not just after incidents
These are boring. They are also the foundation of sustained performance Instead of trying to raise the ceiling every week, raise the floor and the team comes with it.
Hire for the Curve, Not the Peak
One of the more counterintuitive lessons I’ve learned is: hiring a single superstar rarely makes the team 10x better. But hiring someone who raises the average velocity of the team by unblocking others, cleaning up hard-to-own systems, raising the quality bar has a multiplicative effect.
Final Thoughts
In An Elegant Puzzle, Will Larson writes that most teams fail not from bad intentions but from a lack of clarity. I’ve found that to be true over and over again.
High-performing teams don’t avoid friction—they use it. But they do so with a shared map, aligned incentives, and a culture that treats delivery as a discipline, not a vibe.
If you want to build a high-performing team, don’t start by trying to make everyone friends. Start by making the work clear.