High-performing teams: The hidden dynamics team leaders need to know

Teamwork is essential for organizational success, yet many teams aren’t performing at their highest potential. While completing tasks is crucial, often too much focus is put on tasks (what teams do) and not enough on processes (how teams do it). Unleashing the true power of a team requires adopting a robust process orientation, the key to which involves going beyond visible behaviors to uncover hidden team dynamics.

While the visible elements of team dynamics have been well-covered in countless books, articles and TED Talks, the hidden psychological dynamics within teams have been neglected in the management and team-building discourse. Building an effective team requires far more than getting the right mix of skill sets together. Regardless of the skills, knowledge, and abilities the members of a team have, if they aren’t comfortable communicating openly or aligning around a shared purpose, that team won’t be effective.

To illustrate, I was asked by a newly appointed CEO of a large public sector organization to help address relationship challenges he identified between members of his team. He had tried multiple ways to create a positive team environment including clarifying job roles, responsibilities, incentives and encouraging members to raise concerns. Unspoken tension, however, filtered through team meetings, inhibiting open and constructive discussions. This was despite the team members being intelligent and experienced executive managers.

Understanding the psychology underlying team interactions is the key to addressing these kind of challenges and unlocking a team’s full capabilities. By focusing on both visible and hidden elements, leaders can cultivate the conditions for teams to thrive.

Nurturing the foundations of trust and safety

Trust and psychological safety provide the invisible foundation for teamwork. Trust is the confidence in each other’s intentions, reliability and abilities. Psychological safety means feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, such as sharing concerns or potentially unpopular suggestions that support the team’s objectives, without fear of judgment.

Without trust and safety, team relationships fracture. People avoid sharing ideas or admitting mistakes, undermining collaboration. In contrast, teams with established trust and safety will stay aligned despite challenges. Members of such teams feel comfortable voicing their opinions and learning from failures.

So, returning to the case of the CEO and his team, there was need to establish psychological safety between team members so they could address the challenges they were facing without fear of embarrassment of retribution. Through facilitated sessions designed to establish trust, the team started to acknowledge and share frustrations and assumptions underlying the tension.

Inclusive leaders play a pivotal role in building trust and safety. These leaders actively listen, seek diverse views, and address biases. This modeling of openness and fairness nurtures team members’ confidence. Leaders who lead by example by modeling vulnerability further reinforce the norm that it’s okay to take risks and make mistakes.

Clarifying team purpose, goals and processes

While trust forms the base of a team, clear alignment around goals and processes enables execution. Teams need a shared sense of purpose and defined objectives aligned to the organization’s strategy.

Well-defined processes like effective meetings and clear role responsibilities also boost team productivity. Well-defined processes allow team members to make autonomous decisions within a framework of accountability to shared goals.

On the other side of the coin, misalignment can cause confusion. Without clarity of purpose, teams can fail to build momentum or even waste resources and time on activities that don’t support the team purpose. When a team lacks a shared purpose and agreed processes unspoken team dynamics can further undermine the performance of the team.

The CEO and his team revisited their team purpose and came to realize it no longer aligned with the current objectives of the team. This provided a further opportunity for them to re-shape and build shared commitment to what they wanted to achieve together as a team.

Leaders must therefore consistently reinforce the team’s purpose and refine its processes to enhance team focus.

Encouraging a team mentality

With foundations and alignment in place, fostering a team mentality or mindset can help team members find motivation. Team mindset means members derive fulfillment from collective success, with individual recognition becoming secondary to shared goals.

A strong team mindset minimizes competing agendas that can distract from team needs and allows members to more easily share expertise and celebrate shared achievements. This kind of camaraderie increases team motivation and deters disengagement.

In our team example, the CEO worked with the team to identify responsibilities, tasks and decisions that discouraged them from behaving as a unified team. This helped them make choices of how to work together on shared goals rather than focusing on outcomes that served the goals of individuals.

To foster a team mindset, leaders should highlight how individual contributions matter to the team’s performance. Recognizing collaborative behaviors over individual achievements also nurtures team identity.

Fine-tuning communication

Communication is another area with subtle complexities. This aspect of teamwork is often overlooked or sometimes ignored by a team. Misunderstandings between team members are typically labelled as “communication problems”. But a more objective look reveals communication challenges often stemming from a lack of understanding of personality and workstyle preferences within the team. Different personality preferences and work styles mean team members communicate differently. Without awareness of the nuances of communication that lie below the surface, these differences can cause disconnects. The problem goes further than a breakdown of information transfer between team members — low-quality communication ultimately increases conflict.

Conflict that arises from personality and work style differences can be defused by team members increasing awareness of and learning to tailor their communication style to others’ preferences. For example, in the language of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), people who prefer introversion may prefer team communications to include written versus verbal communication. People who are oriented toward the concrete world of facts and details (a sensing preference) are more likely to focus on ideas supported by data and past experience, while people oriented toward abstract concepts (a preference for intuition) want to understand the big picture and how the idea relates to new perspectives. Misunderstandings or even conflict can arise when team members with different preferences are unaware of how to adapt their communication style in the team.

This is something the CEO and his team invested in to better understand individual and team styles. By learning about their own personality preferences, we able to help them explore team strengths, weak spots and potential biases that could disrupt their teamwork. With greater awareness of their preferences and styles, they improved not only communication with each other but also how they communicated as a leadership team to the rest of the organization.

Understanding these differences allows team members to communicate better, strengthen the team, and avoid unhealthy conflict.

Opening up conflict

Suppressed disagreements can lead to resentment, and the right kind of conflict is healthy for teams. Teams that avoid conflict end up with quick but suboptimal decisions, failing to tap the diverse perspectives and knowledge that give effective teams their power.

High-performing teams accept that conflict is inevitable and are aware that it is essential to diversity of thought. They proactively surface disagreements and facilitate productive debate. This prevents back-channel sniping and enables the integration of opposing views into optimal solutions.

The CEO of our team reported that once they had established trust and better understood each other’s personality preferences, the team increased their comfort engaging in healthy debate to make better decisions.

Leaders play a key role in fostering open conflict management through inclusive leadership. They demonstrate that all opinions have value, role modeling how to debate issues constructively without taking conflicts personally. This psychologically safe environment makes team members comfortable addressing tensions and using constructive conflict to support the team’s objectives.

Embracing adaptability and change

Finally, in a world of uncertainty, teams must stay adaptable to change. Adaptability means continuously exploring improvements and innovating when needed rather than remaining static.

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Adaptable teams respond promptly to new challenges and adjust processes to changing conditions. They see change as an opportunity for growth. This team capability relies on the leader and team members trusting each other and being aware of how to leverage their personality and work style preferences.

One of the biggest changes the CEO and his team made was in the way they worked together by applying their insights from the team development sessions. The improvement and benefits they experienced from making changes at a team level, helped them encourage other teams to adapt and make necessary changes to systems and work practices that had been affecting the performance of their organization.

To gain optimal team adaptability, leaders need to encourage their teams out of their comfort zone through new challenges and collaboration opportunities. Inviting new ways of working and interacting helps challenge status-quo thinking and promotes the adaptability required for sustained team effectiveness. Leaders who support the team learning from mistakes and taking calculated risks further increases the team’s ability to adapt when needed.

Unlocking maximum potential

In an environment of organizational change with flatter hierarchies and an expectation of more collaboration, there’s a new emphasis on teamwork from the C-suite to all levels. There’s never been more riding on the effectiveness of teams, and an effective team can’t thrive on visible elements like job skills alone. Superior performance requires optimizing hidden psychological dynamics like trust, alignment around purpose, and communication styles.

By focusing on these invisible foundations and interactions, leaders can transform team performance from “ok” to “exceptional”. A team is more than the sum of its parts, but the full power of team synergy can only be unleashed when leaders devote as much effort to understanding the hidden psychology as to completing visible tasks. Making the invisible visible is the key to assembling a truly high-performing team.

Dr. Martin Boult has worked as a psychologist in the field of management and organizational development since 1998, with a focus on the areas of executive leadership development, strategic planning, the psychology of change, team performance, talent development and workplace wellbeing. He’s a member of The Myers-Briggs Company’s Asia Pacific’s Executive Leadership Team where he’s responsible for managing consulting services and overseeing the certification programs for a range of psychometric instruments. He’s also a certification trainer for the EQ-i 2.0® emotional intelligence assessment. In addition, Dr. Boult is an adjunct faculty member of the Center for Creative Leadership and faculty facilitator on the Executive MBA programs of the China European International Business School and the Moscow School of Management.