The Culture Coach
I’m Wendy Brand, Your Culture Coach, dedicated to supporting people-first leaders. Each week we dive into strategies and insights to help you build a workplace where employees feel valued, motivated, and inspired. From fostering tribal values and improving core processes to developing inclusive communities and responsive listening strategies, we cover it all.
Join me weekly for practical tips, expert interviews, and real-world examples to help you boost productivity, extinguish burnout and cultivate a vibrant organizational culture that reflects your mission, vision and values.
The Culture Coach
#092 Building a High Performing Teams Culture
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High-performing teams don’t happen by accident—they’re built intentionally. In this episode of The Culture Coach Podcast, I break down Wiley’s Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team and give you actionable strategies to strengthen trust, encourage healthy conflict, drive commitment, reinforce accountability, and focus on results.
If you’re a CEO or C-suite leader struggling with employee engagement and retention, this episode will give you practical steps to create a more aligned, motivated, and high-performing team. You’ll also hear key stats and insights on why culture is a competitive advantage and how leaders can directly influence team success.
Key Takeaways:
Why trust is the foundation of a thriving workplace—and how to build it
The secret to getting team buy-in and commitment on key decisions
Why peer accountability is more effective than top-down pressure
Want to assess your organization’s culture and find out where you stand? Take the FREE Culture Quiz now at culturecoachwendy.com/quiz.
🎧 Listen now and start building a stronger, more engaged team today!
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With 25+ years of leadership experience, spanning multiple roles across corporations and non-profits, I have gained a wealth of experience in understanding what makes organizations successful.
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You are listening to the Culture Coach Podcast. This is the place where CEOs and people first leaders come to boost productivity, extinguish burnout, and cultivate a vibrant culture that reflects a fully integrated mission, vision, and core values. Get ready to take your culture to the next level. I am your host, Wendy Brand. Welcome back to the Culture Coach Podcast. I am your host, Wendy Brand, and I'm so excited to have this conversation around high-performing teams and really engaging and retaining top talent. So I'll just tell you, I know that things right now with trying to retain your talent and grow your business, it can be really difficult. And I have experienced firsthand as a CEO myself, uh, once of a nonprofit, once as a small business owner with my husband. And then even in larger organizations where I led teams of several hundred people, I can relate to really ensuring that you're taking care of those high performers and also really maintaining the other talent at the same time. But specifically today, I want to talk about those high-performing teams, how to engage them, how to get the most out of them in a time when, you know, we've been through the quiet quitting phase. There is still some of that that is prevalent in the in organizations across the globe. In a McKinsey study that I saw recently, only 16% of companies say their teams are consistently high performing, which shouldn't surprise you, right? A high performing team, not every team is going to be high performing, not every individual is going to be a high performing individual. And that's okay. We don't, we don't have to have the entire organization in these high-performing roles. You do want good productive um employees, but let's talk a little bit about what it takes to retain and keep that performance of high-performing teams. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk you through a model um that is that can be used for high-performing teams. You've probably heard of Patrick Lincioni and his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I read it uh, I it was early 2000, maybe. Um great book, but Wiley, who is a publisher, took Patrick Lincioni's book in in coordination with him, in collaboration with him, and created the five behaviors of a cohesive team. So we're gonna talk about that today. And as you know, retaining talent is important not only because of the cost, which I will tell you that a Sherm study that I saw, the Society of Human Resource Management, says that it costs, you may already know this, but anywhere from 50 to 200% of an employee's salary to replace them. So there's the bottom line impact, and then there is the culture impact. When you have high turnover or unengaged employees, it can really affect the culture, which is what we're here to talk about. So let's talk about how you can focus on creating high-performing teams within your organization. And so let's dig into what are the five behaviors of a cohesive team. Well, Patrick Lancioni and Wiley, and I agree, um, start with trust as a foundation. In order for a team to be high performing, there has to be an element of trust in the way that they work together. And we're not talking about trust like, oh, you said you're gonna do this, so I trust that you're gonna follow through on that. No, we're talking about really a vulnerable trust, being vulnerable with one another, admitting when you make a mistake, and sharing failures in addition to your wins, right? And so as the leader of the organization, it starts at the top. And so the more that you can demonstrate that to your organization, having that sense of humility and transparency can go a long way. But for those teams, for a high-performing team coming together on a project or to work to solve issues in your organization, you want to make sure that they're starting and you're encouraging that level of trust within the team. Teams with high trust outperform low trust teams by 50%. This was a study done by the Harvard Business Review. I'll say that again. Teams with high trust outperform low trust teams by 50%. And in order to get to that trust, I'm gonna throw out some words like vulnerability and psychological safety that we hear all the time. But what does that really mean? So having a psychologically safe environment means that if someone shares a failure or a lesson they've learned or raises their hand and says they disagree or that they're uncertain about something that, you know, they maybe don't fully understand what's being asked of them. Being able to be vulnerable about those things and the response that the rest of the team has to that is what creates the trust. So, as the leader, you being vulnerable as well can help. Um, and encouraging that within these teams is so impactful. Creating that safe space, so encouraging open dialogue without fear of blame is huge. And so having a team that's willing to dive in and create that trust is what is going to get them the results in the long run. And so when pulling together high-performing teams for big transformational projects, you want to encourage the team to start building some of that trust early on. I know in a uh a team that I formed where it was a high, highly, we had pulled people from across the organization, high performers, to come together and work together. And we started out with a team building day to just um, you know, have we had some activities, but then there was also downtime just to get to know each other better because we knew that it the importance of this team coming together and the value that they were going to drive across the organization was critical. And so really ensuring that they started out with those strong relationships, building trust was a game changer. So, next is encouraging healthy conflict. And we've all heard the term groupthink. And what that means, if you don't know, is that maybe you think that you have an idea, but everyone else is saying a different they want to go a different direction. You kind of keep it to yourself and go along with the group because it feels like a decision has already been formed. And you speaking up either isn't going to change anything, the neutral state, or worse, you might be um, you know, put down or made to feel inferior for even bringing up a different way of thinking. So being able to have healthy conflict is critical in really getting to the results that you need. And so what you can do as a leader in an organization where you're trying to build more high-performing teams is to redefine what conflict means. So framing disagreements as opportunities for stronger solutions will really help foster that level of trust and uh ability to have conflict in your organization and in these high-performing teams. So once you have the trust and then you're able to have this healthy conflict, the third behavior is commitment. So as a team, and this could be your leadership team, this could be a project team that you've pulled together to drive transformation across the organization. But what is in what is required of this team is commitment to a decision. So they have the trust, they're vulnerable, they share their ideas. Everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas, but we know that not every idea can be executed on. So the team makes a commitment to a decision together. And some ways to do this to help drive this uh commitment is to before encourage, you know, really documenting before you leave the meeting key decisions so that when you walk away, it's clear what that commitment is, that you're getting a visible, maybe written, but mostly visible uh commitment, nodding heads, saying, yes, I agree, but that everyone feels like they're walking away with a commitment to what they have decided on. And another way, another kind of barometer for that decision making is always your core values. So ensuring that they're using core values in their decision making is another great way to help drive this high-performing team. So the fourth, the fourth step in this is accountability. So you've got the trust, you've got the conflict, you've had a healthy conflict, you've committed. And then when you walk out of that meeting room, again, whether it's the leadership team, a project team, um, a customer-facing team, when you walk out of that meeting having made a decision, there is a level of peer accountability that's necessary. So that everyone, you know, that we're we're staying aligned to the decision that was made and not going back, if you're familiar with change management at all. Um, once once you have agreed and you're moving forward, a lot of times it's more comfortable to go back and revert back to the way things had been done. Or if you secretly, um, if there's not that level of trust and you've secretly kept to yourself that you preferred a different way. Um, and so you don't do what you've committed to as a team, but you go do something else, your peers should hold you accountable for the decision that was made as you were walking out of that group. And it's really important. And so you as a leader, if if a team member, where you can kind of step in here is if a team member comes to you to complain about the way the decision was made or that you didn't agree with the way the decision was made, it's really important for you to redirect back to that team, to their peers, and to to go back to and have those discussions with that core team. Because the end result for all of this, the fifth behavior that happens with a cohesive team are results. And so it's important, I think, to ensure that teams are reviewing results regularly, recognizing contributions across the team, and measuring what matters. So if you have those goals, strategic goals for the organization, it really helps provide clear direction for these high-performing teams to meet their goals and add value to the organization. Because at the end of the day, that's what every employee wants is to add value and feel like they have made a contribution to the greater goal. So that's it. Those are the five behaviors. We've got trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. And as you can tell, high-performing teams don't just happen by accident. And we know that because, as I said in the beginning, only 16% of companies say that they consistently have high performing teams. And so some of the things that we've talked about here, I hope that you can take away and engage with your team on these. Bring in a consultant to work through the five. There's a whole five behaviors program. You can do an assessment and coaching around this. It's something that I'm certified in. But these are also things that you don't have to bring somebody in. You can take what you've heard today on this episode and put it into action immediately. That's it. Um, I guess the only other thing I'll add is I do have a culture quiz on my website if you want to check that out. It's a free quiz that you can just take and do an assessment of how you think your organization is doing overall, the culture. And that's at culturecoachwindy.com forward slash quiz. You'll get your results where you fall in that culture maturity model. And I hope that you will take what you learned today, share it with a friend if you know someone you think would find value in this episode. And I guess until next week. Have a great week. Thank you so much for being here.
