5 proven strategies for cultivating high-performing teams

Building a high-performing team isn’t just about hitting targets – it’s about creating a culture where collaboration, trust, and purpose drive success. But getting there is no small task. It takes intentional effort, strategic investments, and continuous improvement to empower employees to perform at their best.

In this blog, we’ll explore five actionable tips to help you cultivate high-performing teams, drawing on insights from Culture Amp’s Culture First podcast. We’ll share key takeaways from standout episodes featuring renowned author, marketer, and entrepreneur Seth Godin and NBA champion and former Miami Heat player Shane Battier. These conversations uncover the dynamics of top-performing teams, offering valuable strategies designed to help managers and HR leaders unlock their team’s full potential.

1. Foster high trust and mission focus

To spot breakout basketball players, Shane and his team took a deep dive into what separates high-performing teams from struggling ones. Their discovery? “The two most important factors that determine a team’s trajectory are the interplay between trust and what we call mission focus, or the ability to focus on a singular goal,” Shane explains. This insight inspired him to create the Coherence Quadrant framework, a tool that places teams into one of four distinct categories:

1. Disastrous teams: These teams are characterized by low mission focus and low trust. Poor leadership, toxic culture, and disengagement can push these teams to make excuses or point fingers when poor results inevitably present themselves.
2. Lagging teams: Teams with high trust, but low mission focus. While the team members get along well with each other, they still underperform due to inefficient policies, lack of training, unclear goals, and apathy.
3. Brittle teams: These teams experience high mission focus with low trust, pushing many employees to operate independently, avoiding collaboration or shared accountability, and forming team silos. This can lead to high stress, burnout, and conflict.
4. Coherent teams: With a strong mission focus and deep trust, these teams achieve peak performance. They collaborate seamlessly, foster psychological safety, and openly communicate, enabling them to consistently deliver high-quality results, even under pressure.

Understanding these four team types gives leaders a powerful lens to assess their current team dynamics and identify areas for growth. Whether your team is grappling with trust issues, lacking a clear sense of purpose, or facing other challenges, the Coherence Quadrant framework offers a roadmap for diagnosing team problems and improving them.

2. Build and maintain a performance-driven culture

The criteria outlined above – trust and mission focus – are heavily connected with business and team culture. Building a culture that drives peak performance requires establishing clear values, shared behaviors, and beliefs that every employee understands and supports.

According to Seth, company culture can be defined through two simple statements:

1. People like us do things like this.
2. This is the way things are around here.

Together, these statements form the social contract that defines how your company does business and the type of people your organization attracts and retains. While culture naturally evolves as your business grows, it’s critical to address behaviors that clash with your cultural values early on. Left unchecked, these behaviors can spread and undermine the very foundation of your team culture.

Seth shared a powerful example of when he had to address toxic behavior in his workplace: an employee who would yell in the office whenever things didn’t go his way. He recalls:

“The second time it happened, I took him aside privately, and I said, ‘Here’s the deal. This is a small company, but it's not going to be small forever. If I tolerate this because you are such an extraordinary contributor, I’ve defined what things are like around here. The deal is simple: the next time you yell – it doesn’t matter why – you’re fired.”

A few years later, the individual thanked Seth for the intervention and shared that he never yelled at work again.

Seth’s approach highlights the importance of defining a culture rather than merely being subject to one. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to address problematic behavior that doesn’t embody your cultural values. By calling out these issues early, you not only give employees an opportunity to improve but also protect and reinforce the culture you’ve worked so hard to build. Preserving and improving your culture creates a work environment where employees feel safe, valued, and empowered to perform at their best.

3. Balance short-term gain with long-term success

In today’s economic climate, many businesses are under pressure to do more with less. As companies navigate macroeconomic challenges and tightening budgets, teams are often asked to deliver results despite having fewer resources. While long-term strategic thinking remains vital for business success, the current environment often forces teams to prioritize short-term wins to stay competitive and drive immediate impact. This type of thinking can hurt businesses and hold teams back from performing their best, says Seth.

“It’s always easy to argue for short-term results,” he explains. “You get to say, ‘We saved five dollars on the cost of cheese, so we’ll make a profit at our pizza place.’ It’s much harder to say, ‘We’re investing in paying a little bit extra for cheese because four months from now, there’s going to be a line out the door.’”

The best way to balance short-term pressures with long-term goals? Follow these three best practices:

1. Communicate the long-term vision: Your employees can’t work towards the future if they don’t know your business goals and direction. Share the company’s long-term goals and growth plans for the months, quarters, and years ahead with your employees so they understand the bigger picture and how their work contributes to the organization’s success.
2. Find a healthy balance: While short-term wins are important, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Use cascading goals to connect your team’s objectives with your business’s long-term vision. This gives your team a mix of short- and long-term objectives to work towards.
3. Make time for creativity: Encourage your team to dedicate time for creativity and explore fresh strategies to tackle challenges. Regular brainstorming sessions can inspire employees to step back from their day-to-day tasks and think bigger, generating innovative ideas that drive growth and position the business for long-term success.

Balancing short-term pressures with long-term goals requires discipline, but it’s key to ensuring your team thrives today and well into the future.

4. Improve team resilience

Resilience in the workplace can lead to better adaptability, improved problem-solving, stronger team collaboration, and sustained performance under pressure. For businesses and managers looking to build more resilient teams, Shane recommends adopting the “next-play mentality.”

This approach used by basketball teams encourages players to move on quickly from a past point, regardless of whether they scored, struggled, or missed. “It’s not about what just happened. It’s about the most important play in the game, which is the next play, or what’s about to happen,” Shane explains. “The people and teams that can move on to the next play faster than the competition – whether they [experienced] success or failure – those are the teams that are the most resilient. Those are the teams that have serial success again and again.”

Whether your team achieves a record-breaking quarter or falls short of expectations, adopting this next-play mentality can keep them focused on the future rather than dwelling on the past. This mindset fosters resilience and ensures your team is prepared to tackle whatever challenges or opportunities come their way.

5. Foster a team-first mentality

It’s an age-old adage for a reason: there’s no “I” in team.

In order to build a strong, high-performing team, businesses need to encourage employees to set aside their egos and work together to achieve collective success. Luckily, being a good teammate – or “teammateship” as Shane calls it – is a skill that can be learned.

“The basic building block of cultural DNA is how we relate to each other and how we are teammates to each other,” explains Shane. “Teammateship is the ability to understand what it takes to be a great teammate – to raise up not only your level, but also the level of your coworkers around you.”

While many organizations invest money and resources in leadership training, few teach employees how to be better colleagues. Yet, skills like effective communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and project management are essential for fostering collaboration and building trust among team members.

“It would really be an amazing world if we spent more time thinking about how we can all be better teammates,” stated Shane. Businesses can create a culture of mutual support, shared growth, and collective success by equipping employees with the training and tools they need to excel as team players.

Building high-performance teams with Culture Amp

Whether you're building an all-star basketball team or a top-performing corporate team, data-driven decisions are essential for understanding and improving team dynamics. Culture Amp’s platform helps businesses identify key drivers of engagement, measure team effectiveness, and foster a culture of feedback, growth, and recognition. By empowering leaders with actionable insights and providing employees with opportunities to learn and collaborate, Culture Amp enables organizations to create resilient, mission-focused teams that consistently deliver exceptional results.

Experience Culture Amp’s people experience platform for yourself with a free product tour. Or, listen to the full Culture First podcast episodes to hear more insights from Seth Godin on building a culture of impact and Shane Battier on why data and culture are the secrets to success.