The best teams i've worked with

What sets the best teams apart isn't talent alone — it's trust, honest communication, and shared accountability. Lessons from the highest-performing teams across industries.

After three decades working with leadership teams across six continents, I can tell you that great teams are not built by accident. And the difference between good and extraordinary is almost always the same handful of things.

Key takeaways

• The single most common reason high-performing teams plateau is a leader's reluctance to remove underperformers — keeping the wrong person protects no one and costs everyone.
• The best teams I've worked with invest in each other deliberately and continuously — not through team dinners, but through a genuine feedback culture where honest conversations happen as a matter of course.
• Trust is not a soft topic: it is the multiplier that determines whether strategy becomes execution or stays on the slide deck.

I have had the privilege of working with local teams, national leadership teams, and global executive committees — in public companies, private businesses, hospitals, and large NGOs. No two teams are identical. But the ones that stand out share a pattern. And the ones that struggle share a different, equally consistent pattern.

This memo is about what I have observed in both.

The hardest decision leaders avoid

The most common failure I see in leadership teams is not strategic. It is not about culture or communication. It is simpler and more uncomfortable than that: leaders will not remove underperformers.

I understand why. These are people you recruited, invested in, and often genuinely like. The conversation is painful. The disruption is real. The short-term cost is visible; the long-term cost of inaction is not.

But here is what I have watched happen, repeatedly: keeping an underperformer signals to your strongest people that performance does not actually determine who stays. Your best talent — the people you cannot afford to lose — notices immediately. They recalibrate. Standards soften. And the leader who delayed one difficult conversation finds themselves managing a team that is quietly, gradually, becoming less exceptional.

The best teams I have worked with move on underperformance quickly, clearly, and with respect. They do not confuse kindness with avoidance.

Clarity on what actually matters

The second pattern I see in exceptional teams is radical clarity about their goals. Not twenty priorities — two or three Wildly Important Goals that the entire team can articulate without looking at a slide.

This sounds obvious. In practice, I regularly sit with leadership teams who cannot agree, in the room, on what their top three priorities are. They have a strategy document. They have a balanced scorecard. What they do not have is a shared answer to the question: if we accomplish one thing this year, what is it?

Great teams know their value creation roadmap precisely. They talk about the details of execution because the direction is not in question. Lesser teams spend their meetings relitigating direction, which means they never properly address execution.

What a client taught me about trust

A few years ago I worked with a senior leadership team at a European industrial company. Strong individuals — commercially sharp, technically credible, experienced. On paper, an excellent team. In the room, something was missing.

Over three sessions, the pattern became clear: they were deeply polite with each other and completely unwilling to challenge each other. No one said what they actually thought about a colleague's proposal. Disagreement happened after the meeting, in corridors and one-on-one calls — never in the room where the decision was being made.

We named it. We worked on it. Slowly, the dynamic shifted. Within eighteen months, the same group of people had become genuinely candid — not aggressive, not theatrical, but honest. Performance improved measurably. The CEO told me later: 'I didn't realise how much energy we were all spending managing the silence.'

Trust is the foundation. Not trust meaning 'I like you' — trust meaning 'I can tell you something you don't want to hear, and you will thank me for it rather than punish me for it.' That kind of trust does not emerge from team-building exercises. It is built through repeated, honest interactions over time, modelled consistently by the leader.

Investment that actually works

The best teams I have worked with invest in each other deliberately. Not through offsites in beautiful locations — though those can play a role — but through ongoing attention to how they work together.

They ask: How are we making decisions? Where are we avoiding difficult conversations? Who is not being heard in this room? They create rituals around feedback — not once-a-year performance reviews, but regular, normalised conversations about what is working and what is not.

And — this is the part that surprises people — they genuinely care about each other. Not in a way that overrides accountability. A leadership team is not a social club. They have something specific to accomplish together. But the best teams I know look, from the outside, a little like a group of friends: they check in, they notice when someone is struggling, they carry each other when it matters.

That combination — high accountability and genuine care — is rare. When you find it, you find a team that can do things most teams cannot.

The leaders who build the best teams are not the ones who avoid hard conversations. They are the ones who create conditions where hard conversations are normal — and nobody is surprised by them.

Over to you.