---
title: Build high-performance teams - Linus Murphy
description: High performance is an operating rhythm, not a talent mix. How
  senior teams combine safety and clarity with feedback, a shared scorecard and
  visible progress.
url: https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/build-high-performance-teams/
language: en-GB
type: article
author: Linus Murphy
author_url: https://linusmurphy.com/about/
---

[The 30-part series · Part 25 of 30](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#series)

# Build high-performance teams: safety and clarity, run as a weekly rhythm

By [Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/) • 9 min read

Focus area 25: Build high-performance teams. [Chapter 8: Building winning teams](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/).

Part of the Executive Coaching Methodology: [Build the side that can win](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#build-the-side)

![Four relay batons lying across the lanes of an empty running track in low sun](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/build-high-performance-teams.webp)

The argument in brief

High-performing teams are not assembled, they are run. Psychological safety and clear expectations are the floor, but performance only scales when three rhythms repeat every week: candid feedback, one shared scorecard and visible recognition of progress.

Safety and clarity sit at the centre. Three weekly loops run around them: candid feedback, a shared scorecard and visible progress.

Most CEOs I work with can name the moment their team stopped feeling like a team. It is usually around a growth step. Ten people who used to sort things out over lunch become forty, then a hundred and fifty. The executive table fills with strong individuals, each running a function well. The numbers are fine. And yet decisions take longer, problems surface late, and the energy that carried the early years has gone somewhere.

The usual response is to look at the people. Do we have the right leaders? Should we hire a stronger head of this or that? Sometimes that is the answer. More often, I find a group of capable people who have never been asked to run as a team. They meet, they report, they go back to their functions. That is a work group, not a team.

My position is that high-performing teams are not assembled, they are run. Psychological safety and clear expectations are the floor. On top of that floor, performance only scales when three rhythms repeat every week: candid feedback, one shared scorecard and visible recognition of progress. Skip the rhythm and the floor erodes as the company grows.

This is the third of three deeper pieces under [Building winning teams](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/). The chapter covers Google’s five dynamics in detail. Here I want to focus on the operating rhythm that turns those dynamics into something the team does every week.

## The floor: safety and clarity

The focus area this article sits under compresses the idea into a line: psychological safety plus extreme clarity equals throughput. I think that is broadly right, and the evidence behind each half is solid.

On safety, Amy Edmondson’s original study of [51 work teams in a manufacturing company found that team psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, and that learning behaviour mediated between safety and performance](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ589456). That mechanism is the important part. Safety does not improve performance directly. It lets a team learn: ask questions, admit mistakes, raise problems early. Learning is what improves performance.

Google’s Project Aristotle studied [180 teams and found that what mattered was less about who was on the team and more about how the team worked together](https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness), with psychological safety first and structure and clarity third. Google also reported that people on teams with stronger team culture [were rated as effective twice as often by executives](https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness). Several things you might expect to matter, such as team size, seniority and the individual performance of members, were not significantly connected to effectiveness in that study.

On clarity, the longer tradition is J. Richard Hackman’s. As Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen summarise it, what matters most is not the personalities in the team but [whether it has a compelling direction, a strong structure and a supportive context](https://web.archive.org/web/20180115203622/https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork). Their own research added a fourth condition, a shared mindset, because modern teams are more prone to us-versus-them thinking and incomplete information.

Safety without clarity gives you a pleasant team that is unsure what winning looks like. Clarity without safety gives you a team that knows the target and hides the bad news until it is too late to act on. You need both, and you need them maintained, because both erode quietly as a company grows.

## The rhythm: three weekly loops

This is where most leadership teams stop short. They run a workshop on safety, agree a set of goals, and assume the job is done. Six months later the old habits are back. The focus area asks for something more durable: candid feedback loops, shared scorecards and celebration rhythms, so that excellence scales with headcount. I treat these as three loops that run every week.

| Loop | Weekly form | What it protects | How it fails |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Candid feedback | Ten minutes at the end of the meeting: what helped, what got in the way, one change | Safety, because problems surface while they are cheap | It becomes a ritual where everyone says it was fine |
| Shared scorecard | Five to seven measures, each with an owner, reviewed in minutes | Clarity, because everyone sees the same picture | It grows to forty lines and turns into a reporting meeting |
| Visible progress | Each leader names one piece of real progress on meaningful work | Motivation, because people see the work moving | It becomes generic praise, or is dropped when the week is busy |

### Candid feedback

Gallup has found that [80% of employees who say they received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/357764/fast-feedback-fuels-performance.aspx), and that employees are [3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work when their manager gives daily rather than annual feedback](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/357764/fast-feedback-fuels-performance.aspx). Those are employee figures, not executive ones, but in my experience senior teams are no different. They just get less feedback, because fewer people feel able to give it.

The practical behaviour: close every executive meeting with ten minutes on how the meeting itself went. What helped us decide? What slowed us down? What will we change next week? The CEO answers last. The first time, it is awkward. By the fourth week, it is where the real issues come out.

### A shared scorecard

A shared scorecard is not a dashboard of every function’s numbers. It is the short list of measures the whole table owns together. When a measure is red, it is the team’s problem, not one leader’s. That shift alone changes the tone of a meeting, from defending a function to solving a problem.

Keep it short. Five to seven measures, mostly leading, each with one named owner. If the scorecard needs an hour to explain, it is a report, not a scorecard. My piece on [goal setting successfully](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/goal-setting-successfully/) goes deeper into how to choose the measures.

### Visible progress

This is the loop senior teams most often skip, and I think the research says they are wrong to.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer asked 238 people on 26 project teams to keep daily diaries, producing [nearly 12,000 diary entries](https://web.archive.org/web/20170129191502/https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins). They found that [progress occurred on 76% of people’s best-mood days, while setbacks occurred on only 13% of those days](https://web.archive.org/web/20170129191502/https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins). Then they surveyed 669 managers and found that [only 35, or 5%, ranked supporting progress as the top motivator](https://web.archive.org/web/20170129191502/https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins). Most ranked recognition first.

The practical point is that the most useful celebration is not a party or a generic thank you. It is naming specific progress on work that matters. Five minutes a week, each leader names one thing that moved, and why it matters. That keeps the team’s attention on the work, and it gives the people below them something concrete to repeat.

## Why the rhythm matters more as you grow

At ten people, a team gets safety and clarity almost for free. Everyone sees everything. At a hundred and fifty, nothing is visible by default. The executive team becomes the place where the culture is either modelled or lost, because each leader copies what happens at the top table into their own team.

That is why I care more about the rhythm than any single intervention. A rhythm can be copied. If the executive team closes every meeting with candid feedback, reviews one shared scorecard and names real progress weekly, its leaders can run the same three loops with their own teams. That is how a standard scales with headcount. A workshop cannot be copied that way.

## Arguments

### The case for

The evidence lines up well. Edmondson’s work shows that safety enables learning, which drives performance. Google’s research found that how a team works matters more than who is on it. Hackman’s tradition, as Haas and Mortensen summarise it, says the conditions around a team matter more than its personalities. Amabile and Kramer show that progress, made visible, is a powerful motivator that most managers overlook. Put together, they point to the same conclusion: high performance is mostly designed, not hired. A weekly rhythm is the simplest way I know to keep that design alive.

### The case against

The first objection is that this is too procedural. Great teams, some leaders argue, come from great people and a shared mission, not from ten-minute reviews and scorecards. Add process and you add bureaucracy.

The second is that the evidence is narrower than it looks. Edmondson studied one manufacturing company. Project Aristotle studied teams inside Google, and Google itself notes that variables that did not matter there may matter elsewhere. The Gallup figures describe employees in general, not executive teams. None of this proves that a weekly rhythm will lift performance in a particular senior team.

The third is that some teams genuinely need less safety and more pressure. A team that is too comfortable may need a hard reset, a change of people or a crisis, not a feedback ritual.

### Where I stand

I agree that the evidence is not specific to executive teams, and I would not claim that a rhythm can rescue a team with the wrong people in it. Who is at the table still matters. But when the people are broadly right, I have seen far more teams stall from a lack of rhythm than from a lack of talent. The rhythm is light: about twenty minutes a week in total. If it is turning into bureaucracy, it is being done badly, and the fix is to cut it back, not drop it.

In my [7-step coaching process](https://linusmurphy.com/services/impactful-leadership-7-step-executive-coaching-process/), this is step four, Influence, where the team learns to act with one voice, and step six, Impact, where leading and lagging measures sit on a single dashboard, wins are celebrated and new norms are built into the operating model. Step seven, Results, is where the rhythm is codified so the next level of leaders can run it too. That is usually the point where I work with the whole table through [executive team coaching](https://linusmurphy.com/services/executive-team-coaching/), not only with the CEO.

## Try this

Run this for six weeks with your executive team.

1.  **Agree the floor.** In one session, ask each leader to rate privately, from one to five, how safe it is to raise a problem at this table, and how clear it is what winning looks like this quarter. Share the spread, not the names.
2.  **Build the scorecard.** Agree five to seven shared measures. Each has one owner. No measure belongs to a single function.
3.  **Add the close.** End every executive meeting with ten minutes: what helped, what got in the way, one change for next week. The CEO speaks last.
4.  **Name progress.** Each week, each leader names one specific piece of progress on meaningful work, in a sentence.
5.  **Re-rate at week six.** Repeat the private rating. Look at what moved, and what did not.

Questions to sit with:

-   What is the last problem that reached this table later than it should have, and why?
-   Could every leader here name our shared measures without looking?
-   When did we last name a small win specifically, rather than a big one generally?
-   Which of our habits would I be happy to see every team below us copy?
-   If our headcount doubled next year, which part of how we work would break first?

## Where to go next

The rhythm only works on top of values the team actually holds, which is the subject of [core values of winning teams](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/core-values-of-winning-teams/), and of an attitude that can explain a setback without losing heart, covered in [attitude: what difference does it make?](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/attitude-what-difference-does-it-make/) The piece on [momentum breakers and makers](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leading-change/momentum-breakers-and-makers/) looks at the same weekly habits from the angle of change.

In cycling, a team that rides well together does it through hundreds of small, repeated habits, not one great race. I write about that translation on the [elite sport to boardroom](https://linusmurphy.com/services/from-elite-sport-to-the-boardroom/) page. If you want to set up this rhythm with your own executive team, [book a 30-minute strategy call](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/).

Where this came from

J. Richard Hackman began studying teams in the 1970s and concluded that what matters most is not the personalities in the room but whether the team has a compelling direction, a strong structure and a supportive context. In 1993 Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s The Wisdom of Teams separated real teams from working groups and described the rarer high-performance team. In 1999 Amy Edmondson introduced team psychological safety. Google’s Project Aristotle, first published in 2015, put safety at the top of five team dynamics. In 2016 Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen added a fourth condition to Hackman’s three, a shared mindset, for teams that are more dispersed and digital.

Source: [The Secrets of Great Teamwork](https://web.archive.org/web/20180115203622/https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork)

## Questions I am asked

**What is the difference between a high-performance team and a good team?**

A good team gets the work done. A high-performance team gets better at the work while doing it, because it hears problems early, agrees what winning looks like and notices progress. The difference is rarely talent. It is whether the team runs a rhythm that turns mistakes and small wins into learning every week, rather than once a year at the offsite.

**How do I build psychological safety without lowering standards?**

I treat them as two separate dials. Safety is about whether people can raise a problem or a mistake without paying for it socially. Standards are about what we expect. The highest-performing teams I see have both high, and the combination is what makes candid feedback useful rather than painful. Lowering standards to feel safe gives you a comfortable team that does not deliver.

**How often should a senior team review its scorecard?**

Weekly for the few leading measures, monthly for the lagging ones. The weekly look should take minutes, not an hour. If the scorecard needs a long meeting to explain, it has too many lines. Five to seven measures, owned by named people, visible to everyone at the table, is usually enough to keep the conversation on the work.

**Is celebrating wins not a bit soft for an executive team?**

Not if you celebrate the right thing. I am not asking for parties. I am asking a team to name, briefly and specifically, the progress made on meaningful work that week. The research on small wins suggests progress is one of the strongest drivers of motivation, and most managers underrate it. Five minutes of that is not soft. It is fuel.

## Sources

1.  [Understand team effectiveness (Project Aristotle)](https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectiveness) — Google re:Work, 2015
2.  [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ589456) — Administrative Science Quarterly (ERIC record), June 1999
3.  [The Secrets of Great Teamwork](https://web.archive.org/web/20180115203622/https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork) — Harvard Business Review (Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen), June 2016
4.  [The Power of Small Wins](https://web.archive.org/web/20170129191502/https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins) — Harvard Business Review (Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer), May 2011
5.  [How Effective Feedback Fuels Performance](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/357764/fast-feedback-fuels-performance.aspx) — Gallup, 1 January 2022

[Editorial standards](https://linusmurphy.com/editorial-standards/)

![Portrait of Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/images/portraits/linus-headshot.jpg)

**[Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/)**

Elite executive coach. Linus spent 25+ years as a CEO in technology and services, where the businesses he led averaged 45% annual growth, and has coached hundreds of people from more than 20 countries. He is a former Irish National Cycling Champion.

[Book a 30-minute strategy call](https://calendly.com/linusmurphy-coaching/30min)

## Related parts

[![Small stone cairns marking a trail along a rocky ridge towards a distant summit](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/goal-setting-successfully.webp)Part 12 of 30 · Chapter 3**Goal setting successfully: hard goals, short horizons and the side effects nobody mentions**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/vision-to-execution/goal-setting-successfully/)[![The carved stone keystone at the top of an old brick arch in warm light](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/core-values-of-winning-teams.webp)Part 16 of 30 · Chapter 8**Core values of winning teams: a value only counts once it has cost you something**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/core-values-of-winning-teams/)[![Sunrise breaking through storm clouds over an empty wet coastal road](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/attitude-what-difference-does-it-make.webp)Part 17 of 30 · Chapter 8**Attitude: what difference does it make? Less than the posters claim, more than the cynics think**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/building-winning-teams/attitude-what-difference-does-it-make/)[![A curving line of dominoes on a walnut table, half toppled and half still standing](https://linusmurphy.com/images/series/momentum-breakers-and-makers.webp)Part 13 of 30 · Chapter 6**Momentum breakers vs. makers: audit the rituals, not the mood**](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leading-change/momentum-breakers-and-makers/)

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