Eliminating Ways of Working Theater: What High-Performing Teams Do Differently
Every organization wants more high-performing teams.
But when you ask leaders what makes a high-performing team, the answers often sound vague: “strong collaboration,” “good communication,” “alignment.”
Those things matter, but they don’t tell us what great teams actually do differently, in ways that can be taught and scaled.
After working with many teams across industries, functions, and levels, we’ve seen that high-performing teams share a few clear patterns. These patterns aren’t magic. They’re learnable. They’re buildable. And most organizations aren’t teaching them nearly enough.
Start With the Right of Unit of Focus, and a Clear Goal
The best teams always start here: What does success look like for us?
One of the biggest opportunities is to bring the idea of high performance down to the right unit of abstraction — the team.
We often try to define "high performance" at the company level. But for an individual team, success can and should be made extremely clear.
High-performing teams know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They aren’t stuck debating vague corporate objectives. They are aligned around a clear, shared goal that orients everyone’s energy and decisions.
Invest in Trust, Not by Accident but Intentionally
Trust is the invisible force that powers high performance.
High-performing teams invest in trust, and they do it intentionally. They build real relationships. They create space for vulnerability. They make trust an everyday behavior, not just a talking point.
When trust is absent, it’s very hard, sometimes impossible, for a team to achieve high performance. When trust is present, things move faster: decisions, collaboration, innovation.
Ways of Working That Are Built, not Performed
One of the biggest differences we see is how high-performing teams handle their ways of working.
Too many teams go through what we call “ways of working theater”. They spend a day building a slide deck or aspirational flowchart about how they’ll work together. But those slides rarely get referenced again, especially when real work happens.
Here’s the reality: no day is ever your team’s best day.
Every day is chaotic. Business needs shift. New demands show up. Great teams aren’t performing an idealized process from Slide 6 of their “how we work” deck.
They’ve embedded ways of working into default behaviors - ways of collaborating that hold up when the real world gets messy.
When you see a high-performing team, they aren’t stopping to ask, “How are we supposed to handle this?” They just do it. Because trust, clarity, and ways of working are built in.
Learn about the 8 key behaviors that successful teams prioritize here.
Pursuing Work That Matters, and Will Be Celebrated
Another common pattern: high-performing teams work on outcomes that matter.
They aren’t spending energy on low-impact projects that may or may not be valued by leadership. They are chasing goals that, when achieved, will absolutely get noticed and celebrated.
As we often say: they’re working on something that “someone will want to celebrate.”
That creates energy. It creates focus. It builds resilience.
Teams that know their work will be valued bring a different level of motivation and a different level of sustained performance.
At Cultivate, We See This Every Day
In our teaming work here at Cultivate, we see these patterns again and again. The teams that consistently outperform aren’t the ones who do more training. They’re the ones who embed strong teaming behaviors into day-to-day work — where it sticks.
Whether in clinical trials or across other high-stakes environments, helping teams build these capabilities is core to how we approach teaming.
You can learn more about our teaming work here.
Bottom Line
High-performing teams aren’t just lucky or naturally gifted. They do a few key things differently - and those things can absolutely be taught.
The opportunity for leaders is to move beyond vague concepts of “teamwork” and start helping more teams build the real behaviors that drive sustained performance.
Because when those behaviors become the default, high performance becomes the norm, not the exception. So pause and ask yourself: What kind of culture are you really creating? And is it one worth fighting for?
Cultivate empowers organizations to not just adapt to change, but to lead in shaping the future of work. Let us help you build a thriving culture now — send us a message.
