Every team thinks it's high performing. Most are wrong.

It's fair to say that every organisation wants high performing teams. As a senior leader, you don't want your teams to be average.

But could you describe the habits and behaviours that make it obvious that a team is high performing?

I think the challenge is that we use the phrase so often it's nearly lost its meaning. To the people inside these teams, none of what makes them high performing feels remarkable. It's just how they operate. But these everyday ways of working are what separates a group of talented individuals from a team that genuinely delivers.

So here's what I actually see in the best teams I've worked with over the last twenty years, across just about every sector. I'll start with the one that surprises people most.

The best senior leaders are more loyal to their fellow senior managers than to the team they lead.

Counterintuitive, right? Surely your first duty is to your own people? But watch what happens when it isn't true.

A leader whose loyalty runs mainly downwards fights their corner, protects their patch and actively competes with the very colleagues they should be standing alongside. A leader whose loyalty is to their peer group makes decisions for the whole business, not just their slice of it. They still lead their own team brilliantly. They just never do it at the expense of everyone else. Get that one right, and most of the rest follows.

They're genuinely aligned on what needs delivering and how. Not roughly pointed the same way, but aligned to the point where you could ask each of them separately and get the same answer. And they act together in service of the strategy, the culture and the customer.

Nobody oversteps their lines of accountability. Everyone knows what they're on the hook for and holds it, not to guard territory, but because they understand a simple thing. None of them succeeds unless all of them do.

They disagree hard, but don't do so for the sake of it. They welcome discord, because they know that's how you reach a better answer. But it has a purpose, it's never personal, and when it's finished, it's finished. No grudges carried into the corridor. No reopening the argument by WhatsApp that night.

If you're able to do all four of those things consistently, you get the thing every team claims to want, and few actually have. Trust. Not the bullsh*t, surface-level, away-day, trust-fall kind. The kind of trust that lets you argue fiercely in a meeting and still know, the second you walk out, that your colleague has your back.

Being honest, there are plenty of teams who perform really well without doing all of this. They're friendly in the meeting, political outside it. Nodding along to a strategy they couldn't explain under pressure. Avoiding disagreement in the room, then having the real conversation in twos and threes afterwards. Guarding their own patch and calling it accountability. From the outside, they can look healthy, but the trust just isn't there. And when do you think it shows up?

The moment things get tough. The moment pressure is applied, the cracks show.

So my question about your own team isn't whether you're high performing, because nearly everyone believes they are.

My question is this. How will your daily, weekly and monthly ways of working serve you in your organisation's most challenging moments?

If you're not sure your team is truly high performing, do something about it now before the real test comes.