What Are Habits of High-Performing Teams?
Productivity Advice
What Are Habits of High-Performing Teams?
In the quest for peak productivity, we've gathered insights from top professionals, including Organizational Psychologists and CTOs, to uncover the habits that set high-performing teams apart. From cultivating psychological safety to leveraging osmotic communication, explore these six transformative practices that could revolutionize your team's efficiency.
- Cultivate Psychological Safety
- Prioritize Communication Urgency
- Adopt a Single Communication Platform
- Implement Open Communication Practices
- Align Strategy and Messaging
- Leverage Osmotic Communication
Cultivate Psychological Safety
One habit I've observed in high-performing teams is the cultivation of psychological safety. This environment encourages open communication, allowing team members to share ideas and concerns without fear of judgment. Additionally, these teams consistently engage in regular feedback sessions, fostering continuous improvement and growth. Adopting these practices can significantly enhance productivity by building trust and facilitating better collaboration.
Prioritize Communication Urgency
A great way for teams to reduce interruptions and increase productivity is to agree on what types of communication are most urgent to least urgent. Instead of having every email, text, instant message, meeting request, and phone call feel like they require immediate attention, the team establishes the expectation for how quickly each type of communication needs to be answered. For example, a phone call may be considered most urgent, but everyone agrees that an email can be addressed within 24 hours.
Adopt a Single Communication Platform
The highest-performing teams operate in a zero-email, zero-meeting environment that enhances productivity and focus.
Other teams can create this environment by adopting a shockingly simple habit: sticking to one platform for all communication.
Online task managers like Asana are great for this. They're specifically designed to help teams work more efficiently by making it easy to keep track of deadlines, prioritize the right tasks, and spend less time searching for information.
Additionally, task managers can streamline communication by allowing questions and tasks to be added directly, which helps avoid the confusion of email threads or agendas.
My team swears by this method. With everything in one place, we never miss deadlines, our communication is more efficient than ever, and our productivity has skyrocketed.
Implement Open Communication Practices
One habit I’ve observed in high-performing teams is open communication. The teams I’ve worked with that meet regularly, discuss key results and objectives, and bring issues to light tend to be the most productive.
For example, at one of my companies, we implemented daily stand-up meetings for our product team. In 15 minutes, each team member shared what they were working on, any roadblocks, and their priorities for the day. These short, frequent meetings ensured everyone was aligned and problems surfaced quickly. Within a month, our product release cycle sped up by 20%.
We’ve also used OKRs—objectives and key results—with quarterly all-hands meetings to share progress. Teams presented their OKRs, talked about what’s working and what’s not, and came up with solutions together. Transparency around goals and results builds trust in teams so they can adapt quickly. After starting OKRs, employee satisfaction jumped by 12% the next quarter.
High-performing teams don’t work alone. They communicate openly, set clear expectations, and hold each other accountable to drive results. Adopting these habits can significantly impact team productivity and business success.
Align Strategy and Messaging
"Habit" is a tricky word, one I might replace with "practice." Much of productivity relies on clear direction consistently communicated, and never more so than in times of change.
Alignment across an organization's leadership of strategy and messaging is critical—and real alignment is gained through healthy debate practices to ensure leaders go forward with genuine buy-in. They next need to ensure they're equipped to communicate strategy in ways that are relevant to the roles of their teams all the way down to the front lines, and that the "why" isn't overlooked but offered in ways that drive engagement.
Productivity hinges on clear direction and tapping into a purpose that drives action. High-performing teams are motivated to achieve their targets and are clear on the path to them.
It's not radical advice, but it is surprisingly overlooked or taken for granted by the clients I speak with. I've heard "But we told them to do this" time and again, with wonder as to why results aren't being achieved.
Leverage Osmotic Communication
As someone working in an environment with a flat hierarchical structure, I’ve found osmotic communication to be a highly natural and effective way to contribute to relevant team discussions. On a recent task involving implementing calculative freight-shipping, the software developer in charge was having a conversation with the business development manager (BDM) about investigating the possible solutions to integrate the feature into the website.
At the same time, a fellow software developer who had once worked on something similar overheard the conversation and offered some insight on what he had observed being done on other websites, essentially providing a quick resolution to the issue at hand. Just by being in close proximity to each other, the passive absorption of information between the BDM and the developers facilitated a quick exchange of highly relevant information that directly improved the productivity of the team.
