Table of Contents
- Clarity
- Vision and Values
- Leadership Development
- Rewards and Recognition
- Benchmarking and Feedback
- Mental Skills and Conditioning
- Skills Development
- Self Assessment
- Rituals
- Trust and Open Communication
- Accountability
- Solutions Focus
For your team’s performance to flourish, your employees need to be loyal, aligned and engaged.
This never happens by accident. High performance teams cultivate leadership, skillsets and culture to optimize their performance.
Leadership, skillsets and culture are the 3 pillars of high performance. Each pillar has 4 facets. By improving these facets, you can accelerate your team’s advancement towards peak performance.
This article will walk you through the 3 pillars and the 12 accelerators of a high performing team and then provide direction on how you can apply what you learn within your organization.
Pillar 1: Leadership
1. Clarity
- What does your organization intend to do?
2. Vision and Values
- Is your team led with a clear vision and values?
- Are the vision and values meaningful to your team?
3. Leadership Development
- What is your plan to develop your company’s leaders?
4. Rewards and Recognition
- How will you reward good performance?
Pillar 2: Skillsets
5. Benchmarking and Feedback
- How do your team members know when they’re winning?
- How do your team members get feedback so they can improve?
6. Mental Skills and Conditioning
- Is your team agile?
7. Skills Development
- What is your plan to develop your employees skills so they can bring the most to your team?
8. Self Assessment
- What are the skills of each individual on your team?
Pillar 3: Culture
9. Rituals
- What does your team do you celebrate wins?
- How does your team overcome challenges?
10. Trust and Open Communication
- How does your team speak to each other?
- How well does your team listen to each other?
11. Accountability
- How do you hold your team members accountable for their roles and responsibilities?
12. Solutions Focus
- How does your team address problems?
- How does your company ensure team members are having fun?
You Need All Three Pillars
A high performance team requires all three pillars: leadership, skillsets, and culture.
- When you have leadership and skillsets, but you don’t have culture, then you have no team. Your company functions as disunited collection of individuals.
- When you have skillsets and culture, but you don’t have leadership, then you have no direction. It will be difficult to make significant progress toward your goals, if your goals are even clearly defined.
- When you have culture and leadership, but you don’t have skillsets, then you have nothing. You have no chance to win.
Steps to Develop Your Team
Assess each of the 12 high performance accelerators.
- Highlight in green the accelerators you’re doing well consistently.
- Highlight in yellow the ones you’re doing well, but not consistently.
- Highlight in red the ones that need the most improvement.
First tackle the accelerators you highlighted in red. Develop an action plan to bolster up those areas. Then move onto the yellows.
Achieving great performance is an ongoing journey. A high performance team is always improving!
Get Started Today by Printing Your Venn Diagrams
We encourage clients to print off a copy of our High Performance Teams Venn digram for reference. This will help you remember the areas of your company that you choose to work on today, and refer back to this information each week as you implement and test improvements in your company.

You can print off this diagram, then follow along with our video as you write in the 3 pillars and 12 accelerators of a high performance team.
