6 Factors of High-Performance Cultures in 2025: Exclusive Insights from our Leadership Summit
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Every leader wants to build a high-performance team, but it’s one thing to say you want a high-performance team culture and another to actually create one.
Some people think if they can just get their team to “click,” they’ll be able to improve productivity and engagement. Others think team success is solely based on “heroic team leaders” who take on more responsibilities than other team members and save the day.
While effective leadership is the crux of a positive team culture, the best leaders empower others to be the best they can be.
“The myth of team chemistry—that teams either click or don’t—and the concept of the ‘heroic team leader’ are just not realities in the companies that you work in.” -Michael McCarroll
As we enter 2025, leaders are realizing that factors like “engagement,” while vitally important, aren’t the only measures of a successful team culture.
Today’s leaders need to focus on creating a culture of accountability, learning, psychological safety, trust, and more.
In today’s exclusive Leadership Lab, learn some of the top insights that came out of our recent summit, and what this means for team success in 2025.
A Brief Overview of Our Leadership Summit
On December 5th, we invited many of today’s top leaders and CHROs to an event that focused on building high-performing team cultures.
Over the course of six sessions, several prominent thought leaders and academics shared insights on a wide range of topics impacting today’s business world.
Our esteemed session hosts included:
Over the course of the day, these incredible leaders shared several insights impacting today’s leaders.
Below is a deep dive into six key factors that—according to these experts—are vital for leaders to prioritize in the new year.
1. Team Psychological Safety
The first session, led by Stanford’s Anja Nabergoj, focused on the importance of psychological safety at a team level.
Psychological safety is at the root of most high-performing teams. It results in teams with greater willingness to:
The starting point for psychological safety is a form of trust that facilitates open, honest communication. Teams with this trust will share more information and exhibit a differentiated give-and-take balance.
“Trust and psychological safety don’t just happen—they’re built intentionally through shared experiences and vulnerability.” - Anja Nabergoj
In her session, Anja led several exercises designed to facilitate rapid bonding, trust, empathy, active listening, and more.
These included:
These exercises demonstrate that cultivating psychological safety and connection can be simple, but requires intentionality and vulnerability.
2. Cross-Functional Collaboration
It’s no secret that cross-functional collaboration can be difficult. Harvard Business Review reports that many cross-functional teams struggle with “collaboration drag”—an excessive number of meetings, unclear decision-making authority, etc. This, in turn, leads to a 37% decrease in the likelihood that teams will hit their revenue and profit goals.
To combat this—and capitalize on the innovation benefits effective cross-functional collaboration provides—leaders need to optimize their cross-functional collaboration.
In this session, our CEO Michael McCarroll, and Harvard’s Amy Edmondson discussed some of the key obstacles to effective cross-functional collaboration, including:
There are two ways leaders can respond. The first is by accepting the trade-off between Intra-team effectiveness and Inter-team effectiveness.
The second is to actively work to “shift the curve” by enhancing cross-functional collaboration.
There are three ways to accomplish this:
Cultivating empathy and perspective-taking is an excellent way to enhance intra-team effectiveness.
“Consistently, it’s this ability for teams to see things from another perspective that leads to success.” - Michael McCarroll
Leaders should be deliberate about investing in team experiences and training that promote empathy, open communication, and psychological safety.
3. Disagreement and Innovation
Increasingly, team leaders are becoming aware of the importance of disagreement to innovation.
However, there’s still a widely held implicit belief that disagreements shouldn’t be voiced—or are even dangerous to voice.
Unspoken disagreement is one of the most significant barriers to innovation. To address this challenge, Harvard’s Deanna Parrish and Elaine Lin Hering discussed strategies for surfacing dissent.
“Research… shows us that there are two elements that are critical to greater innovation on teams. The first is surfacing minority dissent, and the second is participation in decision-making.” - Deanna Parrish
There were two primary tools discussed in this session that can help address this challenge:
1. Leveraging Process
Consider embedding standardized questions into team processes to surface differences, encourage minority dissent, and depersonalize conflict—thereby reducing conflict’s strain on relationships.
“The more that we can rely on process, the less it puts the strain on the relationship.” - Elaine Lin Hering
Examples of questions include pros/cons, what works/what doesn’t work, and what resonates/what’s concerning.
2. Encouraging Participation
It’s important to ensure that everyone is assigned one of the following roles:
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Make sure that everyone understands their role in the decision-making process and that there’s alignment among stakeholders.
“A lot of challenge can come from a misalignment in terms of who we believe is a decision-maker or is to be consulted and how someone sees themselves, their authority, the expertise they have to offer. Making explicit those implicit relationships is extraordinarily important—not only to setting expectations for when and how dissent can be voiced but also preventing future feelings of extraction or burnout.” - Deanna Parrish
Once again, psychological safety and candor play a key role in ensuring that team members feel comfortable voicing their concerns and opinions.
4. Prioritization and Simplification
In Bob Sutton’s book, The Friction Project, he mentions that one of the most common sources of friction in an organization is “addition sickness.”
Addition sickness as defined by Bob Sutton is “The Penchant to solve problems by adding, rather than subtracting, complexity.”
In other words, when problem-solving, it’s natural for people to lean towards adding complexity rather than finding ways to subtract it.
“The natural tendency if people were left unchecked was to add more and more.” - Bob Sutton
Bob mentioned three key drivers of this “addition sickness”:
According to Bob, great organizational leaders make subtraction a habit.
“When organizations become great organizations, they do this. It’s a routine part of the culture.” - Bob Sutton
While some level of complexity is inherent in challenging work, leaders should model subtraction and empower their teams to identify and eliminate unnecessary friction.
5. Accountability and Outcome Ownership
In past Leadership Lab events, we’ve discussed the importance of framing accountability as ownership rather than punishment.
This session, led by Colonel Robert “Cujo” Teschner, focused on the importance of accountability in the workplace.
“We recognize that there's a deficiency [of accountability]. We also know that the deficiency is preventing us from becoming the best that we can possibly be.” - Cujo
Despite the fact that organizational leaders want to improve accountability, there’s often a lack of a shared vision for how this should look in practice.
The lack of a shared definition of accountability often hinders teamwork and performance. Traditional "postmortems" often focus on blame and penalties, creating a culture of fear and avoidance.
According to Cujo, the best definition of accountability is “taking absolute ownership of the outcomes we achieve.” To cultivate this form of accountability, organizations should run regular debriefs.
The debrief is a "constructive evaluation of decision and action quality" aimed at learning and improvement. The trigger for a debrief is mission completion, not failure.
“We were one question away from success today... If we can ask that kind of question next time, imagine what we're going to do.” - Cujo
According to Cujo, these are the key components of a successful team debrief:
Research shows that effective, rigorous debriefs can improve organizational performance by as much as 25%.
6. Moving Beyond “Engagement” to Measure High Performance
The final session was led by Amy Edmondson and MIchael McCarroll.
In this session, they discussed the fact that engagement, while an important measure of a high-performance culture, often overemphasizes satisfaction and doesn’t fully capture team performance.
“Engagement is not the same thing as output.” - Michael McCarroll
While engagement should certainly be measured and prioritized, organizations should also measure the following aspects:
Learning Speed and Adaptability
How quickly are team members able to learn from successes and failures and adapt accordingly?
The specific metrics used to measure this can vary based on the function. For example, marketing teams can use A/B testing velocity—the speed and frequency of testing new ideas and implementing successful variations.
Sales teams can measure the speed at which deals progress through the pipeline or how quickly new representatives become productive.
While these metrics should be tailored to the nature of the work, they’re nonetheless incredibly important to high-performance teams.
“We have to be ever mindful that all metrics are flawed and make it discussable, but be absolutely committed to holding ourselves accountable for excellence and continuous learning.” - Amy Edmondson
Intelligent Failure
Some of the most impactful research Amy Edmondson has done is her groundbreaking work on intelligent failure.
According to Amy’s research, there are three different types of failure:
“[Intelligent failures] are the kinds of failures that happen when we try new things in new territory and when we have very good reason to believe it might work.” - Amy Edmondson
In risk-averse cultures, failure is often perceived as a negative rather than a positive. In high-performance cultures, employees are encouraged to take “smart risks,” and intelligent failure is encouraged rather than punished.
“We have to learn to love [intelligent failures] because the... speed and ambition of intelligent failure production... is a critical determinant of innovation.” - Amy Edmondson
Next Steps and Practical Insights
So what does this mean for your team?
One of the most actionable insights that came out of this event is that team experiences can contribute to creating a high-performance culture.
Intentional, research-backed experiences that allow your team to connect and learn together contribute to enhancing psychological safety, trust, and collaboration.
At Teamraderie, our team experiences are designed with creating a high-performance team in mind. These live, virtual workshops are led by experts—such as Anja Nabergoj, Cujo, and Deanna Parrish—and are backed by extensive research.
Click here to learn more about how our experiences can ignite your team’s high-performance culture.
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