What Most Teams Get Wrong About High Performance (And How to Fix It)
Accountability alone doesn’t drive performance. Better systems do. (Read time: 9 minutes)
(Read time: 9 minutes)
In this week’s newsletter, we’re unpacking what it really takes to build a high-performing team, and why most orgs get it wrong. One of my goals this year is to take the most effective strategies I’ve seen in my time working with governments, non-profits, and tech companies and package them up so everyone can benefit, regardless of where you work.
You want to be the best in the world at what you do. But even inside top-performing organizations, only 1 in 5 employees are highly engaged (Gallup).
That’s not a margin of error. That’s an 80% failure rate.
In economic terms, that reads to me like a market failure of the massive untapped reserve of human potential inside organizations. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that the system they work within isn’t set up to unlock their best.
Success isn’t about one star player or a great quarter. It comes from systems that support collaboration, clarity, and continuous improvement.
Let’s look at what that means.
In case we haven’t met yet
👋 Hey, I’m Jessica MacLeod. Welcome to my weekly newsletter. I’m a former gov tech leader turned executive coach and advisor to mission-driven teams in government, tech, and beyond. I help leaders build high-performing teams through better systems, clearer strategy, and culture that actually works. If you want to work together, learn more about executive coaching and team workshops here: jessicalynnmacleod.com, and drop me a note at jessica@jessicalynnmacleod.com
Build Systems Around the Team, Not the Individual
Too many organizations still treat performance like a solo sport. We reward individual achievement, assign credit narrowly, and create internal competition where there should be shared accountability.
What if every team member woke up thinking: “What do we want to be true about our city, company, or mission, and what’s my role in making that real?”
The teams I’ve worked with across sectors who sustain high performance aren’t just sharper. They’ve made cultural and structural choices to support long-term excellence.
And crucially: they don’t rely on holding individuals accountable for results they have no power to change.
Performance programs fail when they focus more on individual accountability than on fixing the system.
I’ve seen this again and again.
People learn to “perform performance” without actually making progress.
Here’s what happens when the system is broken:
People cushion their metrics to avoid negative attention.
Teams set underwhelming goals to ensure everything stays “green.”
Leaders hold people accountable for results they have no power to change.
Accountability doesn’t drive performance. Better systems do.
If we want different outcomes, we need to design for collaboration, clarity, and continuous improvement, not compliance.
Care → Clarity → Challenge
Matt Breitfelder, CHRO at Apollo, recently shared this framework: Care → Clarity → Challenge.
Challenge → How We Achieve:
Stretch goals, high standards, and a culture that encourages innovation and growth.Care → How We Relate:
Trust, psychological safety, and strong collaboration.Clarity → How We Work:
Clear priorities, aligned expectations, and a shared understanding of how individual work connects to the bigger picture.
As I thought more about how these three things are connected, examples from great organizations and teams started popping up. Although Matt doesn’t say it, I believe this model is a feedback loop. These three conditions reinforce one another. And when even one is missing, performance falters.
I’ll break them down and share examples and resources of what I believe it critical in each part of the cycle.
1. Challenge
This is where most teams get stuck and so I made this number 1. We confuse busyness for progress. We fear scrutiny and set safe goals. We measure activity instead of outcomes.
Making a meaningful impact requires aligning with others to achieve something specific and ambitious.
Goal Setting That Works
A few months ago, I spoke with my friend and startup CEO Tyler Masterson about what clarity looks like in practice at his tech company.
He said:
“If you have too many definitions of success, you’re bound to create conflict.”
“Start with what you know and iterate. Set expectations that goals will change as you learn more.”
Tyler’s advice? Fewer, clearer goals. And the humility and transparency to adjust them as you go.
OKRs: Anchoring Ambition in Reality
One of the best tools for this is OKRs:
OKRs = Objectives (inspiring) + Key Results (measurable).
If you want to go deep on OKRs, look to Ryan Panchadsaram: former Deputy CTO at the White House, co-author of Measure What Matters, and a master of system design.
When Ryan helped rescue the failing Healthcare.gov launch, his digital services team used OKRs like this:
Objective: Fix Healthcare.gov for the vast majority of users
Key Results:
– 70% user success rate
– 1-second page load times
– 1% error rate
– 99% uptime
I had the opportunity to work with Ryan at US Digital Response, and I still recommend his free resource library at WhatMatters.com to every leader I work with.
If you want to learn how to implement OKRs well (and see what mistakes to avoid), start there.
Design for Alignment
Clarity doesn’t stop at goal setting. It also means aligning. Many teams stop at finalizing OKRs, presenting them, and then going back to work. But how do the daily activities of a team feed into the goals for this month? This quarter? The five year plan?
The best tool I’ve seen to establish and communicate alignment around a set of goals is a logic model. This is a logical chain of events that is visually represents a blueprint for achieving your mission. It depicts the causal relationships between daily activities, their desired results, and how those feed into short term and long term goals.
Here’s an example from a government program to reduce youth arrested for violent crime.
The thing I love about this is it helps everyone keep the bigger goal in mind and sanity check how resources are spent, what programs and projects get prioritized and other external factors in relation to the big goal. Because each set of goals in the model are time bound, it let’s you go big with the big goal. No more picking and choosing how ambitious you really want to be or making trade offs between what’s good for this year vs. what really matters down the line- it all connects- and the big goal should feel wildly ambitious and nearly out of reach.
The Performance Institute has a comprehensive course on logic models, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a ton of free resources for implementing them in your organization.
Incentivize shared outcomes
Too often, teams are rewarded for individual results, even when success depends on collaboration. That creates misalignment and internal competition. Shift your goal structures to incentivize shared outcomes. When teams rise and fall together, collaboration becomes the norm, not the exception.
2. Care
This might seem totally unrelated to high performance, but it’s foundational and often written off as a personality trait rather than a practice. If you’re going to set challenging goals, you need to create the conditions for people to achieve them, and the condition of psychological safety or trust must come first.
Creating psychological safety isn’t soft. It’s the prerequisite for risk-taking, feedback, and innovation. When people don’t feel safe, they don’t bring their best thinking and your team’s full capacity stays locked up.
To create and sustain it on your team, you have to lead with openness, humility, and care. Jim Collins (of Good to Great) calls this "Level 5 Leadership": fierce resolve and humility. Not either/or. Both.
Without humility, you stop learning. Without resolve, you avoid hard things.
You create care through small, consistent signals:
“How are you doin’…really?”
“What are we not seeing that could be a game changer for us?”
“What’s getting in your way or in the way of others doing their best?”
“What’s one thing I could be doing differently?”
I talk more about this in Rehumanizing Leadership, especially the power of curiosity and humility in building trust.
Embrace Productive Conflict
High-performing teams don’t avoid conflict, they engage with it in a healthy, goal-oriented way. When there’s care, trust and psychological safety on a team, a disagreement or competing ideas become a catalyst for clarity and better decision-making, not a source of division.
It’s important to distinguish between types of conflict:
Destructive conflict is personality-focused. It shows up as mean-spirited attacks, passive-aggressive behaviors, or turf battles. It creates tension, anxiety, and frustration, and erodes team trust.
Constructive conflict, by contrast, is goal-focused. It’s a productive exchange of ideas, driven by the shared desire to tackle meaningful issues and improve outcomes.
The difference isn’t about whether there’s friction. It’s about the intent behind it and how people engage with one another. In strong teams, conflict isn’t about who’s right. It’s about getting it right for the sake of the shared goal. And that mindset is what pushes teams from good to great.
Peer-to-peer accountability
When teams are committed to a shared mission, they want to challenge each other. They bring issues to the surface. They sharpen each other. They take responsibility not just for their own part, but for the team’s collective success.
This is what separates good teams from great ones: they don’t outsource accountability to management, they own it together.
3. Clarity
Your goals are sharp and challenging. Your team is aligned and connected. Now, how they work to achieve their goals is paramount. Clarity on how to work can be established through well-defined systems, processes, and communication channels that align individual tasks with organizational goals.
In addition to basic things like role clarity, milestones, and documentation, here are some important tips for establishing clarity.
Working in the open
Working in the open isn’t just about feedback. It’s about making your work visible as it happens. This takes guts.
It means sharing progress, blockers, drafts, and decisions in public channels, not closed threads or siloed meetings. It means assuming others can and should benefit from what you’re learning in real time.
As Waldo Jaquith writes:
“Working in the open means leaving a trail as you go. So that others can follow it, build on it, and avoid repeating your mistakes.”
This kind of transparency reinforces trust, surfaces issues early, sparks collaboration across roles and functions, and prevents duplication and misalignment.
When people share what they’re working on (not just polished outcomes) it invites others in. It also reinforces accountability without fear, because visibility is a given, not a surprise.
And when combined with care and clarity, working in the open becomes a powerful enabler of momentum. It’s the difference between a team that reacts and one that evolves, together, in full view.
Push Decisions to the People Closest to the Work
Decisions made too far from the action lead to delays and disconnects. The people doing the work usually have the clearest view of what’s needed.
Give them more ownership while ensuring managers act as coaches, not bottlenecks. This increases both speed and accountability.
Make Progress Visible
If people don’t see how their work connects to the bigger picture, motivation drops. For big picture alignment use OKRs and logic models. In the medium and shorter term, track metrics on dashboards and use visual management tools like Kanban boards so everyone has visibility into where things stand at any point in time. Clear line of sight fuels focus, engagement, and purpose. It also let’s people catch what’s not working early and course correct more effectively.
You can read more about how to do this in my article on eliminating wasteful work [READ HERE].
When you get this right, you remove friction. You build momentum. You create a line of sight from daily actions to real outcomes.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you.
If you’re going to start putting this into practice, keep in mind that it will look different depending on your context. A sales org will express this differently than a city department or a nonprofit. That’s okay.
But the structure holds. They’re learnable. They work.
Want help bringing these practices to your team? I’d love to help you.
Check out my programs for teams and executive coaching, or use the links below to book a call:
✉️ jessica@jessicalynnmacleod.com
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