High Performance: A Collective Endeavor

It’s Time to Reframe High Performance: From Individual Excellence to Collective Impact

For years, the conversation about high performance has centred on individuals, high‑achieving leaders, star performers, and personal productivity. In some ways the plethora of new years resolutions based on personal goal setting is a reminder of the ego-centric world we live in, particularly in Western cultures.

Increasingly the evidence is clear: individual brilliance alone does not create high‑performing organisations.

Recent research from McKinsey’s 2024 “Cracking the Code of Team Effectiveness”, based on global organisational data and team‑health diagnostics shows that three in four cross‑functional teams underperform when collaboration is weak, even when individual talent is high. We also know that psychological safety increases execution by 19% (EZRA’s 2025 Performance Index), demonstrating that the climate of a team, not the capability of any one person, directly shapes performance outcomes.

So what does this mean?

How we work together matters more than how any one of us performs alone.

Why We Must Rebalance the Narrative

I am not against a personal focus on high performance. In fact, it is essential, especially in relation to building self-awareness, resilience and the skills to build effective relationships. But the current imbalance, where individual output is often focused on more than collective capability, has consequences. Performance management and KPI are still primarily about individual goals that leads to competition over collaboration.

The world is becoming increasingly complex and under strain. Stress is on the rise. Old ways of working where outcomes can be predicted, and actions plan can be set in stone are few and far between.  How we work together to navigate uncertainty and empower each other is now how successful teams are operating.

In our evolutionary past, how a community connected was how it survived. Our brains are wired for connection but we seem to have lost our ability to connect well. It’s time to refocus our attention on connection. It is what we need individually and collectively and it is how we are going to drive positive change together.

The Real Foundation of High Performance

Whether we are talking about individuals, teams, or whole organisations, high performance rests on:

• Self and team awareness

• Trust and psychological safety

• The ability to connect, communicate, and empower each other

• Shared accountability and aligned purpose

• The skills to navigate challenge, conflict and change together

  
  

Where teams falter it's rarely down to technical skill. They falter when people cannot have difficult conversations with care, when meetings lack clarity and purpose, when conflict becomes personal instead of productive, when values are posters, not lived behaviours.

This is why my work focuses on building the human capabilities that drive collective success.

My Five Core Principles for High‑Performing Teams

1. Build Cultures of Psychological Safety

The research is strong (and constantly building): psychological safety is the foundation of high‑performing teams^.

2. Strengthen How We Connect Through Effective Conversations

This includes disagreeing well, challenging supportively and empowering each other (such as through coaching).

3. Manage Work Together Through High‑Quality Decision‑Making

Teams must be able to turn negative conflict into positive conflict, run effective meetings, and share organisational insight.

4. Create Agreed Ways of Working Across Teams of Teams

High performance becomes cultural when behaviours, habits and mindsets align with organisational values.

5. Build Self, Team, Organisational, and Systemic Awareness

Awareness is the engine of transformation, personally and collectively. Seeking to understand you context should be your guiding compass.

Team Performance and the 2025 Ofsted Framework

Having led six schools, three successful Ofsteds, and worked with over 100 school teams, I’ve seen firsthand that high challenge, paired with high support creates rapid, sustainable change.

The 2025 Ofsted framework reinforces this. It places greater emphasis on staff wellbeing, leadership team effectiveness, professionalism and the conditions that enable purposeful collaboration. It's a clear signal that culture, connection and collective capability matter and are seen as drivers of success (both for children and the whole organisation).

Recently, I worked with a school who completed a team coaching programme. Over a series of 4 months we combined one‑to‑one coaching, team coaching, DISC profiling, ways of working, meeting effectiveness and embedding one to one and team coaching skills.

The result?

“This work has left us more cohesive, reflective, and better equipped to collaborate effectively; a transformation that directly contributed to Ofsted’s confirmation of Outstanding in all areas.”

This is what intentional development of team performance looks like in practice.

The Bottom Line

Organisational outcome are the result of collective capability over personal achievements.

Teams that communicate well, trust each other, challenge and support each other and align around shared purpose, accelerate performance both within teams and across whole organisations.

Personal growth fuels organisational transformation and how people connect is fundamental to this. Team coaching builds the capabilities that make high performance possible and psychological safety is the foundation that holds it all together.

This is the shift our workplaces and our schools need.

My name is Tamara, I am an experienced Executive Headteacher and leadership trainer. I now work with organisations to help teams connect well at an individual, team and organisational level to drive positive change together.

References

Psychological safety: the foundation of high-performing teams. https://www.nfp.co.uk/media/insights/psychological-safety-the-foundation-of-high-performing-teams/

The role of psychological safety in high-performing teams.

https://fridaypulse.com/insights/psychological-safety-high-performing-teams

Ofsted’s New Inspection Framework 2025.

Education inspection framework: for use from November 2025 - GOV.UK

Ofsted’s New Inspection Framework 2025: prioritising wellbeing in schools. https://www.partnershipforchildren.org.uk/who-we-are/news-and-blog/ofsteds-new-inspection-framework-2025-prioritising-wellbeing-in-schools/