Leading high-performing teams: The power of genuinely caring about people

They were the darlings of Silicon Valley, every investor’s favourite tale of how they made a fortune as they went from seed funding to a $3.5 billion unicorn in just three years. 

If ever there was a high performing team it was at Uber. CNBC reported that new employees were asked to adhere to 14 core values, including making bold bets, being “obsessed” with the customer, and “always be hustlin’.” 

It was a recipe that saw founder and CEO Travis Kalanick drive Uber to a $70 billion valuation, but in 2017 a whistleblower lifted the lid on a high performing culture out of control. 

In a blog Susan Fowler detailed sexual harassment, discrimination, and managers undermining their direct supervisor to steal their job, while a subsequent investigation found a director shouting homophobic slurs and another manager threatening to beat an employee’s head in with a baseball bat. 

It was the opposite of the psychological safety Google’s Project Aristotle study of 180 of its teams found was the driving force behind a high performing team. Sometimes performance can overshadow and mask what truly belonging to a team is all about. 

To build a sustainable high performing team requires much more than dubious core values and a machismo culture built on one-upmanship. 

Decades of research into teams, building on the seminal 1993 book The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, both partners at consulting giant McKinsey at the time, have developed seven principles that leaders should follow for building and leading high performance teams that genuinely care. 

1 Cultivating emotional intelligence in leadership  

The concept of emotional intelligence is well established, having been popularised by psychologist Daniel Goleman in 1995 with his bestselling book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. 

Emotional intelligence is fundamentally about how one interacts with others, and that interaction is always a two‑way process rather than a personal trait of the leader alone. 

What matters is the space a leader creates between themselves and those they lead - a space shaped by the ability to recognise and articulate their own emotions and, crucially, to understand the emotions of others.  

This is not about projecting toughness or adopting a ‘soft’ persona, but about acting as a facilitator and listener who enables others to perform and contribute at their best. 

Today, discussions increasingly focus on psychological safety; the idea that people in their workplace should feel comfortable expressing their ideas and confident enough to experiment without fear of negative consequences. 

Allowing different ideas to surface is a foundational element of organisational culture because it enables people to feel free and express their creativity, which is closely linked to innovation. 

Emotional intelligence reflects an awareness that people bring not only hard skills to work, but also so‑called soft skills. It is about how you engage with others, which means recognising not only their ideas, but also their fears, ambitions, and a desire to feel valued.  

The role of empathy is central, though I tend to frame it slightly differently, when thinking about teams and organisational life. From that perspective, it begins with recognising and accepting our shared vulnerabilities, something we all experience, at different points in life and at work.  

Leaders need to acknowledge that we are not always bubbly and upbeat, sometimes being vulnerable and down is a normal part of being human; understanding and allowing this means people can bring their full selves into their teams.  

Crucially, it also means offering support when things are not going well, so that people feel safe not only to share ideas and experiment, but also to be open when life becomes challenging. 

Organisations, especially large ones, have a lot of services for staff now, but they can be nothing more than a tick-box exercise, especially when done on scale online. Often people really just need space to restore themselves and regenerate. So, this means a generous vacation policy and humanising organisations, which means genuinely caring about people's well-being. 

2 Defining effective team leadership  

First of all, to be an effective leader you have to be aware of your own strengths and weak points as a person. Once you are aware of your own capabilities and your own complexity, but also your own weaknesses, you are much more able to be attuned to others.  

That awareness allows leaders to think of their staff as whole people, who bring not only skills but also aspirations, dreams, and vulnerabilities. They need to care about them, but this has to be supported materially through organisational policies and structures, not just rhetoric. 

These days we often talk about care in organisations, but the critical question is how that care is actually implemented and what material structures support a caring organisation.  

One of the most fundamental of those structures is ‘trust’, something leaders need to have in their staff. It reflects leaders’ assumptions about human nature, ie whether they see people as creative and willing to do good, or as inherently lazy and in need of constant control.  

In organisations built on trust, people tend to rise to that trust, leading not only to better performance but also to more sustainable, happier places where people feel recognised and motivated to do their best. 

If you want sustained performance, a leader needs to rebalance their focus towards cultivating people’s attachment to the organisation in a positive, non‑exploitative way, because people are far less likely to leave or withhold their best efforts when they feel recognised for who they are and, above all, when they are trusted. 

3 Setting clear expectations and goals  

Setting goals and expectations that are aligned with the mission and vision of the organisation, with clarity and consistency, is, of course, extremely important. 

But within teams there also needs to be discretion and space for people to express themselves and give feedback. This is because goals, objectives and even tasks are often redefined by external circumstances, changes in technology, competitive pressures and wider geopolitical developments.  

High‑performing teams do not exist in a vacuum; the external context still matters. Organisations are shaped by the stage of their life and the environment they are operating in, such as the media industry right now, where traditional newspapers are experiencing significant and sustained external pressures from online competitors.  

In such contexts, expectations of high performance must be moderated, because what counts as high performance in one situation may not be realistic or sustainable in another, and there is only so much that people can do when so much lies beyond their control. 

4 Building and leading high-performing teams 

To build a high-performing team means recruiting and cultivating the right people. This depends on how clear and articulate we are about what we actually need, because very often we recruit in our own image through homosociality – our bias for same-sex friendships – and sometimes even worse, through biases we are not aware of.  

What really matters is being clear about our expectations and about what the role requires, because that clarity helps us identify the right person rather than simply someone who looks familiar to us.  

Recruiters therefore need to be trained to recognise and work against their own biases, because we are all prone to them. And if organisations want a strong and sustainable pool of people for future roles, they need to invest in their own pipeline, developing and cultivating people internally so they can step into different roles as the organisation moves through various stages. 

Diversity and inclusion are super important for both ethical and practical reasons because they offer a very material way of addressing our own biases by bringing in people from various backgrounds and life experiences who are unlike us.  

Ethically, this is about practising equality of opportunity within organisations and conveying that commitment to our future workforce and our clients, while it brings different perspectives, experiences and that much‑needed out‑of‑the‑box thinking.  

However, diversity and inclusion are not box‑ticking exercises: they require genuine investment of time and care to bring people together organically around shared goals and expectations, rather than imposing alignment superficially. 

5 Empowering team members 

While it is essential to create supporting structures and provide tangible, material ways of support - not just slogans - it is equally important to give people autonomy. 

Autonomy makes people feel valued and recognised, motivates them, and encourages commitment when they see their advice, ideas and inputs being taken seriously and incorporated.  

When that happens, people feel that the organisation and the team are where they belong, which strengthens both motivation and attachment.  

Even in highly structured or science‑driven research and development settings, autonomy is not only possible but necessary, both to prevent failure in difficult circumstances and, at best, to harness people’s creativity, ingenuity and skills in ways that allow them to contribute meaningfully and feel that contribution is genuinely valued. 

6 Meaningful performance management  

As a leader, measuring your team’s performance is very important. But it is also important to look at this from a half‑glass‑full perspective, because, depending on our assumptions about human nature, we can also slip into a half‑glass‑empty way of seeing things.  

From a positive perspective, recognition really matters: saying “I see what you do, I appreciate what you do,” giving feedback, and asking what support people might need is really important. 

That is team performance management, rather than engaging in a ritualistic, going‑through‑the‑motions kind of assessment. 

Giving feedback is a gift, and so is receiving it, but receiving it properly means responding to it and acting on it where possible, so people feel valued not only for what they have done but also for what they can still contribute.  

When feedback and recognition are meaningful, they help people understand their contribution to an organisation’s shared goals and feel valued by the collective, whereas when they are ritualistic they create disengagement and cynicism, instead of becoming the powerful tool they could be. 

7 Celebrating success and acknowledging contributions  

One way a leader can celebrate success and acknowledging their staff's meaningful contributions is simply through everyday practice and the way we interact in the organisation. 

Leaders can make sure that recognition becomes an embedded part of an organisation’s culture rather than something reserved only for rare occasions. You cannot always wait for big celebrations, but in small, everyday ways recognition can be part of how people relate to one another. 

When key milestones or bigger achievements are completed, it is good practice to recognise them both symbolically and materially. Ideally it is both, because while people value symbols and not everything can be expressed in monetary terms, material recognition also sends an important signal across the organisation that contributions are noticed and valued.

Marianna Fotaki is Professor of Business Ethics and teaches Management in Practice on BSc Management.

Learn more about developing high-performing teams on the WBS Executive Leadership programme.

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