Beyond High Performance
THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE:
A high-performing team may not be an effective team.
The team may be talented and hardworking, but they may be optimizing for the wrong success indicator at the expense of maximizing value to their clients and their organization. They may be pursuing short-term results at the expense of sustaining long-term outcomes. Or sometimes they compete with other teams to be ‘the best’ at the expense of what is in the best interests of the enterprise.
Below, we explore our collective insights and wisdom as we reflect on what we’ve experienced, observed and worked with as Systemic Team Coaches. This month’s panel has partnered with leaders, teams and organizations, nationally and globally.
This newsletter series emerged from our Canadian Community of Practice. Collectively, we want to share the patterns and trends we see in teams and organizations and share ways to support your team's values and effectiveness.
With this unique lens, we're pleased to share our collective insights to generate a more systemic way of seeing how teams can create value.
Our panel of Systemic Team Coaches this month:
Evelina Rog, EJR Leadership Development Inc., Andria Gillis, People Lab & Renewal International, Lucy Shenouda, FosterEssence Inc. & Renewal International, Dana Janzen, Janzen Leadership Inc. and Olga Netchaeva, Next Challenge Coaching
The questions we posed to our panel this month challenged the premise that high-performing teams are also effective teams, by default, adding significant value to their organizations.
In exploring this distinction, five themes emerged that speak to the challenges faced by high-performing teams.
One: The speed and efficiency trap
Efficiency can quietly become the enemy of thinking. Thinking strategically. Thinking long-term. Thinking about the best interests of the enterprise. High-performing teams often pride themselves on running tight, efficient meetings, and that discipline, over time, can crowd out the conversations that actually matter.
Olga Netchaeva describes it this way: "The pattern of speeding through their meeting agenda without sufficient time for discussions that invite diverse perspectives or challenge assumptions can look like high-performing. The team appears to be cohesive, decisive and efficient. But over time, this way of operating leaves the team at risk of strategic drift, siloed views and trust erosion."
Lucy Shenouda adds that teams leaning into perfectionism "hit each goal and avoid surprises, which looks high-performing, yet it quietly diminishes their value: people stop challenging assumptions, avoid hard conversations, and don't make time for learning or experimentation."
Two: The individual vs team performance
A team of high performers is not the same as a high-performing team.
The difference shows up in how decisions are made and how work is owned. Elevating the quality of conversations and accelerating progress toward integrated, collective action requires deliberate effort to design the quality of relationships and the clarity of processes together. Treating shared systems and workflows as essential infrastructure that shapes outcomes across the ecosystem operationalizes this distinction. When teams build on a shared purpose, visibility replaces guesswork, and collaboration becomes a shared effort where teams can anticipate, receive, and respond with confidence. Highly effective teams add value by collectively designing how their work interconnects.
Lucy Shenouda worked with a leadership team that had everything on paper: "experienced executives, clear growth goals, and a compelling shared vision. Yet they weren't delivering the integrated client experience the organization needed. Under the surface, leaders were still acting as high-performing individuals, competing for influence." This isn’t unusual. After all, executives are often rewarded and promoted based on their ability to deliver results for their function. Collective performance and wisdom don’t emerge magically or organically under these conditions.
Evelina Rog sees a related pattern: teams that deliver exceptional results, even with the best interests of the enterprise at heart, can do so in ways that accumulate power and influence, but when this insulates them from getting honest feedback or bringing others along, it comes at a cost. "Their accomplishments and being seen for what they can deliver become most important," she says, "and it comes at a cost, to the team, or to others around them." That cost can show up as friction, disengagement, and an organization that quietly routes around the team rather than through it.
Three: The system around the team stays invisible
High-performing teams may stop looking outward beyond what’s obvious. They become so focused on internal execution that the broader organizational system, its misalignments, its unmet needs, and its shifting priorities, become invisible to them.
Dana Janzen names it directly. "Teams get really good at internal execution, but they don't focus enough on enterprise value. They optimize the team while the system around them stays misaligned. It shows up as siloed wins, slower adoption, and lots of rework."
Andria Gillis sees it play out in meeting rooms: "Team meetings are not necessarily serving the team. In one organization I worked with, teams used the meetings to share findings, explain research and basically present their work to each other. If the research wasn't interesting or directly related to their own work, other team members tuned out." The team was busy. It just wasn't generating anything beyond what each individual could have done alone.
Four: Leaders are often looking in the wrong place
When something isn't working, the instinct is to look at the people. Our panel consistently looks elsewhere first, at the behavioural patterns, the structural conditions, and the systemic forces that are shaping how the team operates.
"I look first at the interaction patterns, not the personalities," says Dana Janzen. "How decisions really get made, what's avoided, where ownership truly sits."
Andria Gillis takes a similar approach: "One of the first things we do is attend some business-as-usual meetings, not to intervene but to observe. Who speaks and to whom, who doesn't contribute, who engages, who is tuned out."
What both are pointing at is that the presenting problem is rarely the real problem.
Olga Netchaeva offers a reframe that makes this concrete: "Interpersonal dynamics among team members are a signal of tension in the system, rather than a conflict between two individual leaders."
Evelina Rog adds: “If structure drives performance, then teams would benefit from learning to locate the problem in the system, not in individuals. When teams make that shift, they stop pointing fingers and they stop trying to fix the wrong thing. They get better at seeing the system and asking questions like “what is sustaining this pattern?” and “how can we redesign the system to produce different behaviours?”
Five: Slowing down is a strategic act
Value-creating teams pause with intention.
Precision requires it. The most consistent insight reshaping how value-creating teams lead is this: their biggest challenges are rarely solely strategy or personnel problems. The real work involves slowing down long enough to connect what's been left disconnected; how work moves across teams and toward outcomes and value creation. As leaders begin to see those system connections clearly, what's been obscuring impact becomes undeniable. Momentum has a pattern. It flows where alignment is built and trust moves work forward, and it slows just enough to expose exactly where the real strategic impact lives.
Lucy Shenouda puts it this way: "Build the muscle to slow down with your team in order to power up, just like marathon runners. They see a hill on their path, they slow down, observe the landscape, breathe deeply, and prepare to harness their energy."
Evelina Rog points to what becomes possible when teams make that shift: "By becoming a value-creating team, the team learns to collaborate to do what is in the best long-term interests of the enterprise versus delivering short-term results, individually, in silos. This takes intention. It requires learning to be comfortable with the discomfort of slowing down in the short term to speed up later."
Andria Gillis brings it back to a practical starting point: "Get really clear on what is the highest, best purpose of your team. What do your clients and stakeholders need from you today, and in the future? Measure your success against delivering on those needs."
That is the question that changes what a team pays attention to, and ultimately, what it delivers.
The challenges of high-performing teams described in this article are important because if not addressed, the collective wisdom of a team remains underutilized or worse, inaccessible. The impact? The team cannot reliably operate as a cohesive whole and does not have the strategic lines of sight that are required for leading through complexity.
