5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently

Harvard Business Review · article · 2021-10-21 source ↗ Reader 🖥️

Coordination Cost Psychological Safety Social Connection & Relatedness Trust

Close social connection among colleagues, deliberately engineered through everyday relational behaviors, is the primary driver of team performance — fulfilling the basic psychological need for relatedness — and can be fostered even in remote or hybrid settings, so high performance takes more than hiring the right people and giving them the right tools.

practical · mixed (expository + argumentative) — A prescriptive HBR practitioner piece: its aim is to tell organizations how to build high-performing teams. It borrows a theoretical spine (Self-Determination Theory) and an empirical exhibit (an ignite80/Front survey) but subordinates both to a normative recommendation. Argues one thesis by marshalling five survey findings, each buttressed with a citation to prior research.

Structure

Part	Role
Theoretical frame: Self-Determination Theory's three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), of which relatedness is the hardest for organizations to cultivate — and which Covid/remote work made harder still.	premise / problem-setup
Method: ignite80 partnered with Front to survey 1,106 U.S. office workers; 'high-performing teams' = those whose members rated the team 10/10 on both self-assessed effectiveness and comparison to industry peers.	evidence-grounding
Finding 1 — high-performing teams communicate more, and are markedly more likely to use the telephone (10.1 vs. 6.1 calls/day), which strengthens relationships and prevents misunderstanding.	evidence (behavioral differentiator)
Finding 2 — they run better meetings: more prework (+39%), agendas (+26%), and opening check-ins on progress (+55%), making time together efficient and collaborative.	evidence (behavioral differentiator)
Finding 3 — they spend more time on non-work conversation (+25%) and socializing (coffee/tea/drinks), which surfaces shared interests, deepens liking, and yields better teamwork later.	evidence (behavioral differentiator)
Finding 4 — they exchange appreciation far more (received from colleagues +72%, from managers +79%; expressed +44%), and it flows peer-to-peer, not just top-down.	evidence (behavioral differentiator)
Finding 5 — they express more emotion, positive AND negative (compliments, jokes, teasing; also cursing, complaining, sarcasm), because suppression is cognitively expensive; to the extent members have the psychological safety to express their full emotional range, team performance benefits.	evidence (behavioral differentiator) + mechanism
Synthesis: creating a high-performing workplace takes more than hiring and tools; it requires engineering opportunities for genuine relationships — which is cheap, simple, evidence-based, and available to any workplace, including remote/hybrid ones.	conclusion / normative recommendation

Key terms

Relatedness Social Connection & Relatedness
One of Self-Determination Theory's three basic psychological needs (Deci & Ryan): the desire to feel connected to others. Framed as the trickiest need for organizations to cultivate ('how do you get talented employees to like each other?') and as the specific lever for team performance.
High-performing team
Operationalized purely by self-report: a team whose members scored it 10/10 on BOTH its effectiveness AND its performance relative to industry peers. Everyone else is the comparison group.
Close / authentic connection
Genuine, non-instrumental social bonds among colleagues — friendship, liking, shared interests — as distinct from mere task coordination; the thing the five behaviors build and the article's proposed cause of performance.
Psychological safety Psychological Safety
Used narrowly here as the safety to express one's FULL RANGE of emotions with colleagues (including negative ones), so they need not be suppressed at cognitive cost.
Emotional suppression
The cognitively expensive act of hiding emotions from others, which expends mental resources that would otherwise go to the work — the article's efficiency rationale for authenticity.

Propositions

explicitcontestedClose social connection among colleagues is the primary driver of team performance — creating a high-performing workplace takes more than hiring the right people and giving them the right tools; it requires deliberately engineering opportunities for genuine relationships.conf: medium
refines9) Nils Brede Moe om AI-paradokset, autonomi, læringskultur og fremtidens team · p5 — Moe names psychological safety as THE single distinguishing factor of high-performing teams; HBR widens that single factor into a broader relatedness/connection driver — of which psychological safety is one facet — and specifies the everyday behaviors through which it operates.
supportsOn Pair Programming · p10 — Both hold that relational/social capacities predict team performance: the pairing piece argues team skills (feedback, vulnerability, communication, psychological safety) predict performance; HBR supplies survey evidence that connection-building behaviors distinguish high-performing teams.
refines ←How to Build a Superteam That Keeps Getting Better · p1 — 5-things develops relatedness/connection (arguably the second of this document's three strengths — 'members actively make one another better') as if it were the primary driver of high performance. This document's explicit three-strength framing shows connection is one facet among three, alongside attention-efficiency and continuous improvement, rather than a competing single explanation.
contradicts ←The Office Amenity That Actually Improves Teamwork · p2 — Focus-time-as-driver vs. social-connection-as-driver — competing accounts of what makes teams effective. This piece names protected focused work as the distinguishing factor; the companion HBR piece names close social connection (relatedness) as the primary driver.
explicitHigh-performing teams communicate more overall and are significantly more likely to use the telephone than lower-performing peers (10.1 vs. 6.1 calls per day), which strengthens relationships and prevents misunderstanding.conf: medium
explicitcorroboratedHigh-performing teams run better meetings: they are more likely to require prework (+39%), use an agenda (+26%), and open with a progress check-in (+55%), making time together both efficient and collaborative.conf: medium
supports ←How the Best Leaders Shape Conversations · p2 — An independent survey converges on the same finding: structural meeting practices (that piece's prework/agenda/check-in; this piece's explicit next-steps/accountabilities) predict team-effectiveness ratings.
explicitHigh-performing team members spend more time on non-work conversation (+25%) and in-person socializing, which surfaces shared interests, deepens liking, and produces better teamwork later — the best teams are not more effective because they work all the time.conf: medium
explicitHigh-performing teams exchange appreciation far more frequently (received from colleagues +72%, from managers +79%; expressed +44%), and appreciation is a peer-to-peer cultural norm rather than only top-down, because feeling valued and recognized motivates more than money.conf: medium
explicitcontestedHigh-performing teams express more emotion of BOTH valences — positive (compliments, jokes, teasing, exclamation points/emojis/GIFs) and negative (cursing, complaining, sarcasm) — because suppressing emotion is cognitively expensive; to the extent members have the psychological safety to express their full emotional range, team performance benefits.conf: medium
contradictsHard truths about building in the AI era | Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures) · p10 — Direct opposition on the same construct: HBR finds that the psychological safety to express one's full emotional range lifts team performance, whereas Rabois asserts high-performance teams 'don't have psychological safety; they're about winning.'
explicitFostering close connection is cheap, simple, and evidence-based, and any workplace — including a remote or hybrid one — can engineer it through better communication, more productive meetings, and deeper friendships.conf: low

Arguments

Close social connection is the primary, engineerable driver of team performance, so organizations should deliberately create opportunities for genuine relationships rather than relying on hiring and tooling alone. strength: medium

Explicit premises:

Self-Determination Theory establishes relatedness as one of three basic psychological needs, and fulfilling psychological needs makes people healthier, happier, and more productive.
A survey of 1,106 U.S. office workers found that teams whose members rate them 10/10 differ from all others on five connection-related behaviors (more calls, better meetings, more non-work talk, more appreciation, more emotional expression).
Each of the five behaviors is independently linked by prior research to relationship or performance benefits (phone calls strengthen bonds; non-work talk builds liking; recognition out-motivates money; emotional suppression is cognitively costly).

Implicit premises:

LOAD-BEARING: the observed correlation is not a common-method / same-respondent artifact — yet both 'high-performing' and all five behaviors are self-reported by the same people, so teams that simply FEEL good about themselves would report more positive everything, inflating the association independent of any real performance.
The causal arrow runs connection -> performance, not performance -> connection (successful, low-pressure teams may have more slack to socialize) and there is no common cause (good managers or healthy culture could drive both).
A self-rated 10/10 on effectiveness and peer comparison validly identifies genuinely high-performing teams.
More connection is monotonically better, with no offsetting cost — in particular no trade-off against protected individual focus / deep-work time.
Findings gathered under summer-2021 pandemic conditions generalize to normal and post-pandemic work, and the mostly in-person behaviors transfer to remote/hybrid teams.

Inferences:

From 'these five behaviors distinguish high-performing teams' + 'these behaviors build connection' it infers 'connection drives performance' — a correlational-to-causal leap.
From several separately-cited studies (each on one behavior) it generalizes to a single unifying driver (relatedness), an abductive best-explanation move.

Narratives

The ignite80 x Front study: over the summer, the author's team surveyed 1,106 U.S.-based office workers, designating those who rated their team 10/10 on both effectiveness and industry comparison as 'high-performing,' then compared their behaviors against everyone else's.
→ The single empirical exhibit that anchors all five findings and the overarching driver claim; stands in place of case studies or anecdotes (the article is statistics-driven, not story-driven).

Questions addressed

✅ What do high-performing teams do differently?
Five behavioral differences: more communication (especially phone calls), better-run meetings, more non-work conversation and socializing, more mutual appreciation, and more full-range emotional expression — all read as expressions of close social connection.
⭕ How can organizations cultivate relatedness/connection when physical proximity is reduced by remote or hybrid work?
Offered as a promise ('even within a remote or hybrid work setting') and answered mostly with in-person behaviors (office non-work chat, coffee/drinks); only phone calls clearly transfer. The remote/hybrid mechanism is asserted more than demonstrated.
⭕ Does close connection CAUSE performance, or do high-performing teams simply have more room to connect (and is the whole pattern a self-report halo)?
Not addressed. The article treats correlation as causation and never confronts reverse causation, common causes, or the fact that both the performance label and the behaviors are self-reported by the same respondents.

Gaps

incompleteCommon-method / same-respondent bias and unestablished causation. 'High-performing' is defined entirely by members' own 10/10 self-rating, and all five differentiating behaviors are ALSO self-reported by those same members — so the correlation may be a halo artifact (teams that feel good about themselves report more positive everything) rather than evidence that connection drives performance. Even taken at face value, the direction is unproven: success may create the slack to socialize, or good leadership/culture may cause both.
Read next: Look for objective, third-party or outcome-anchored performance measures paired with longitudinal or experimental designs that can separate a genuine connection->performance effect from reverse causation, common causes, and self-report halo.
incompletePandemic-era framing and the missing focus-time trade-off. The data are from summer-2021 Covid conditions and may not generalize post-pandemic. More sharply, the piece privileges CONNECTION as THE lever and treats more of it as monotonically good — it never weighs connection against the cost to protected individual focus / deep-work time, where a competing view holds that guarding uninterrupted attention is what actually lifts team effectiveness. More calls, more meetings, and more non-work chat are precisely the interruptions that view warns against.
Read next: Weigh close connection against protected focus / maker-schedule time; test whether the connection->performance effect survives when these behaviors crowd out deep work. A companion counter-thesis (HBR on the office amenity that improves teamwork via protected focus time) argues attention-protection, not connection, is the primary lever.
incompleteRemote/hybrid applicability is under-evidenced relative to the headline promise. The article opens by promising the findings help 'even within a remote or hybrid work setting,' yet most differentiators are inherently in-person or proximity-based: 'time at the office discussing non-work matters,' meeting for coffee/tea/an alcoholic beverage. Only the phone-call behavior clearly transfers to distributed teams; the mechanism by which the rest survive full remoteness is not shown.
Read next: Investigate which specific connection behaviors actually transfer to fully-remote teams versus which depend on physical co-location, and whether deliberately engineered remote rituals reproduce the in-person effect.

Closes gaps elsewhere

When You Start to Find Employee Requests Irritating · g2 — That gap flags a four-need taxonomy (safety, love, belonging, meaning) left unmapped to established frameworks like Deci & Ryan. This article grounds workplace belonging squarely in Deci & Ryan's Self-Determination Theory — autonomy, competence, and especially relatedness — showing that 'belonging' corresponds to the relatedness need and connecting the folk taxonomy to the canonical SDT triad.