One evening, I was speaking to a group of MBA students on the subject of team performance. I asked them to consider this question: “Think back to your best team experience ever. What made it so memorable for you?”

One young woman’s hand shot up. “I felt like the whole of my team was greater than the sum of its parts,” she said.

Some years ago, Google undertook a comprehensive study of 180 internal teams to understand the drivers of high-performing teams. Google concluded — and social psychology research has confirmed – that the most important factor is psychological safety, which Harvard professor Amy Edmundson defines as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

Your team is no different. What will set your team’s performance apart is not the knowledge or skill of individual contributors but rather how your team members work together – the structure, processes, and norms they establish and consistently follow for solving problems and generating creative solutions to difficult challenges.

Connection trumps competence every time.

Trust is the secret sauce of psychological safety and building collaborative relationships with others. Your team members should feel safe asking questions about things they don’t understand and comfortable raising concerns about the work you’re doing. They should feel free to view mistakes as opportunities for team learning and to offer candid feedback to other team members. They should feel confident enough – and secure enough in their own skins – to accept feedback from others graciously, with an open mind.

“[Eric] has demonstrated an uncanny ability to discern the nuanced differences among teammates and what lies below the surface, and co-create a pathway to take our team to a higher level.” – Nicole Rush

My work coaching leadership teams – accomplished through workshops, small group breakouts, and personal reflection exercises – focuses on helping teams build trust and psychological safety through reaching consensus on shared goals, learning how to accommodate and celebrate different communication styles, and balancing efficiency with collaboration. Executive teams I have coached in the past have reported the following results from our work together:

• Increased team member engagement and more focused task concentration
• Better time management and more efficient work processes
• More open, candid and clear communication
• Clearer, more actionable feedback among team members
• Greater commitment to shared team goals
• Improved interpersonal relationships among team members