How to lead high performance teams during chaotic times

The world is much more volatile and unpredictable than it has been in most everyone’s lifetime. Today’s leaders are dealing with continuous political and climate shifts – plans get made but are often shelved in response to significant external change. The ‘five-year plan’ that used to be a staple of corporate life, now only rarely sees its fifth birthday.

Even more challenging is the reality that the problems business leaders are dealing with are typically complex, cross-national, and highly technical involving climate, economics, and technology. What is more, customers and other stakeholders are increasingly asking businesses to ‘stand for’ something in order to differentiate themselves from competitive offers – drawing business into the political domain of shifting opinions. To address such an unstable yet technical landscape, businesses ‘curate’ teams of experts and ask them to work together. We see this up and down the landscape from product teams to boards now all facing these challenges.

Despite these challenges, the standard for what makes a high-performance team has continued to climb. We expect our teams to continuously produce better, more, and faster. To achieve this continuous improvement requires collaboration and learning by creating a culture where people can experiment, share ideas, and learn from failures without fear of retribution.

A high-performance team

There are three key indicators to watch to ensure your team is reaching its potential. The first is obvious; one needs to carefully observe the outcomes from the team. This is harder than it appears, however. What if the team’s outcome is decision making? Most senior teams do not ‘do’ things, they make decisions. How do you know your board or your top management team is making the best decisions? You can wait and see how decisions impact the organisation, but those types of groups have long time horizons, so by the time you see their impact many other decisions are affected.

To fully evaluate a team, you should also consider whether most of its members believe they get at least as much as they give to the team. That may sound like you are judging selfishness, but you are actually judging learning and investment in the team. If a team is all give and no get, its members will not put their best foot forward. To have people engage fully, they must feel they benefit in some way too. Would your team say they are benefitting from being a part of your team?

Finally, and most importantly, you should evaluate the viability of the team itself. If members are trying to simply survive, they are not thriving. The questions to ask are ones about whether the members would choose to continue working with this team or whether they would prefer to make some changes, or work in a different team. The most productive teams are those in which the members believe there is a uniquely good fit between this group of individuals and the task at hand. Would your team say they cannot think of a better group to work with?

Leading in a chaotic world

When I teach, I always ask the question: “What do we want from our leaders in times like these?” Answers I typically get include empathy, relationships, agility and resilience. Relationships and empathy have always been part of the equation for motivating others, but they are becoming ever more important as the world feels more chaotic and we increasingly supervise from a distance or online today. To achieve this, you need your team to follow when you signal a change in direction. That takes trust in leaders.

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell illustrated perfectly why trust matters when venturing into the unknown when he was asked to define the key characteristics of effective leadership. He said: “Trust. The longer I have been in public service, and the more people have asked me about leadership over the years, leadership ultimately comes down to creating conditions of trust within an organisation. Good leaders are people who are trusted by followers. Leaders take organisations past the level that the science of management says is possible.”

Quoting a sergeant from his time in infantry school, General Powell also said, “You’ll know you’re a good leader when people follow you – if only out of curiosity! So, the essence of leadership is about doing all that the science of management says you can with resources, but then taking it that extra step and giving it that spark. And that spark comes from getting people to trust you.”

Generating that kind of trust is not always easy. At its core trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to someone else, so it is not given easily. There are at least three questions your followers need to decide in your favour: 1) behavioural integrity – are your words and actions clearly consistent, 2) benevolence – do they have my interests at heart, and 3) competence – are they capable of delivering what they promise? If the answers are yes, then trust is possible.

There is a final warning, however. Be aware that trust is domain-specific, meaning that if your team trust you in one area such as day-to-day work, that does not mean they trust you in other areas such as pay and promotions. Worse still, distrust is universal. If you do something that generates active distrust, it will colour your entire relationship from pay to management, friendship to family ties.

Randall S. Peterson is Professor of Organisational Behaviour; Academic Director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School and Chair of the Research Ethics Committee. His research and teaching focus on CEO personality, top management team interaction, board dynamics, leading diverse teams, conflict management, and the effects of member personality on group interaction and performance. His newest book is ‘Disaster in the Boardroom: Six Dysfunctions Everyone Should Understand.’

This article was first published in Forbes magazine on 09 January 2025.