High Performing Teams: Is Your Boss Building One or Just Adding Pressure?

I spent nearly two decades as a skydiving instructor. I’ve guided on glaciers and taught avalanche safety. These are jobs where a mistake can have very real consequences.

The most pressured I’ve ever felt at work was on a sales floor.

That surprises people. Plenty of people could never do a skydiving instructor’s job. We all loved the work, and maybe we were wired a little differently to handle it. The office still felt like more pressure.

So here’s my first point: don’t take the stress of an office job lightly.

And here’s my second: a lot of what gets called high performance is really just high pressure. They’re not the same thing, and high performing teams are built very differently.

Why an office job can feel more pressured than jumping out of a plane

In skydiving, the pressure is intense, and then you land. It’s over. You debrief, have a laugh, and reset.

On the sales floor, it never really ended. The best way I can describe it is lots of open tabs. At any given time I’d be working with several different customers, each wanting things changed or adjusted, and each one taking time. None of them ever fully closed. That was the stressful part.

There’s research behind why that wears on you. Psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished tasks keep intruding on your thoughts, and that simply making a specific plan for them reduces those intrusions, even before the task is done. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011)

That matched my experience. The pressure eased once I learned systems to keep track of everything without relying on my memory. Nothing about the workload changed. The tabs just stopped living in my head.

That’s worth thinking about as a manager. A lot of workplace stress isn’t one big moment. It’s a pile of small open loops that never get closed.

What’s the difference between high performance and high pressure?

High pressure is about load. More targets, more watching, more urgency, less room to breathe. (I’ve written about how targets can backfire when they become the job.)

High performance is about conditions. People know what matters, have the say and support to do it well, and can recover between the big pushes.

Pressure can lift numbers for a while. When high demands combine with low control, poor support and no recovery, you’re creating the conditions for burnout and turnover. (Those conditions are also recognised psychosocial hazards.)

What the best boss I worked under did differently

The best boss I worked under ran a team that performed really well, and it never felt like pressure was the engine. Looking back, it came down to four things.

• They took the time to get to know us as individuals. Not as numbers on a board.

• They let capable people get on with it. If you knew your job, you were trusted to do it.

• When someone was underperforming, there was support and education. The response was to help them get there, not to pile on.

• Unacceptable behaviour wasn’t tolerated. It was dealt with quickly and fairly.

None of that is soft. High standards and high support sat side by side. That’s what made it work.

Cracking the whip in the quiet times

Every workplace has slow patches after a busy run. What a business does with them says a lot.

I’ve worked somewhere that would crack the whip in those moments. If it was quiet, you had to find work, even when there wasn’t any. It looks good from a business perspective. In the long run, it doesn’t work well.

Those quiet patches are a great opportunity for people to actually get to know each other, and the research backs that up.

A Harvard study of software teams found that team familiarity, how often people had worked together before, had a significant positive effect on performance. (Huckman, Staats and Upton, Management Science, 2009)

MIT’s Alex Pentland went further. His research found the most important predictor of a team’s success was how its members communicated, as significant as intelligence, personality and talent combined. In one bank call centre, simply having teams take their coffee breaks together, instead of one at a time, lifted performance and job satisfaction. (Harvard Business Review, 2012)

A coffee break. That’s the kind of thing a high pressure workplace would cut first.

Signs your team is running on pressure, not performance

• Quiet periods get filled with busywork instead of recovery, training or connection.

• People carry lots of open tabs in their heads, with no system to track them.

• Underperformance gets met with more pressure, not more support.

• Capable people still need sign-off for routine decisions.

• The numbers get talked about constantly, and the people behind them rarely.

• Good people are leaving, and the ones who stay look tired.

If a few of those sound familiar, our Team Culture Diagnostic will help you see which conditions are driving it.

Look after the team, and the numbers will come

If I had to give a manager one thing to start doing on Monday, it would be this: talk to your team.

Ask them how they’re going. Ask what’s causing them stress. Ask how they could be better supported. A walk around the block works better than a chat across a desk, which I’ve written about in staff incentives. I heard a speaker from SafeWork NSW say almost exactly the same thing at a WHS conference recently, which tells you how basic, and how overlooked, it is.

Don’t lean on generic advice from someone who’s never worked on the floor. Your team already knows what’s getting in the way. Be more human with them.

We’re in a world of AI, dashboards and less real connection between people. It’s time to spend less time staring at the numbers and more time looking at the team.

The evidence is on your side. Gallup’s analysis of 2.7 million employees across 96 countries found teams in the top quarter for engagement were 23% more profitable and 18% more productive in sales than teams in the bottom quarter. (Gallup, 2020)

I’d put it simply. Look after the team, and the numbers will come.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a high performing team?

High performing teams usually combine clear standards with real support. Leaders know people as individuals, trust capable people to get on with their work, support those who are struggling, and deal with unacceptable behaviour quickly and fairly. Team members also know each other well, which research links to better performance.

What is the difference between high performance and high pressure?

High pressure is about load: more targets, more monitoring and more urgency. High performance is about conditions: clarity, the right amount of control, support and time to recover. Pressure can lift results briefly, while good conditions sustain them.

Can workplace stress affect performance?

Yes. Ongoing workplace stress, especially high demands combined with low control and poor support, is linked to burnout at work, lower performance and higher turnover. Office roles with lots of unfinished tasks can be particularly draining because those open loops keep intruding on people’s thoughts.

How do you build a high performance culture?

Start by talking to your team about what’s causing them stress and what support would help. Then fix the conditions behind it: clear priorities, systems for tracking work, appropriate autonomy, support for underperformance, and time for people to connect and recover.

Want to know if your team is performing or just under pressure?

Start with the Team Culture Diagnostic. If you’d rather talk it through, get in touch.

Culture that drives performance.