Our High-Performing Teams Framework

The path to becoming a high-performing team demands a collective focus and mastery of four key areas:

Team purpose

Bridging the inner game and the outer game, and at the very heart of the framework, is team purpose. This provides collective clarity on the unique value that only the team can generate together. It serves as an anchor point, helping the team navigate complex decisions. A shared purpose also acts as a cohesive force, binding the team together in pursuit of a common mission – especially when challenges arise.

The inner game

The concept of an inner game and an outer game was popularised by Timothy Gallwey in the 1970s, through his influential book The Inner Game of Tennis. Gallwey, a tennis coach and educator, introduced this dual concept to describe the mental (inner) and
physical (outer) aspects of performance in sports, but his ideas have since been widely applied in other fields such as business, leadership and personal development. In the context of team effectiveness, the inner game is an inward orientation on the ways of working within the team. The inner game is concerned with three things:

1. the right team membership (the “who”)
2. defining what is the unique work of the team (the “what”)
3. agreeing how team members should behave towards one another (the “how”).

If not properly attended to, the inner game can occupy a disproportionate amount of team energy and focus, taking away valuable resources from getting the job done. As a result, many books on team effectiveness begin and end with the inner game. But the high-performing teams framework also recognises that, as well as looking inwards, a team must face outwards. This is the outer game.

The outer game

It is not enough for team members to simply look inwards and “report in” on their work. High-performing teams also face outwards, scanning the environment to gather insights and engaging regularly with stakeholders to explore how they can deliver even greater value. Such teams excel at bringing external perspectives into the fold while simultaneously advancing their internal mission to the outside world.
The outer game is concerned with three things:

1. creating value for the team’s stakeholders
2. harnessing external insights and trends
3. presenting a clear, consistent narrative about the team.

Wellbeing

What may appear initially as a lack of teamwork is sometimes simply exhaustion. Focus gives way to fatigue, and collaboration is replaced by an overwhelming sense of burnout. This part of the framework goes beyond conventional wellbeing initiatives to explore the root causes of being overwhelmed in a team context, with a focus on prioritisation, navigating paradoxes and managing transitions when people join or leave the team. The outcome is a team that not only knows how to expend its energy but also knows how to renew it.

Are you a high-performing team?

If you want to gauge how your team is performing against the four elements of the framework, take this assessment to find out.