The 5 Pillars of Exceptional Teams, and Why One Matters Most

In early July of 2014, I was preparing to sell my boutique real estate firm to a much larger national firm. Because the acquiring firm also had a local presence, the offices would be merged, and I was asked to lead the newly combined team. While the cultures of each office were obviously different after years of operating independently, the challenge would be establishing a new culture without making either side feel absorbed, overlooked, or diminished in the process. We couldn’t simply impose our high-energy boutique culture on them, and we couldn’t just adopt theirs either. Whatever came next had to be built deliberately, openly, and with input from the people who would have to live inside it.

In the first 60 days, I made it a priority to meet with everyone in the local office that was new to my team. I asked lots of questions and took lots of notes. What motivates you personally? What scares you about this transaction or the transition ahead? How do you view the newly combined company and its possibilities? I also asked what they hoped to see and what they hoped to avoid. More than anything, I wanted them to know they would be heard. Shortly thereafter, we hired an external consultant to lead a full-day company offsite. One of our most important goals was to establish team commitments ― the norms that would shape how we intended to work together. At the end of the day, we thoughtfully voted on the commitments that would ultimately define our future culture.

That experience has always stayed with me because cultures can be fragile, and leaders need to be intentional in shaping them.  Healthy cultures are built, and they usually rely on a handful of foundational pillars ― norms and values a team chooses to deploy and strengthen over time. These pillars are often overlooked in our reactive approach to the busyness around us ― the sheer pace of our work lives. It would have been easy for me to simply hold a company meeting, give a rah-rah speech, tell everyone to work harder, and promise good things would happen. But building an excellent culture would require more than that. As I later reflected on that integration, I found myself drawn to the story of Google’s Project Aristotle, which Charles Duhigg recounts in his 2016 book, Smarter Faster Better.     

Project Aristotle was a research project in which Google set out to determine what made some teams thrive while others struggled. Researchers examined everything from personality types and educational backgrounds to management styles, hobbies, and team composition. What many expected to matter most was the “who” of the team, meaning some correlation to a specific talent ― intelligence, charisma, or some other valued quality. What Google found instead was that it was the “how” that mattered more.

The research determined that the most important differentiator was psychological safety, or a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In practical terms, that meant people felt comfortable speaking up, asking questions, admitting mistakes, offering ideas, and disagreeing without fear of embarrassment, rejection, or retribution ― even when addressing someone more senior or the team leader. I learned this early in my own sales career when my more senior partner and I agreed to always provide each other regular feedback, good and bad.

Coffee breath before the meeting? Underdressed for the lunch? A piece of spinach in your teeth? Nothing was off limits, but we always tried to do it respectfully. That kind of candor is exactly what Google’s research pointed to. Psychological safety stood out as the foundation that allowed teams to function at their peak by putting the mission first and helping the organization succeed.

It empowered people to act in the mission’s best interest and to speak up when it mattered most. That insight reaches far beyond a single operating team. What is true for a healthy team is often true for a healthy culture. When people do not feel psychologically safe, they protect themselves, they stay quiet, and worse yet, they don’t share feedback, managing ‘political risk’ rather than collaborating openly.

In organizations where that silence becomes the norm, often through conflict aversion or an assumption that people should simply know better, problems compound quietly until they surface as something larger. At its worst, this dynamic can lead to a termination in which the employee had no idea there was an ongoing issue—because no one ever gave them honest feedback. But when safety is present, trust deepens with time and the conditions for high performance begin to take hold.

Google’s researchers found that psychological safety mattered most, but it was not the only condition that shaped effective teams. Four other pillars consistently stood out: trust and dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.

Together, they help explain why some teams merely function while others truly thrive.

Trust and dependability are fairly straightforward, but no less essential. Exceptional teams are made up of people who are reliable and do what they say they will do. They follow through, meet or exceed team standards, and carry their share of the load. When dependability is missing, the cost is rarely a single dropped deliverable—it is the slow erosion of trust that follows. Teammates begin to hedge, to double-check, and to build quiet workarounds for the person they cannot count on. Yet too often, no one openly acknowledges what is happening to steer the team back to accountability. Without psychological safety, the team has no mechanism to deal directly with the problem, so the behavior goes unaddressed and team standards drift downward by default.

Structure and clarity are critical; without them, team members drift into what I often call mission fog. Does your organization have a clear mission statement? Core values? A clear value proposition? Does the vision of the leadership team create motivational alignment throughout the organization? In environments without structure and clarity, performance is judged by visible effort rather than strategic alignment. I see this in youth sports. A coach may look at the scoreboard, fail to understand the deeper strategic problem at hand, and default to demanding more effort, even when the team is visibly exhausted. Business can work the same way. Employees may work long hours and push themselves hard, but if they do not understand the strategy, the priorities, or how success is actually created, effort alone will not save them. Clarity gives people direction, reduces friction, and helps them understand not only what to do, but why it matters. And clarity is not only a leadership output; it is also a team input. People have to feel safe enough to ask the obvious question, admit they do not understand a priority, or challenge a contradiction when they see one. Without psychological safety, those questions go unasked, and the fog never lifts.

Meaning is what makes the work feel personally important. People are more engaged when they believe what they are doing matters beyond simply checking a box or earning a paycheck. Meaning connects work to intrinsic values like growth, purpose, or contribution to the community. It gives effort emotional staying power, particularly when the work becomes difficult or mundane. Leaders must tap into this and help employees make the connection where it exists.

Impact is closely related, but distinct in that people want to know if their direct efforts contribute to the larger cause, whether that is helping a client, advancing a mission, supporting a team, or moving an organization forward. When people can see the effect of their contributions, commitment deepens. Impact can come from showing employees how the work changed a customer’s situation—a problem solved, a goal reached, a life improved. It can also come from a company’s commitment to something larger, like a team day building with Habitat for Humanity or volunteering at a Ronald McDonald House. Both connect daily effort to a clear result the team can see and feel.

All of these pillars serve a culture of excellence, but psychological safety is what allows them to take hold. Meaning deepens when people can bring more of themselves to the work, and impact grows when people are willing to contribute candidly, challenge assumptions, and collaborate without fear of retribution or ego. Looking back at the office we built in 2014, the commitments we voted on that day were really an attempt to make safety the precondition for everything else. Psychological safety is powerful because it shifts the focus from self-protection to mission protection. In that kind of culture, feedback is not seen as a threat to ego, but as a contribution to collective success, allowing organizations that establish it to flourish.