High-Performing Teams Are Not Always Thriving Teams

For years, I've asked leaders a simple question:

"What makes a team effective?"

The answers are remarkably consistent.

"We achieve our goals."

"We meet our deadlines."

"We produce results."

Those are certainly indicators of success.

But I don't believe they're enough.

In fact, one of the greatest misconceptions in leadership is that high performance automatically means a team is healthy.

I've worked with teams that consistently exceeded expectations while quietly experiencing burnout, declining trust, disengagement, and turnover. From the outside, they looked exceptional. From the inside, they were exhausted.

That experience has led me to rethink how we define team effectiveness.

I've come to believe that team effectiveness is built on three interconnected dimensions:

Results + Relationships + Renewal

Together, these dimensions provide a more complete picture of whether a team is simply performing—or truly thriving.

Results: Why We Exist

Every team exists to accomplish something meaningful.

Results matter because they provide direction, purpose, and accountability.

Organizations depend on teams to solve problems, serve customers, educate students, care for patients, innovate, and move the mission forward.

Without meaningful results, it's difficult to argue that a team is effective.

But results answer only one question:

Did we accomplish what we set out to do?

They do not answer another equally important question:

What happened to the people while we accomplished it?

Relationships: How We Accomplish the Work

Results tell us what we accomplished.

Relationships reveal how we accomplished it.

Healthy relationships are built on trust, communication, accountability, psychological safety, and mutual respect.

They create environments where people feel comfortable asking questions, offering ideas, disagreeing respectfully, and learning from mistakes.

Throughout my work in leadership development, I've become convinced that relationships are not "soft skills."

They are performance skills.

When relationships deteriorate, communication slows, collaboration weakens, innovation declines, and conflict becomes increasingly difficult to navigate.

Servant leadership reminds us that people are never simply the means to accomplishing organizational goals.

People are the mission, too.

Renewal: The Dimension We Often Ignore

The third dimension is the one I believe deserves much more attention.

Renewal asks a fundamentally different question:

Are we becoming stronger because we're working together?

Or...

Are we simply becoming more tired?

This idea has been influenced by the work of Gretchen Spreitzer and her colleagues, whose research on thriving at work suggests that thriving emerges when people experience two things simultaneously:

Learning and vitality.

Learning reflects continual growth, development, and increasing capability.

Vitality reflects energy, enthusiasm, and feeling alive in one's work.

One without the other is incomplete.

People can learn while becoming exhausted.

They can feel energized without growing.

Thriving occurs when learning and vitality reinforce one another.

That insight has challenged me to think differently about team effectiveness.

Perhaps the goal isn't simply producing results.

Perhaps the goal is building teams that leave people more capable, more energized, and

better prepared for tomorrow than they were yesterday.

Servant Leadership Creates the Conditions

Recent research examining servant leadership and flow adds another important piece to this conversation.

Flow represents those moments when individuals become fully engaged in meaningful work—when challenge, skill, purpose, and concentration align.

Interestingly, servant leadership doesn't create flow directly.

Instead, servant leaders create the conditions where flow becomes more likely.

They provide clarity.

They build trust.

They coach.

They remove obstacles.

They create psychological safety.

They invest in growth.

Those leadership behaviors foster environments where people become deeply engaged

in meaningful work.

Viewed together, these studies suggest something powerful:

Servant leadership creates the conditions for thriving.

Thriving strengthens renewal.

Renewal sustains long-term team effectiveness.

A Different Way to Measure Success

Imagine evaluating your team using three questions.

Results: Are we accomplishing meaningful work?

Relationships: Are we becoming a healthier, more connected team while doing it?

Renewal: Are people leaving this experience more capable, more confident, and more energized than when they began?

Those questions move leadership beyond performance metrics alone.

They invite us to consider not only what our teams accomplish, but what our teams become.

A Final Reflection

One of Robert Greenleaf's most enduring questions asks whether those served grow as persons.

I've come to believe that the same question applies to teams.

Yes, effective teams achieve meaningful results.

But they also strengthen relationships.

They increase trust.

They build confidence.

They expand capacity.

They create opportunities for people to learn, contribute, and flourish.

In other words, they leave people better than they found them.

Perhaps that is one of the truest measures of leadership.

Not simply what our teams accomplish...

But who our teams become because we led them.

For more on this topic, check out my podcast: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/3jixcxN4w4b

Warm Regards,

Dr. Jason R. Weber, Ed.D.

Owner / Advisor

SLI Coaching and Consulting

www.slicoaching.net

Jason@slicoaching.net

806-507-2046

References:

Spreitzer, G., Sutcliffe, K., Dutton, J., Sonenshein, S., & Grant, A. M. (2005). A Socially Embedded Model of Thriving at Work. Organization Science, 16(5), 537–549.

van Dierendonck, D., Xiu, L., & Lv, F. (2026). Servant leadership influencing flow and team performance through a caring-oriented social context [Review of Servant leadership influencing flow and team performance through a caring-oriented social context]. Evidence-Based HRM: A Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebhrm-07-2025-0322