People talk a lot about building high-performing teams. In fact, you’ll struggle to find someone who doesn’t have an opinion on what it takes to get there. But in practice most teams never get anywhere close. Not because people aren’t capable, but because the leadership holding everything together isn’t stable enough or consistent enough for anything meaningful to build.
Few people want to admit that building a high performing team is slow work. Slow.
It works more like saving money than hitting a jackpot. Put £100 into a savings account once and it barely moves the dial. Put £10 in every month for ten years and something meaningful starts to grow. And that’s what leadership is. Not the big gestures, but the tiny behaviours that compound quietly in the background.
That’s why my conversation with Mick Rigby stuck with me. He’s kept a senior team together for close to a decade. Several started as interns – and in an industry where people often rotate every 12 to 18 months, that level of longevity isn’t just unusual. It’s a clue that he’s getting something crucial right.
When you see that kind of stability, it’s worth paying attention. And it’s not because Mick has a magic framework. It’s because he’s behaved consistently, patiently and with enough self-awareness to give other people room to grow.
Why most teams never reach high performance
Most teams fall apart long before they become great. Not due to toxic behaviour or dramatic fallouts. Usually it’s a gentler drift. A couple of conversations avoided for too long. A few rushed decisions. One or two people feeling unseen. Or a push for short term wins that erodes a longer term mindset.
When foundations get skipped. Pace overtakes patience. And people move on before any compounding can happen. It’s not just opinion either. A 2024 CIPD practice summary found that long term performance is heavily linked to trust and psychological safety, not just incentives or targets.
Yet too many teams still try to get the performance bit, without any of the groundwork.
The compounding effect of leadership
What separates leaders who get lucky from leaders who build something durable?
It’s not the big moments. It’s the repeated ones. And where empathy is used as a practical tool, not a personality trait.
Empathy often gets misunderstood. People hear it and think softness. The research says otherwise. A 2019 study found that empathetic leadership directly supports stronger performance, because people work better when they feel understood and safe to speak up.
For Mick, empathy is the thing that tells him how his team is really doing, long before the work exposes it.
You don’t even need to share his wiring to use the principle. You just need to stop treating people’s emotional reality as an optional extra.
Trust built through small, consistent behaviour
You don’t get to a position of being trusted with one or two moments.
It happens when you back someone who’s having a wobble. When you say no to a client who would burn everyone out. When you admit you were wrong before someone else has to tell you. When you make five minutes for someone at the exact moment you’d prefer not to.
Those things stick. And they tell a team who you really are, not who you claim to be.
Stretching people without overwhelming them
One thing that stood out from the conversation was how often Mick gives people opportunities they don’t yet feel ready for. Not to test them. To show that he believes they can grow into it.
Handled properly, those moments change how someone sees themselves. It’s the kind of stretch people remember years later.
But develop people at the pace they can sustain
This is where leaders can get impatient. People don’t all grow at the same speed. Some rise quickly. Some need time to settle. Some grow through repetition rather than volume.
And Mick doesn’t force the pace. A 2025 review in the Review of Managerial Science backs this up. Human-centred leadership produces more sustainable performance over time, even if it slows the short term trajectory.
Again, the compounding shows up later.
Why understanding your own wiring matters
Self awareness isn’t just a soft-skill to wheel out during away-day exercises. Leaders who understand how they’re wired make better decisions about the environment they create and the people they surround themselves with.
Whether that wiring includes neurodivergent traits or just personal strengths and blind spots, the principle is the same: you lead better when you aren’t pretending to be someone else.
And you stop forcing other people into roles or scenarios that don’t fit them either.
Why this matters more over the next decade
What’s becoming clear, is that AI will increasingly handle a lot of the mechanical work. Campaign optimisation. Data sorting. Performance reporting. But the real leverage in teams comes from the stuff AI won’t replace: judgement, relationships, creative problem solving, the ability to read a room, or influence others.
As the technical gap narrows, the human gap gets bigger. This is where the leaders who invest early will thrive.
What can ambitious marketers start doing tomorrow?
The good news is that none of this relies on grand gestures. The real gains come from a handful of small behaviours that start compounding the moment you take them seriously.
Stretch someone slightly, not dramatically
One of the simplest places to start is with stretch. Not the kind that sends someone spiralling, but the kind that nudges them a little beyond where they currently feel comfortable. Most people don’t need a leap. They just need one piece of work that signals you believe they can grow into bigger things. Give someone a challenge that’s slightly ahead of them, spell out what ‘good enough’ looks like, and stay available without taking over. Those moments tend to stick with people far longer than the task itself.
Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding
Every person has one. The thing dragging behind them like a loose cable because they keep telling themselves they’ll deal with it next week. The delay is almost always worse than the discussion. If you raise the topic plainly, give the other person space to respond and finish with a clear next step, the whole thing usually feels far lighter than you feared. And it builds relationships in a way that nothing else quite does.
Ask what people are really trying to achieve
This one’s deceptively simple. This isn’t the project goals though. It’s their goals. Most misalignment in teams doesn’t come from poor performance, but from unspoken intentions. When you understand what someone is driving towards, what matters to them personally, you can support or redirect them with far more accuracy. It also cuts through months of silent assumptions that slow everything down.
Understand the dynamics, not just the tasks
Teams don’t operate like neat diagrams. They run on mood, trust, confidence, insecurity, alliances, and occasionally a bit of friction. Sitting back and watching one meeting unfold without participating tells you more about how your team really works than a deck of KPIs ever will. You see who people defer to, who speaks with ease, who stays quiet, and where the real influence sits.
Be consistent in one small, reliable way
Consistency also matters more than people want to admit. But it’s the very boring, very human kind that matters e.g. replying when you say you will, keeping the meetings you promise to keep, not disappearing when things get busy. Teams place huge weight on small, steady signals. If there’s one behaviour you often drop under pressure, pick it up again and keep it going for a month. Don’t make a big thing about it though, just be predictable. It builds an emotional safety net you can’t manufacture any other way.
Ask which behaviours will still matter in five years
There’s the long-term question that underpins all of this: what behaviour today would still be useful in five years? Slow down and think about the team you’re trying to build, not the fires you’re trying to put out. If a decision only solves the immediate problem, it probably needs another look. If it contributes to trust, capability or autonomy, it’s almost always worth doing.
Because the long game is the only real game
It’s easy to celebrate the outcomes, and forget about the behaviors that produced them. But anyone who’s ever built something that lasts knows the truth: nearly all the important work is slow, quiet and largely invisible.
That’s the real story behind high performing teams. Not talent, slogans, or charisma.
It’s about consistency, patience and a level of self awareness that most never get round to building.
By Dave Heywood
A marketer who’s spent his career figuring out how real growth happens – for brands and people alike. He runs Marketing Careers Uncovered, a podcast where marketers talk honestly about the work, the missteps, and what actually moves the needle.
