If you’re like most seasoned leaders, you’ve heard a lot in recent years about the value of trust.

Employees who trust their organizations show higher engagement, creativity, and productivity. Those who don’t experience more stress, increased burnout, and are more likely to quit. Fostering trust, therefore, represents a crucial imperative for any leader looking to create a high-performing team.

Conversations about cultivating trust at work often focus on the relationship between managers and employees. While useful, this approach represents only half the equation. As important — if not more so — is establishing trust between teammates. After all, most employees work in teams, and the lion’s share of their daily experience involves interacting with colleagues, often in the absence of a boss.

So, how do the best teams build trust among themselves?

To find out, my team at ignite80 surveyed 1,000 U.S.-based office workers, with the goal of pinpointing behaviors that differentiate high-performing teams and understanding we can learn from their approach.

To identify members of high-performing teams, we invited respondents to complete a survey about their attitudes, experiences, and behaviors at work. Embedded within our questionnaire were items asking workers to: 1) rate their team’s effectiveness, and 2) compare their team’s performance to other teams in their industry. Workers who scored their team a 10 out of 10 on both items were designated members of high-performing teams, allowing us to compare their behaviors against those of everyone else.

Our research found that high-performing teams are exceedingly rare; only 8.7% of respondents gave their teams qualifying scores. We also identified five key behaviors related to trust that set these teams apart.

High-Performing Teams Don’t Leave Collaboration to Chance

When launching a project, many teams follow a predictable cadence: They assign tasks and start working. High-performing teams, on the other hand, are more than three times more likely to begin by first discussing how they will work together, paving the way for fewer misunderstandings and smoother collaboration down the road.

How exactly do you have a conversation about collaborating? In his new book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, Michael Bungay Stanier provides a series of prompts teammates can use to conduct what he calls “Keystone Conversations” before starting a project. Colleagues take turns sharing: 1) the tasks at which they excel, 2) their communication preferences, and 3) successful and unsuccessful collaborations they’ve experienced in the past. Critically, Bungay Stanier also recommends proactively creating a strategy for when things go awry, by inviting team members to devise a plan for handling any breakdowns in collaboration, should they occur.

Ultimately, the precise prompts your team uses to establish collaboration norms matter less than engaging in a dialogue on how you will work together. Doing so contributes to trust by signaling respect for one another’s strengths and preferences, securing agreement on process, and inviting team members to speak up when they notice opportunities for improvement.

High-Performing Teams Keep Colleagues in the Loop

Another factor that differentiates high-performing teams is their tendency to proactively share information.

Greater transparency doesn’t just foster trust — it’s also been shown to fuel creativity, performance, and profitability. In contrast, when colleagues withhold information from their teammates, there are frequently deeper issues at play. “Knowledge hiding,” as it’s referred to in academic literature, often suggests a lack of psychological safety or an underlying power struggle.  

In our study, we found that members of high-performing teams are significantly more likely to take responsibility for keeping others informed rather than expecting a manager to do so. In other words, they don’t just avoid hoarding information — they go out of their way to keep colleagues in the loop, creating a culture of inclusion.

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