Every two years, like clockwork, one of the largest automotive parts manufacturers in the world faced what it called a “big event”: a large project went off the rails, costing the company a minimum of $80 million to $100 million each time. When a new president joined the organization, he decided to investigate what was behind this expensive pattern.

The problem, he discovered, was that people in the organization were not willing to risk giving feedback up the org chart until it was too late—once a situation escalated, and they had no choice but to go outside the plant and ask headquarters for help. As in many companies, a phenomenon called “CEO disease” prevailed: the higher up leaders go in an organization, the less candid feedback and information they get from below.

This is just one example of how employees’ failure to take risks (in this case, the risk of speaking up) can have outsized consequences for teams and organizations. In reality, people need to go out on a limb in order to achieve high performance. Unless they are willing to name an inconvenient truth about a strategy or product, make a difficult decision, or raise their voice about an issue, it’s difficult for companies to go beyond what has been done before and to build something differentiated from competitors’ offerings.

And yet risk-taking goes against the operating model of human beings—their biology—which defaults to protection, especially when feeling pressure to perform. Taking any risk triggers a clash between the requirements of high performance and how our brains try to protect us. I call this clash the fundamental conflict of performance: at the exact time an organization needs people to take risks to move fast to execute the strategy, their brains are defaulting to protection.

So, how can companies address this clash and get employees to take risks more often?

My experience working with coaches of high-performing teams in the NFL, NBA, and Olympics—combined with research from my organization, the Institute for Health and Human Potential—has helped us identify strategies that enable teams to take more risks and improve faster than their competitors. And it all starts with a number: 8%.

The Last 8%

In a multiyear survey of 34,000 people that looked at a range of risks—from making hard decisions, to naming inconvenient truths, to having the hardest parts of a conversation—my organization found that there is a gap between the risk people feel they should take in a situation and the actual risk they do take.

In conversations, for example, people tend to leave out an average 7.56%—rounded up to 8%—of what they want to say. They are comfortable enough discussing the first 92%, but when they get to the more challenging parts—those that have the biggest consequences for the other person or the project—they get caught up in how their counterpart is reacting, or is perceived to be reacting, and they avoid having the full conversation.

It is the same with hard decisions. Most people are comfortable making the easier choices they face, but when there’s a risk involved in making a decision—one they perceive will upset others, such as who gets promoted and what projects should get supported—they back off, procrastinate, and struggle to take action.

We’ve named this gap the last 8%.

Our work also identified the kind of team culture and environment that enables people to more frequently take risks—to close the 8%—and the three kinds of team cultures that do the opposite, acting as barriers to taking risks. Those insights came from a study we conducted of over 72,000 people in which we asked individuals to describe the elements of their team they perceived to be barriers to, and enablers of, taking risks to do hard things.

The data shows that enabling high performance through smart risk-taking has two pillars: high connection, meaning people perceive they have a voice, are valued, and feel psychological safety; and high courage, meaning people are capable of, encouraged to, and enabled by norms to be courageous to execute on hard things, such as holding people accountable. When high connection and high courage are both in place, a culture of trust is built that enables people to take more risks—in other words, a last 8% culture.

Of course, not all teams in organizations have both high connection and high courage. For 67% of our respondents, one or both of the pillars were perceived to be at levels that were insufficient to drive performance. In these instances, we saw teams default to one of three culture types that impair risk-taking and performance: family, transactional, or fear-based. These patterns occur independent of industry and company size.

Let’s look at each culture in turn.