That your team gets along might be the problem.
Trust is one of the biggest factors in whether a team performs well together. Not the only one - clarity, skill, and workload all matter too - but it's the one that's hardest to see and easiest to underestimate. The reason for trust being so important is that it makes or breaks the level of feedback in an organisation.
Trust = Soil
When I talk about performance, I mean both the day-to-day behaviours and activities, and the output at the end of it. Neither is optimised without people being able to critically assess what's actually going on. Daniel Coyle's definition of feedback is the one I keep coming back to: “real feedback confronts the gap between where are and where we ought to be”. Without trust, people don't feel safe enough to point that gap out, let alone confront it. They withhold it, or worse, they obscure it, out of fear of what saying it out loud might cost them. All of that leads to stagnation - the exact opposite of high performance. Think of trust as soil. Poor soil, and nothing grows. Rich soil, and almost anything can.
The model I keep coming back to for reading this is Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright. It describes organisational culture across five stages, from open hostility at Stage 1 through to genuine collective purpose at Stage 5. Most teams sit somewhere in the middle, and if you read the book, you'll likely be able to place your own team fairly accurately by the end of it. That's the first thing worth knowing about it: it's not just a framework to admire. It's a diagnostic you can actually use immediately.
The Sickly Sweet Nature of Stage 3
The stage most teams I work with sit in is Stage 3 - a culture built around individual capability rather than collective effort. Picture five people on the same team. Harry trusts Barry. Harry does not trust Sally. The reason is the subtext running underneath a Stage 3 culture: “I'm good, but you're not”. That's not as harsh as it sounds, at least not in how it shows up. Think passive-aggression rather than aggression.
It shows up as a leader insisting they fully trust their team, while quietly wanting to be CC'd on every email. It shows up as a colleague saying they'll just do it themselves, because they secretly doubt the quality of what someone else would produce. In our example, Harry and Barry get on well. They know each other's work, and there's real trust there. Harry doesn't mind having a coffee with Sally either - but in his view, her work doesn't measure up to the standard he wants. That takes us toward a related but different topic, about ego, which is worth its own piece another day.
If trust is low, disagreement becomes dangerous - and disagreement is just another word for honest feedback. Patrick Lencioni made this case in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: without the ability to disagree openly, a team can't build real commitment, and without commitment, accountability and results both suffer. So the route out of Stage 3 isn't a better strategy, or a new process. It's a team getting consistently, uncomfortably honest with each other - and surviving it.
Real Trust Is Risked, Not Earned
That last part matters more than it sounds. Daniel Coyle also describes something called a vulnerability loop: one person takes the risk of saying something true and exposing, and the other person meets it with acceptance instead of punishment. Trust isn't built by telling people to trust each other. It's built by watching, first-hand, that honesty doesn't get you burned. Do this once and it barely registers. Do it consistently, and a team's culture genuinely shifts - stage by stage, not overnight, but visibly.
I've watched this happen in the room. A few years ago I worked with three teams from the same organisation, brought together by a level of mistrust that had been quietly building for a long time. We used feedback models and Tribal Leadership itself to help them see, honestly, where they actually sat. Then I ran a day built around a genuinely difficult topic, and coached the group to say what was true, even when it was uncomfortable. What struck me wasn't the content of what got said. It was watching trust grow in the room in almost exact proportion to the courage each person showed in that moment.
Where to Begin
If you want to try this yourself, the starting point isn't necessarily a workshop or a survey. It can be simpler than that. Notice what happens the next time someone on your team either disagrees with something, or doesn't disagree even though you know they're not in agreement with the decision. Read the room. Feel the energy. Then consider what led to this. Has the company gone through layoffs? Have people higher up been quite liberal about letting people go, without giving clear, concrete reasons? The uncomfortable truth about culture is that nothing is unrelated. Everything is interconnected - which is exactly why it's so difficult to take charge of, and channel in the most useful direction.