You Can’t Mandate High Performance. You Have to Build It.
Early in my career, I was asked to run a team performance workshop I did not want to do.
My R&D team was missing deadlines. Progress was happening, but communication was not. My executive leader pushed me to bring the team together for a structured session with an outside facilitator. My instinct was to resist. We do not have time for this, I thought. We need to focus on the work.
She was persistent. So we did it.
I remember standing in a windowless ballroom, watching a vendor present to a room full of serious faces, looking at me every few minutes for reassurance I did not feel. I was stressed. I put on the most confident face I could manage and stayed in the room.
What happened over the next several hours changed how I lead.
I had not realized how much trust had eroded on that team. There were long-tenured engineers, skilled and experienced, who had grown cynical. Every missed milestone was an opportunity for an “I told you so.” I had been so focused on the deadlines that I had missed what was actually driving the slippage.
The workshop did not fix the deadlines. It fixed something more fundamental. It gave the team a chance to make promises to each other, out loud, in the same room. And once people make that kind of commitment to their peers, something shifts. They stop working to satisfy a manager. They start working to not let each other down.
That is discretionary effort. And it is the only metric that actually predicts whether a team will perform when it matters.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Discretionary effort cannot be mandated or incentivized in the traditional sense. It is a byproduct of trust, and trust has to be earned at the team level, not just the leadership level.
To get there, you have to start by understanding what is actually slowing the team down. I think of it as finding the rocks in their shoes. Some are small and easy to remove quickly: a broken SOP that everyone knows is broken, a process that creates friction without adding value. Fix those early and visibly. It signals to the team that you are listening and that leadership will actually act on what it hears.
Some rocks are larger and harder to remove. A team member who undermines others, who poisons the culture through dominance or dismissiveness, can neutralize the trust you are trying to build faster than almost anything else. Removing that person, when necessary, is one of the highest-impact leadership decisions you can make. I have watched organizations breathe again after that kind of change. Do not underestimate it.
Building toward high performance
Once the environment is safer and the team starts to open up, the focus shifts to alignment. The team needs to understand the company strategy and their specific role in it. Not in a general way. In a specific, connected way that lets each engineer draw a line from their daily work to something that matters.
Every R&D team I have ever led, across mechanical devices, drug-device combinations, preclinical programs, and complex systems, has wanted the same two things: to be recognized for their contributions, and to work on something worth doing. Those are not hard things to give people. But they require a leader who makes the connection explicit.
Create a mission and vision for your group that sits inside the company’s goals but belongs to the team. Do this in the first 60 to 90 days. Align it with your supervisor and key stakeholders. Then bring it back to the team and make it theirs.
When people understand what they are trying to build together, and they trust the people they are building it with, they do not need to be pushed. They pull.
That is high performance. It does not happen by accident, and it does not happen fast. But when it does, you will know it. The deadlines start landing. The communication improves without prompting. And the engineers who once said “I told you so” start saying “let me help.”
Next: how project prioritization and portfolio decisions either reinforce or undermine everything you are trying to build with your team.
Terri Kapur is a seasoned R&D executive with more than 20 years of experience driving innovation in the medical device industry. She has led global, multidisciplinary teams across the full product lifecycle, from early research through development, commercialization, and post-market support.
