How to Build a Team That Performs When It Matters Most

We recently had the pleasure of hosting an engaging and insightful conversation on our podcast with the remarkable Jill DePompei Morales, an expert in organisational development and team building at eBay. Jill shared invaluable wisdom on the art of building high-performance teams, and we couldn't wait to pass along these insights to you.

In this episode, Jill illuminated the key ingredients that transform ordinary teams into extraordinary forces of collaboration, innovation, and achievement. She conveyed the importance of trust, vulnerability, and purpose in creating a high-performance culture that drives sustainable success.

We all know that leadership is more than just a title or a position. It's about inspiring and empowering individuals to reach their full potential. Jill's extensive experience as the Organisation Development and Team Development Lead at eBay has given her a unique perspective on what it takes to nurture a culture of excellence and unlock the true potential of teams.

But building a team that performs when it matters most requires more than good intentions. It requires a clear-eyed understanding of what effectiveness actually looks like, and a practical framework for getting there. Below, we bring together Jill's insights alongside a complementary model from strategy and emotional intelligence expert Faris Aranki, whose IQ-EQ-FQ equation adds a useful diagnostic lens to everything Jill covers.

Highlights from Our Conversation with Jill

Trust: The Foundation of High-Performance Teams

Jill emphasised that trust is the cornerstone of any successful team. Without trust, collaboration falters, and progress stalls. She shared practical strategies for building trust, including:

• Fostering open communication
• Promoting transparency
• Actively listening to team members' perspectives

By cultivating trust, leaders create an environment where team members feel safe to take risks, share ideas, and push boundaries.

Embracing Vulnerability: The Catalyst for Growth

In the realm of leadership, vulnerability often gets a bad rap. However, Jill passionately spoke about the transformative power of vulnerability in building high-performance teams. By embracing vulnerability, leaders create a space where authenticity, empathy, and genuine connections flourish. It encourages team members to share their fears, challenges, and aspirations, leading to increased collaboration, innovation, and overall team performance.

By embracing vulnerability, leaders create a space where authenticity, empathy, and genuine connections flourish.

Purpose: The North Star of High-Performance Teams

A team without a clear and shared purpose is like a ship without a compass. Jill emphasised the significance of defining a compelling purpose that resonates with every team member. When individuals understand how their work contributes to a larger mission, their motivation soars, and their commitment deepens. Jill shared practical insights on how leaders can help individuals discover their purpose and align it with the team's overarching goals.

Progress through Incremental Steps

Jill drew parallels between coaching college athletes and building high-performance teams. She highlighted the value of taking an incremental approach to progress, where small victories and continuous improvement are celebrated. By breaking down big goals into manageable milestones, teams experience a sense of accomplishment and momentum, propelling them forward toward even greater achievements.

A Complementary Framework: The IQ-EQ-FQ Equation

Everything Jill describes, trust, vulnerability, purpose, incremental progress, sits within the human dimension of team performance. A useful way to stress-test whether your team is actually set up to deliver is to run it through the IQ-EQ-FQ equation developed by Faris Aranki of Shiageto Consulting. Faris has patented this formula as a way of diagnosing where teams are strong and where they are quietly leaking performance.

The equation is simple: IQ multiplied by EQ multiplied by FQ. All three elements must be present. If any one of them is close to zero, the product collapses regardless of how strong the others are.

IQ: Generating Quality Ideas

IQ here refers to the quality and diversity of thinking a team brings to its strategy. The more varied and numerous the ideas generated before a direction is chosen, the more robust the eventual approach. Leaders who pride themselves on being the smartest person in the room often invest heavily here, but that alone is not enough.

EQ: Engaging and Communicating Effectively

EQ covers how well leaders involve their people in decision-making, communicate strategy, and create genuine buy-in. This maps directly onto what Jill describes when she talks about trust and vulnerability. A leader who is entirely focused on looking after their people but not driving results is over-indexing on EQ at the expense of the other two elements.

FQ: Strategic Focus

FQ is about maintaining focus by limiting competing priorities. Spreading resources across too many initiatives is one of the most common ways capable teams underdeliver. Faris's point is that leaders need to concentrate effort on a select number of initiatives and protect that focus actively.

How many leaders are putting all of their effort into one or two segments but missing the third?

The diagnostic value of this equation is real. Most leaders can quickly identify which element they naturally neglect. Some are idea-rich but struggle to bring people with them. Others are brilliant at engagement but lack the discipline to say no to competing demands. A few are ruthlessly focused but generate little fresh thinking. Knowing your weak point is the first step to addressing it.

Putting It All Together

The themes from both conversations point in the same direction. Involve more people in the decisions that matter. Create the conditions where honest thinking and honest conversation are both possible. And then protect the focus needed to actually execute.

Practically, that means running regular team conversations that go beyond status updates, creating space for people to raise concerns before they become problems, and being willing to cut initiatives that are diluting the team's effort rather than adding to it.

Trust, purpose, and vulnerability are not soft extras. They are the conditions under which the IQ, EQ, and FQ of your team can actually function. Get those conditions right, and the performance follows.

Listen to the Episodes

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify Podcasts
• Web listen
• Watch on YouTube
• The High-Performance Leader Podcast, episode 34 with Faris Aranki

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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