When Good Communication isn’t Enough – What High-Performing Teams Need Instead
Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally.
“We need to improve communication.” It is one of the most common diagnoses leaders give when a team is not performing as well as expected. Sometimes it is accurate. But sometimes the team is already communicating perfectly well. They have meetings, one-to-ones, and established channels. They exchange information, give updates, and may genuinely like and respect one another. Yet something still does not work.
I recently worked with a cross-functional B2B team in a large technology company. The initial brief centred on improving communication and collaboration while supporting the team towards an ambitious commercial objective. At first glance, that seemed straightforward. But the individual conversations we held before beginning the team coaching revealed something more interesting. Communication was not absent. The deeper issue was that the team was not always operating as one system.
Good relationships do not automatically create a high-performing team
A group of capable people can respect one another and still optimise completely different outcomes. This is especially common in cross-functional teams.
One part of the organisation may naturally focus on customers, commercial opportunities, speed and revenue. Another may be concerned with feasibility, delivery, resources, technical constraints and operational risk. Neither perspective is wrong. The organisation needs both.
The problem begins when each function becomes successful only according to its own definition of success. People know what they are accountable for individually. They know their targets and priorities. But one question can remain surprisingly unclear: What are we collectively here to achieve?
In the team I was working with, responsibility could sometimes stop at the boundary between functions: “I have completed my part. The next stage belongs to someone else.” Nobody had deliberately created a silo, but the effect was the same.
The customer does not experience your organisational chart
Customers rarely care where one department ends, and another begins. They experience one organisation. A promising opportunity may require commercial, technical, operational and delivery functions to work together. A brilliant sale that cannot be delivered is not a success. Excellent delivery that arrives too late is not a success either.
Each function sees something the others may not. Commercial teams understand the customer relationship, competitive pressure and the work involved in creating an opportunity. Technical and operational colleagues see feasibility, capacity, risk and constraints that may be invisible from the outside.
The breakthrough does not come from deciding whose perspective is more important. It comes when the team becomes capable of holding those perspectives together.
From “Did I do my part?” to “Did we achieve the result?”
Collective ownership does not mean that everyone becomes responsible for everything. Clear accountability still matters. Roles still matter. Expertise still matters. But there is a significant difference between asking, “Did I do my part?” and asking, “Did we achieve the result?”
The first question focuses attention on the boundary of a role. The second focuses attention on the outcome. That changes conversations.
Teams begin to notice where information is arriving too late, where assumptions are being made rather than discussed, and where another function needs to be involved earlier. A colleague’s constraints stop looking like an inconvenience and become part of the reality the team has to navigate together.
This is where communication stops being an isolated skill. It becomes part of a wider system of trust, interdependence and shared responsibility.
When “I” starts becoming “we”
Over the following months, the shift became visible in relatively ordinary moments. People expressed ideas more openly. There was greater willingness to challenge one another without automatically becoming defensive. Different functions understood one another’s pressures more clearly. Team members asked for help more readily, delegated more, and showed more initiative. Something subtle began happening in the language of the team. There was more “we.”
There is a meaningful difference between “That belongs to their department” and “How are we going to resolve this?” The second statement does not erase accountability. It expands responsibility for the overall result. That is where a collection of functions begins to behave more like a team.
Trust has operational consequences
Trust, relationships and communication are still sometimes grouped under “soft skills”. The phrase can be misleading. Poor trust slows decisions, makes people cautious about sharing concerns, allows problems to remain hidden for longer and encourages functions to protect themselves rather than challenge the wider system.
The opposite is equally practical. When people trust one another more, difficult conversations happen earlier. Risks surface sooner. People ask for help before problems become crises. Opportunities are less likely to fall into the gaps between departments. These are behavioural shifts, but behaviour influences execution, and execution influences business performance.
When behavioural change starts showing up in performance
Over the course of the engagement, the changes were not confined to how people felt about one another. Cooperation between functions strengthened, and people developed a better understanding of what each part of the organisation needed from the others. At the same time, more B2B opportunities began progressing into successful business outcomes.
It would be irresponsible to claim a simple cause-and-effect relationship and say that coaching alone created those commercial results. Businesses are complex systems, and performance is influenced by many variables.
But there was a clear relationship between how the team was working and what it was becoming capable of achieving: better communication enabled earlier conversations, greater trust made challenge safer, improved understanding reduced friction, and collective ownership encouraged people to act beyond the narrow boundaries of their own role.
The coaches did not produce those results. The team did. Our role was to help them see the system they had created, and the system they were capable of creating instead.
Leadership is a behaviour, not only a position
This work also reinforced another principle that matters increasingly in complex organisations: leadership cannot live exclusively at the top.
One leader cannot coordinate every dependency, identify every emerging risk, facilitate every conversation and resolve every tension between functions. Teams need people who are willing to notice what the system requires and respond by raising a difficult issue, challenging an assumption, inviting another function into the conversation earlier, or naming the moment the team is falling back into silos.
This is closely aligned with Management 3.0 thinking: organisations are complex human systems, not machines that can simply be controlled through instructions. In those systems, leadership is a behaviour, not merely a position.
Maybe your team does not need to communicate more
When leaders tell me their team has a communication problem, I am careful not to accept the diagnosis too quickly. Sometimes communication genuinely needs improving. But other times people already communicate frequently. The deeper problem is that they are communicating from separate realities, separate incentives, and separate definitions of success.
In that situation, another communication workshop may not be enough. More powerful questions might be: Do we understand what we are collectively responsible for? Do we understand what other functions are dealing with? Where does ownership disappear between us? Are we operating as several successful departments, or as one successful system?
Because ultimately, the purpose of better communication is not better communication. It is better collective performance.
Read more from Yaryna Carpenter
Yaryna Carpenter, PCC ICF Executive, Leadership & Team Coach
Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally. With over 20 years of international experience, Yaryna brings a structured, human-centred approach to leadership, team performance, and cross-cultural growth.
