Introduction

Your team isn’t elite. Yet.

Most teams think they’re high-performing. Most are wrong.

High-performance teams aren’t built on talent alone. They thrive because of ruthless execution, no-BS leadership, and relentless accountability.

The hard truth? Short-term wins don’t equal long-term excellence. Hitting targets doesn’t mean your team is operating at peak performance. Good teams meet expectations. Elite teams redefine them.

What separates truly high-performing teams from those that just look busy? Leadership that identifies and eliminates execution gaps—before they kill momentum.

In this article, we’ll break down:

• Why most teams fall shortof true high performance.
• The leadership principlesthat drive elite execution.
• How to diagnose and fix execution gaps before they cripple your team.

If you’re serious about building a high-performance team, let’s get to work.

---

The Power of Five: Why Leadership Frameworks Follow This Rule

Most leadership frameworks boil down to five principles—not because five is magic, but because it’s practical and effective.

Some frameworks use three (Collins’ Hedgehog Concept), four (Lencioni’s Four Disciplines), or seven (Covey’s 7 Habits), but five often strikes the balance between simplicity and completeness. It’s just enough to cover the essentials without overloading decision-making.

Among the many “Five” frameworks out there, these five principles are non-negotiable for building high-performance teams:

1️⃣ Leadership Excellence – (Kouzes & Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership) → Great leaders don’t just manage; they inspire, build trust, and drive action.

2️⃣ Agility & Innovation – (Scrum’s Five Core Values) → Execution is everything. The best teams adapt fast and deliver results.

3️⃣ Emotional Intelligence & Team Dynamics – (Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence Model) → IQ gets you in the door, but EQ keeps your team from falling apart.

4️⃣ Change Leadership & Growth – (Kotter’s Change Model—yes, More than Five, but Still crucial) → Organizations that fail to lead change eventually fail—period.

5️⃣ Accountability & Trust – (Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team) → No trust, no team. Dysfunction kills execution faster than incompetence.

Master these five areas, and you’ll build a team that thrives—even under pressure.

But leadership models mean nothing if your team can’t execute. That’s where most organizations fail—not in strategy, but in the gaps between vision and action.

Enter the PAZZTECH Five: the real execution killers you must fix.

---

The PAZZTECH Five: Why Your Team Isn’t Elite (Yet)

Forget leadership buzzwords. Your team isn’t failing because of “culture” or “values.” It’s failing because of execution gaps—the critical breakdowns that kill performance, stall growth, and create burnout.

I’ve spent years leading high-stakes tech and ops teams, breaking down what actually makes teams scale or fail. And after seeing teams pretend to be elite while secretly drowning, I’ve identified the five execution gaps that separate high-performing teams from those that just look busy.

The difference between average and elite isn’t effort—it’s execution. Let’s find out what’s slowing you down.

1️⃣ The Alignment Gap: The “False North” Problem

Your team thinks they’re aligned, but execution proves otherwise.

• Team KPIs conflict with company strategy.
• Leadership preaches vision but fails to translate it into execution.
• Departments optimize for themselves, not the business as a whole.

Solution: Kill vanity metrics. If an OKR or KPI doesn’t clearly connect to business outcomes, it doesn’t matter. Align everything to revenue, customer success, reliability, or security. If it doesn’t move the business forward, drop it.

2️⃣ The Accountability Gap: The Cost of Rewarding the Wrong People

Most companies sabotage themselves by rewarding mediocrity and punishing innovation.

• Risk-takers suffocate under pointless approval processes.
• Weak performers cling to roles, while your best people drown in workloads and leave.
• Your company burns cash hiring replacements instead of keeping top talent.

Solution: Stop wasting money on endless hiring cycles. Promote people who deliver results, not excuses. If you’re tolerating mediocrity, you’re actively punishing your best people.

3️⃣ The Psychological Gap: The Hidden Fear That Kills Innovation

Leaders say they want honesty, but their teams aren’t buying it.

• Employees stay silent, letting bad ideas win.
• “Radical Candor” is a weapon, not a feedback tool.
• The real conversations happen in private chats, not in meetings.

Solution: Make dissent mandatory. Reward those who challenge bad ideas publicly. If your team isn’t pushing back on weak decisions, your culture is broken.

4️⃣ The Execution Gap: The Illusion of Productivity

Busy doesn’t mean effective.

• Calendars are filled with meetings that change nothing.
• Leaders track emails sent, hours logged, instead of real outcomes.
• Strategy never moves forward because teams are too busy “aligning.”

Solution: Kill useless meetings. Ban status updates that don’t drive immediate action. Measure teams by impact, not busyness. If it doesn’t create measurable value, eliminate it.

5️⃣ The Resilience Gap: Why Your Best People Burn Out

Your top performers are overworked. Your weakest performers hide in plain sight.

• High performers get more work, not career growth.
• Low performers coast, creating resentment and burnout.
• Companies treat top talent like machines—until they break or leave.

Solution: If someone is “too valuable to lose,” they’re too valuable to burn out. Build redundancy, invest in growth, or prepare for turnover.

The Bottom Line

High-performance teams aren’t built on effort. They’re built on ruthless execution, accountability, and measuring what actually matters.

If you’re tolerating these execution gaps, you’re leading on gut instinct.

Every company claims they want high performance—few are willing to do what it takes. Execution isn’t an accident; it’s engineered. If your team isn’t elite, it’s because you’re tolerating failure. Fix the gaps, or accept mediocrity.

---

How to Measure If Your Team Is Truly High-Performing

Most leaders assume their team is “doing fine”—but without hard data, that’s just guesswork. To assess whether your team is actually high-performing, use a combination of Google’s research-backed test and quantifiable cultural metrics. If your team fails these tests, you’re likely dealing with execution gaps from The PAZZTECH Five.

1. The Google Test: Five Key Dynamics of High-Performing Teams

Google’s Project Aristotle (Google, 2015) studied 180+ teams and identified five key dynamics that separate elite teams from average ones. You can ask anybody these five yes-or-no questions any time you like. Each failure in Google’s Five Key Dynamics maps directly to the PAZZTECH Five Execution Gaps. If your team lacks structure & clarity, you have an Alignment Gap. If psychological safety is weak, you’re facing a Psychological Gap, and so on.

• Structure & Clarity – Do all team members understand their roles, their goals, and how they contribute to execution? (Alignment Gap)
• Psychological Safety – Can team members take risks, challenge ideas, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment or embarrassment?(Psychological Gap)
• Meaning of Work – Does each team member see personal significance in what they do? (Resilience Gap)
• Dependability – Can teammates rely on each other to deliver high-quality work on time? (Accountability Gap)
• Impact of Work – Does the team believe their work contributes to the bigger picture? (Execution Gap)

These aren’t just random leadership issues—every single failure here ties directly to one of The PAZZTECH Five Execution Gaps. No team fails at high performance by accident. They fail because one of these gaps is actively killing execution.

Source:Google’s Project Aristotle: The Five Key Dynamics of Effective Teams

2. Cultural Metrics: eNPS & Westrum Model

High performance isn’t just about execution—it’s about team culture. Subjective observations aren’t enough; you need hard numbers. Run these quarterly to measure whether your leadership fosters a high-performance culture or enables dysfunction.

2.1 eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score)

Commonly sold as a measure of employee “loyalty.” But let’s cut the BS—eNPS actually measures employee engagement and willingness to recommend your company as a worthwhile place to work. Loyalty implies reciprocity, and most companies abandoned that bargain long ago.

To get a no-BS measurement, ask your team:

“On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend this organization as a great place to work?”

• 9-10 (Promoters) → Engaged, high-performing employees.
• 7-8 (Neutral) → Doing fine, but not truly invested.
• 0-6 (Detractors) → Actively disengaged.

If your eNPS is low, you’re likely dealing with the Accountability, Execution, or Resilience Gap.

How to Calculate eNPS:

• (Percentage of Promoters) – (Percentage of Detractors) = eNPS Score
• Example: If you have 30 responses—15 Promoters (50%), 10 Neutrals (33%), and 5 Detractors (17%)—your eNPS score is 50 – 17 = +33.

A positive eNPS is good; above +50 is excellent, and above +80 is world-class.

2.2 Westrum Cultural Model: Assessing Team Collaboration

Bad cultures kill execution. If your team hoards information, hides mistakes, or fears speaking up, execution stalls. The Westrum Score exposes whether your team is high-performance or slowly rotting from the inside. Employees respond on a scale from Strongly Disagree (=1) to Strongly Agree (=7):

Does your team…

• Actively seek and share information?
• Treat failures as learning opportunities rather than punishing messengers?
• Share responsibilities instead of hoarding control?
• Encourage and reward cross-functional collaboration?
• Use failures to drive inquiry instead of blame?
• Welcome new ideas rather than resisting change?
• (Optional in some adaptations) See failures as opportunities to improve the system?

How to Score Westrum Culture:

• Employees rate each statement from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).
• Calculate the average score for each question across all respondents.
• Compute an overall Westrum Score by averaging all scores into one number between 1–7.

How to Interpret Your Overall Westrum Score

• Low (1–3):Pathological culture – Teams hoard information, fear failure, and assign blame.
• Mid (4–5):Bureaucratic culture – Teams follow rules but lack trust and agility.
• High (6–7):Generative (High-Performance) culture – Teams collaborate openly, innovate rapidly, and execute effectively.

This scoring method is an industry adaptation of Westrum’s (2004) cultural typology, popularized by the DORA research program (Forsgren et al., 2018).

Low Westrum Scores aren’t just a ‘bad culture’ problem—they mean your team is actively hiding problems, avoiding accountability, and stalling execution. In pathological teams, problems go unsolved for months—until it’s too late.

Measuring Execution: Is Your Team Actually High-Performing?

Most leaders assume their team is “doing fine”—but without hard data, that’s just guesswork. If you want to build an elite team, you need to measure exactly where execution is breaking down.

Step 1: Run the Google Test – A quick, no-BS litmus test. If every team member can’t confidently say “yes” to all five questions, your team isn’t high-performing. Run it regularly to catch execution gaps before they spread.

Step 2: Measure eNPS – This is your high-level engagement metric. A low eNPS signals that employees aren’t invested—but it won’t tell you why.

Step 3: Use the Westrum Score – If eNPS tells you there’s a problem, Westrum’s Model helps you diagnose the cause. It measures how teams handle information flow, collaboration, and failure.If your Westrum Score is low, your culture likely suffers from trust issues, blame-shifting, or information hoarding.

If these scores aren’t strong, your team isn’t high-performing—no matter how busy they seem.

High performance isn’t about effort—it’s about eliminating execution failure. 🚀 Fix the gaps. Measure relentlessly. Build an elite team.

Fix It or Stay Average

High-performance teams aren’t built by accident. They don’t happen because of good intentions, culture slides, or leadership jargon. They happen because leaders engineer an environment where execution is the standard—where every level of the organization is aligned, accountable, and obsessed with results.

Most teams struggle with at least one of the PAZZTECH Execution Gaps—whether it’s a misalignment of goals, a lack of true accountability, or a failure to foster resilience. These gaps don’t just slow teams down—they create frustration, missed opportunities, and ultimately, stagnation.

If you’re serious about elevating your team, start by conducting a brutally honest assessment:

• Is your vision aligned across all levels?
• Do your employees feel safe challenging the status quo?
• Are your best performers thriving—or burning out?
• Are you mistaking busyness for impact?

Every team has execution gaps. The difference? Elite teams fix them—weak teams ignore them. You’re either improving or falling behind.

If your results are bad, congratulations—you just found what’s killing your team’s performance. Now, fix it.

High-performance isn’t about effort—it’s about eliminating execution failure.

Measure. Adapt. Execute. Build an elite team.

---

“You get what you expect, and you deserve what you tolerate.”

---

References

Google. (2015). Re:Work: Guide: Understand team effectiveness. Retrieved from https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/introduction/

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.

Scott, K. (2017). Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. St. Martin’s Press.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.

Westrum, R. (2004). A typology of organisational cultures. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 13(suppl 2), ii22–ii27.