Breathe Together | What High-Performing Teams Are Actually Doing

About a year ago, I released a paper called The Culture of High-Performing Teams. In it, I sketched out four components I kept seeing in the best teams I’ve worked with, and alternately I kept not seeing in the ones that were struggling.

The four components of a high-performing team? Self-accountability. Active validation of ideas. Deep trust. And the one that makes people do a double-take every single time…

Conspiring for the success of everyone.

Yes. Conspiring.

I watch people listen to that word and they almost always visibly tense up. Their eyebrows raise. Their shoulders might shift. It’s the equivalent of a cold splash of water or a finger snap in the face, which is exactly why I use it.

Here’s the thing. Conspire comes from the Latin con (together) + spirare (to breathe). To conspire, at its root, literally means to breathe together.

How cool is that?!

Western workplace culture has largely flipped this on its head. We’ve built environments where someone is always performing better, someone is always a threat, and let’s be honest, someone is usually whispering about someone else behind closed doors. That’s conspiring too. Just not in the right direction.

Picture a team where that’s the norm. Some are hoarding information. Quietly rooting for a colleague to miss a deadline. Rowing hard but out of unison, each misplaced beat slowing the others down. It looks busy. It feels chaotic. And it performs like a rowing crew weaving in and out of their lane.

High-performing teams don’t do that. They compete fiercely as a unit while pulling for each other as individuals. They breathe together.

Here’s what that actually looks like in practice:

Know each other’s work. You can’t conspire for someone’s success if you have no idea what they’re doing. High-performing teams have very little role overlap, but the connections between roles are intense and well-understood.

Make those connections visible. Map out who depends on whom and why. Talk about it openly. Design your workflows together. When everyone can see how the pieces fit, it gets a lot harder to accidentally (or intentionally) get in each other’s way..

Build in reflection. After-action reviews, quick debriefs, honest check-ins. These are the breathing exercises of a high-performing team. They keep in alignment with one another.

Kill the gossip, keep the candor. There’s a real difference between talking negatively about people and working together to make sure everyone can do their best work. One is conspiring for failure. The other is conspiring for success.

Shared language shapes shared behavior. When a team starts using conspire the right way, something shifts. It’s a little cheeky. It’s a little surprising. And it sticks, which is the whole point. 

So go ahead. Start a conspiracy.

What does conspiring for success look like on your team, or what does the opposite look like? Drop it in the comments. I read every one and would love to hear what’s actually happening out there.