Insight Archives - Goldcrest Partners

Leading through adversity

When the Soviet Union began to break up in the early 1990s, the Americans coined the acronym VUCA to describe the situation. It stood for:

Volatile
Uncertain
Chaotic
Ambiguous

It was a good way to describe how things felt to ‘Kremlin Watchers’ during those times and perhaps more widely understood today. A post-pandemic global recession, war in Europe, disruption to food and energy supplies, runaway inflation, rising interest rates threatening the viability of mortgages, and that’s before we talk about climate change!

If ever there was a VUCA world, this must be it.

It’s easy to look at what’s going on and get distracted, worried or upset. As current or aspiring business leaders, part of leading through adversity is about knowing how to focus when times are tough. From my military background, there are two key principles we can apply to the business world that effective leaders should keep in mind in this type of situation.

Plan, prepare, and practise

During the 2020-2021 Vendée Globe non-stop around the world yacht race, the French sailor Kevin Escoffier was about 800 nautical miles off Cape Town when his yacht quite literally folded in on itself.

It sank in two minutes.

This race is for yachts crewed by just one person, so Escoffier was on his own. He had just 120 seconds to radio a message to his onshore team and get into his life raft with a grab-bag of emergency rations and a personal AIS beacon which transmitted his position to rescue crews.

Escoffier completed all these urgent tasks and survived. He sent the radio message, set up his life raft, grabbed his emergency rations and beacon. All in a frighteningly short time window.

This was no accident. Escoffier had planned for just such an emergency. He knew what he needed to do, he knew where to find everything and he practised his response many times.

Plan. Prepare. Practise.

These are the three Ps that can save your life when you’re in choppy waters and serve as a valuable template for how we can navigate a VUCA environment as business leaders.

When times are good it can seem pessimistic to be scenario planning for disruptions that are distant risks rather than immediate realities, but you will be grateful when it matters.

Don’t panic!

When things go wrong, you may want to scream, or cry, or punch the wall in frustration and those who advocate for “authentic leadership” can interpret this as being unfiltered with our personal emotional experience. However, in leadership as in life, there is a time and a place for everything. Sometimes our authentic desire to be professional and the best leader for our people may best be fulfilled by giving others confidence and support when they are concerned, rather than fully expressing our own vulnerabilities.

Another sailing story to illustrate the merit of this more stoical approach is personal to me. I can tell you in no uncertain terms how it felt captaining a yacht around the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland through a strong tide and bad weather. On the inside I was panicking that we were in serious trouble and angry at myself for leading my crew into a dangerous situation, but I needed to maintain my composure.

We were quite literally in stormy waters and the expression “worse things happen at sea” was providing very little comfort.

The crew were asking if everything was all right. I needed to be honest about the reality of the situation. It was important they knew to take safety seriously and generally be at a heightened state of readiness. But it was also important for them to know that I had this under control, was confident in my ability to deal with the situation and that they could trust me and focus on the task at hand.

The very fact I am writing this now is proof that we made it.

Once we were safely back on land, I disclosed how I had been feeling at the time and reflected on some things I thought I could have done differently. I believed that was the right time and place for me to share my vulnerability with my crew.

As a leader in business, when you’re in metaphorical stormy waters, your people will look to you. When times are tough, it is vital to be honest about the realities of the situation. Your people want to know what’s going on and it builds trust. it is also important how you convey your emotions. If you’re panicked, flapping like a windsock, they will rightly have cause to worry. Only now they’re not just worried about a bad situation, they’re also worried about whether you’re the right person to lead them through it.

It’s all about the context

The common theme for both these principles is context. We plan, prepare and practise for situations that are not current but are important for us to know how to manage when the time comes. How we lead is also contextual. There are times to be authentically emotional and honest and there are also times when a display of confidence and in yourself and others is what is needed. Balanced leaders understand the context and how to respond.

The meeting after the meeting

Have you ever been in a position where an investment committee finished, where the paper was good, the discussion was serious and the decision was made? And, then, the team (understandably) moves on.

But then, later that day, one line from the meeting comes back to you. A challenge that was raised but not really explored. A moment when the room got slightly too eager to agree. Nothing dramatic, just a faint sense that the conclusion arrived a little too neatly.

Most experienced investors know this feeling. It matters more than people like to admit.

Formal process is important. Meetings, papers and clear decisions all matter. But some of the best judgement in investing happens after the official discussion has ended. That is when people reflect on what really happened in the room, rather than what the minutes say happened.

This is useful because investment decisions are never driven by analysis alone. They are shaped by status, fatigue, group mood, time pressure and the natural desire for closure. Teams can have a sound process on paper and still make decisions in conditions that are less robust than they look.

Sometimes a meeting produces real clarity. Sometimes it produces relief. It’s important to recognise that those are not the same thing.

The question worth asking afterwards is not “Was the decision right?” That often cannot be known for some time. The better question is “Was the decision made well?” Did the discussion sharpen the issue, or just settle it? Was dissent properly tested, or merely noted? Did the team become more precise, or just more comfortable?

This is where mature investment cultures have an edge. They do not treat the formal process as sacred simply because it is formal. They make room for a second layer of judgement. Not endless reopening of decisions, but honest reflection on how the decision was reached.

That can lead to practical improvements. A position may still be taken, but at a smaller size. The monitoring may become tighter. A team may realise that the thesis is fine, but the quality of challenge was weak. Or a manager may simply notice that the room was being influenced by the confidence of one person more than the substance of the case.

None of this is soft. It is part of decision hygiene.

In investing, process is not just what sits on the page. It is also what happens in the room and what lingers after people leave it. Investors who pay attention to that tend to build better judgement over time. They are not just analysing opportunities. They are analysing the quality of their own thinking.

That is usually worth the extra five minutes.

Shaping company culture in a hybrid-working world

Everything that leaders say and do reveals something about their organisation’s culture. Every business has a company culture. You can’t choose not to have one. You just do. The question is, “Is it a culture that you’ve proactively shaped? Or is it a culture that has evolved because you’ve left it to its own devices?”

What is an organisational culture?

There are many ways to define culture. At its simplest, some say culture is just behaviour. However, we think there’s a lot more to it than that. Another way to define it is to say that culture is the underlying assumptions, values, beliefs and expectations shared by an organisation’s members. It can be positive or negative, proactive or reactive.

There are many models of organisational culture. The Johnson-Scholes model suggests that a culture is built on the following six factors:

• Control systems

• Rituals and routines

• Stories

• Symbols

• Organisational structures

• Power structures

We’re going to explore these factors to discuss how leaders can shape culture to achieve effective hybrid working.

Control systems

Organisations use different means to control employee behaviour, from pay to training to disciplinary systems, and many more. When employees work from home, this reduces the amount of direct control leaders have over them.

Leaders can either choose to trust the individual, give them clear boundaries and expectations, and let them get on, or not. If your people aren’t engaged and motivated enough to work productively, trying to micro-manage them won’t improve the situation.

Indeed, showing that you trust them will go a long way towards increasing their motivation. Most of us extend this level of trust regularly. When we hire a babysitter, for example. Or when we have a builder working on our house. So why wouldn’t we do the same for our people?

Rituals and routines

Hybrid working creates huge opportunities to change pre-existing rituals and routines. Many employees are now unfamiliar with the old routines or are new and never knew them in the first place. This enables leaders to establish new ones that would be more suited to the culture they’d like to develop.

At the same time, the continuation of full or part-time remote working brings with it the need for fresh approaches to how we work together. For some employees hybrid working materially improves their work-life balance and offering this flexibility is critical to attract and retain the best talent. If an employee values pausing work from time to time to attend to other activities e.g. exercise, family, domestic and then make up later on, then that too could be a valuable ‘benefit in kind’.

However this needs to be a two-way street. There is increasing consensus that certain actives are best performed in-person, together (Amazon – 3 day week) and variable hours are ideally a win-win for all parties concerned. Give and take is the name of the game. If it isn’t working then there are probably underlying cultural issues to address.

Stories

Stories are important because they tell us about who we are, where we come from, where we are going and why we are going there. Post-Covid, we have the opportunity to create new stories. However, this means consciously creating them, deciding who are the ‘main characters’ of the stories, and what morals, messages and questions do we want those stories to offer.

Stories are most effective when based around shared experiences. Look at Automattic Inc, the owner and operator of WordPress which supports this website and millions of others like it. Almost all of their 2,000 employees in 97 countries work remotely. In light of this geographic dispersion, founder Matt Mullenweg recognised the need to periodically bring the company together, create connections and, most importantly, make stories.

A few times each year all employees gather in one location for a meaningful amount of time. When they do, the company makes sure that alongside strategy presentations, project meetings and a multitude of business discussions, they create stories – because that’s what people remember. In this way, Automattic creates a cultural narrative based on a shared experience.

Symbols

In this sense, symbols are artefacts that hold the power of something important to the culture of the organisation. They act as a tangible resource that enables us to connect with something that is intangible. They can represent a memory, an idea, a value, a hope that is part of the organisational story.

The question here is – ‘What are the symbols of your organisation and what do they mean?’

Nations have flags, officials often have uniforms, sports teams have mascots. In our homes we have sentimental items that represent moments that matter to us. Symbols remind us of our place in the family of things.

Most corporations could do more to leverage the power of symbolism. As a result, many confuse symbols with their company logo and miss an opportunity to communicate the company culture.

At Goldcrest Partners, we believe that symbols are more important than ever with dispersed working habits. Since an office building is no longer the thing that binds us, finding other ways to share symbolic common ground is more important than ever.

Organisational structures

These are the formal structures and hierarchy of an organisation, as well as the informal routes to get things done. In our experience, many organisations can get bogged down looking to update or change their formal structures while not paying enough attention to the informal.

Formal structures are important to provide the infrastructure of an organisation, however they are by definition rigid, can take time to build and it can be disruptive and expensive to change them. They are well complemented by informal channels that fill in the gaps and get things done quickly.

Culture is a great way of encouraging informal engagement to support hybrid working. Things are changing more quickly than formal structures are able. Therefore we need to adapt and to get things done in the meantime.

Power structures

This refers to how people have the power and influence to get things done. Again, it is useful to consider both formal power, which accrues to a specific role, and also informal power, which is a more about influence and often described as “soft” but is no less effective.

Informal power structures reflect the non-hierarchical relationships that are valuable in communicating messages and accomplishing tasks. They are more important than ever when hybrid working and benefit from being nurtured and cultivated to align efforts and motivate others.

Another phrase to describe the most influential people within an organisation is “culture carriers”. If you can identify your “culture carriers” they can help you influence across your team or the organisation with their impactful voice.

Culture is key to effective hybrid working

Ultimately, organisations either have a culture the leadership consciously craft or ended up with one by accident. We believe that culture is key to effective hybrid working and will be on the agenda for all successful organisations of the future.

Calibration, not conviction

In investment management, conviction is often treated as a defining virtue. Strong views, decisive language and visible confidence can create momentum in meetings and reassurance in uncertain markets. In a profession built around judgement under ambiguity, that confidence in conviction can be valuable.

Investment culture therefore tends to admire conviction. There is a reason for that. Markets do not reward endless caution, and many good ideas feel uncomfortable at the point of purchase.

Yet conviction and quality are not the same thing. The more important skill is not simply having conviction, but knowing when it is warranted, how strongly it is warranted and what action it should translate into.

In short, it is calibration, not conviction, that should be an investor’s goal.

Calibration means matching confidence to reality. It is the discipline of knowing how much you should believe, how much uncertainty still sits around the case and how that should affect position size and timing. In practice, that is a more useful skill than simply sounding assured.

In fact, many investment mistakes are not caused by weak ideas. They are caused by too much certainty wrapped around decent ideas. An investor may be broadly right about direction, but wrong about the strength of the edge, the timing, the downside or the amount of capital the idea deserves. That’s a calibration problem.

This is where investing becomes more than just having opinions. It is not enough to think something is attractive. You also need to ask: how attractive is it, how clear is the edge, what could go wrong and what size of position does that justify? Those are less glamorous questions, but they are usually the ones that protect returns.

Good investors tend to be more precise here than dramatic. They do not confuse confidence with quality. They ask what must be true for the thesis to hold. They think about what would weaken the case. They notice when they are reacting to price rather than evidence. And they are more comfortable than most with saying, “There may be something here, but the edge is not strong enough yet.”

That last point matters. In many teams, “no edge” sounds timid. In truth, it is often a sign of maturity. Knowing when not to force conviction is part of the job.

Over time, the investors who last are usually not the loudest. They are the ones who repeatedly align belief, sizing and behaviour with the actual quality of the opportunity in front of them.

Conviction has its place. But in the long run, calibration is what makes it useful.

Execution drag usually begins in unresolved decisions

A strategy offsite goes well. The priorities are sensible, the ambition feels credible and the senior team leaves the room believing it has real alignment. Six months later, the organisation has moved, but not with the pace or coherence people expected.

This is usually described as an execution problem. Though often, it is something slightly different.

In large organisations, execution drag rarely begins with a bad strategy. More likely is that it begins with decisions that were discussed, but never really settled. Priorities were named, but not made exclusive. Trade-offs were recognised, but not owned. Authority looked clear in the room, but then became blurred as the strategy travelled through regions, functions and reporting lines.

That is where momentum leaks away.

So, while the strategy may be sound, the problem is that the decisions around it are too soft. What has genuinely become less important? Which activities are losing resource so others can gain it? Who decides when two parts of the business optimise for different outcomes? Which choices are closed, and which are still open? If those questions are not answered firmly enough, people further down the organisation start having to guess.

That guessing is expensive. Teams try to honour the new direction while also keeping legacy expectations alive. The result is effort without enough movement. Everyone feels busy, but fewer things actually shift.

There is also a human side to this. Senior teams often underestimate how much energy change actually consumes. A strategy can feel clear at the top because a small number of people have spent a concentrated amount of time shaping it. Lower down, it lands as another addition to an already crowded agenda. If the supporting decisions are not clear, the organisation absorbs the strategy as pressure rather than direction.

This is why execution depends so heavily on decision quality. Good strategy creates direction, but only clean decisions create enough coherence for the system to move. Which tensions are likely to reopen? Where will exceptions start to creep in? Which stakeholders will interpret the priorities differently unless someone keeps restating them?

This is not glamorous work, but it is where strategy either becomes real or slowly frays.

When execution feels weaker than expected, it is worth asking not only whether the plan is strong enough. It is also worth asking whether the surrounding decisions were made firmly enough for the business to act without having to infer what the senior team really meant.

Investment edge is not a slogan

In investment management, few words are used more freely than “edge.” It appears in meetings, research discussions and portfolio debates as a marker of confidence and competitive advantage. Used well, it captures something important: the need to possess a genuine reason to expect better outcomes than the market consensus.

Yet the term is often relied upon more than examined. It can become a convenient label for belief rather than a clear explanation of why a view should outperform. That matters, because successful investing depends not on sounding convinced, but on having an advantage that is real, durable and capable of being translated into returns.

The real question, then, is not whether a team believes it has edge, but whether it can define the source of that edge with precision and express it through a disciplined process.

A useful test is simple: what exactly is the edge? Is it informational, analytical, behavioural, structural, or something about the way the team is organised? Is it coming from a better understanding of the business, a cleaner read on incentives, a longer time horizon, or a stronger process for separating signal from noise?

If that cannot be answered clearly, then “edge” may just be a respectable label attached to enthusiasm.

This matters because the market does not reward people for merely having a view. It rewards people for having a better view that is well enough expressed to survive time, variance and friction. That is a much higher standard.

There is another problem too. Even when an edge is real, it may not be large enough to matter. A valid insight that cannot overcome costs, uncertainty, liquidity or portfolio constraints is not much use in practice. Good investors understand this. It means they do not just ask whether they have an edge. They ask what sort of edge it is, how durable it might be and how it should be expressed.

That is where process becomes important. Edge is not only intellectual. It is organisational. A modest advantage can become valuable if it sits inside a disciplined system that challenges well, journals decisions, updates honestly and avoids forcing risk where no edge exists. Just as importantly, a decent edge can be wasted by poor sizing, weak process or emotional leakage.

The reality is less glamorous than people often hope. Long-term outperformance is rarely built on brilliant one-off calls. More often it comes from small but genuine advantages, expressed repeatedly and protected carefully.

There is maturity in being able to say, “This is interesting, but we do not have enough edge.” That is not a weak conclusion. In fact, in many cases, it is the strongest one available.

Edge should therefore be treated as a standard, not a slogan. If it is real, it should be possible to explain where it comes from, why it should persist for long enough to matter and how the team intends to convert it into returns.

Anything less is usually just optimism wearing a smarter suit.

Emotional regulation and decision quality

There will be many times in an investor’s career where a stock is moving against the position while news flow is noisy and messages are coming in. Often, in times like this, an investor’s attention may narrow as the time horizon shortens so that the urge to act starts to outweigh the case for acting.

Most investors recognise this state, even if they do not always name it. And they absolutely should be aware of it. It has a direct bearing on decision quality.

Emotion in investing is often treated as something awkward or slightly embarrassing, as though serious professionals ought to be able to operate above it. That is unrealistic. Emotions are always present. The better question is whether they are being noticed and managed well enough to stop them distorting judgement.

This is not about becoming flat or robotic. In fact, emotion carries useful information. Discomfort can be a warning. Excitement can point to asymmetry. Anxiety can reveal uncertainty that has not been thought through properly. The issue is what happens when those signals are not regulated.

Under pressure, the body moves first. Attention narrows, while threat sensitivity rises and ambiguity becomes harder to tolerate. In markets, that can show up as forced action, brittle communication, overreaction to price or a stronger attachment to an existing view, simply because changing course now feels psychologically expensive.

That is why emotional regulation is not a side topic. It is part of investment skill.

The practical discipline is to create a gap between state and action. What is actually happening here? Has the thesis changed, or has my internal state changed? Am I responding to evidence or trying to relieve discomfort? Is this urgency real, or am I just finding uncertainty hard to sit with?

Investors who can ask those questions in real time usually make better decisions. They are not emotionless. They are simply less likely to let emotion take the wheel.

This matters in teams as well. Emotional states spread quickly. One person’s agitation, certainty or defensiveness can alter the tone of a discussion and narrow the group’s thinking. Teams that regulate well do not remove emotion from the room. They stop it from running the room.

In a profession shaped by pressure, volatility and incomplete information, this is not optional. Investors need enough awareness of themselves to stay thoughtful when markets or meetings start to feel loud.

The goal is not to eliminate feeling. It is to preserve judgement when feeling is present. That is a more realistic standard and, ultimately, a far more valuable one.

Challenge without theatre

Challenge is widely recognised as an essential ingredient of good investment decision-making. Most teams would agree that robust debate, dissenting views and scrutiny of assumptions should improve outcomes. In principle, the case is straightforward.

In practice, however, challenge is harder to cultivate than many organisations assume. It depends not only on having intelligent people willing to question ideas, but on creating an environment where disagreement is useful rather than disruptive. Too little challenge can leave weak thinking untested. Too much of the wrong kind can turn discussion into performance rather than progress.

The real issue, then, is not whether a team claims to value challenge, but whether challenge is helping the quality of judgement when decisions matter.

Most investment teams say they value challenge. The problem is that challenge is easy to praise in principle and much harder to handle well in practice. Some teams have too little of it. Others have plenty, but it comes with too much performance and not enough usefulness.

The reason that either of these is a problem is that too little challenge leads to false alignment. The team sounds coherent, but the debate has been too polite or too compressed to do real work. On the other hand, too much theatre creates the opposite problem. People challenge to show sharpness, not to improve the decision. It becomes a display of intelligence rather than a search for truth.

Neither helps much.

Good challenge is quieter than that. It is disciplined, evidence-based and aimed at strengthening the decision rather than winning the room. It asks what would disconfirm the thesis, where the assumptions are carrying too much weight, what the other side of the trade might be seeing and whether the confidence level really matches the evidence.

That requires a particular team environment. People need to know that challenge is expected, not awkward. They need to know that changing their mind is not weakness. And senior people need to show that they want better decisions more than they want smooth meetings.

There is an emotional side to this as well. If disagreement is experienced as a threat, people either retreat or become defensive. Once that happens, the discussion is no longer really about the asset. It is about identity, status or control. That is usually where challenge becomes either timid or theatrical.

The strongest teams treat challenge as part of professional discipline. Not aggression, not point-scoring, and not endless devil’s advocacy. Just a shared standard that confidence should be tested before it earns the right to be expressed in the portfolio.

When that standard is present, something useful happens. Debate becomes less performative and more clarifying. People become more precise. Risks become more visible. Positions may still be taken, but the quality of conviction improves.

That is what challenge is for. Not heat for its own sake, but better judgement.

Solving the transfer problem: making leadership development stick

Leadership development has long been recognised as essential to organisational performance. Yet many programmes struggle to deliver lasting change. Participants leave workshops energised and full of ideas, only to find that, once back in the pace and pressure of daily work, new habits quickly fade.

This challenge is often described as the “transfer problem”: the difficulty of translating learning into sustained behaviour change in the workplace.

The reasons are understandable. Leadership programmes typically take place away from the realities they are meant to influence. Participants spend time reflecting on ideas, discussing frameworks and practising skills in controlled settings. But when they return to the office, they are met with competing priorities, time pressures and established organisational dynamics. Without structured support, the gravitational pull of old habits is strong.

As a result, any newly created development is at risk of becoming an isolated event rather than a process of genuine growth. Organisations need to recognise, therefore, that leadership capability develops differently from technical expertise. It is not simply acquired through knowledge transfer or occasional training. Instead, it evolves through a cycle of action, reflection and feedback applied to real situations over time.

Accountability also plays a critical role. When leaders share their development goals with sponsors, line managers or peers, learning becomes more visible and purposeful. Conversations about progress move from abstract ideas to observable shifts in behaviour and decision-making.

Equally important is relevance. Leadership challenges rarely exist in isolation from the context of an organisation or sector. For the financial services, it’s essential that programmes draw on real-world organisational challenges, such as leading through change under regulatory scrutiny, integrating new teams after acquisitions or leading across distributed functions.

For organisations investing in leadership development, the implication is clear. When programmes are designed with real-world factors in mind, they are more likely to resonate with participants and prompt meaningful change. Because the real measure of success is not how compelling a programme feels in the room, but what happens afterwards. When learning is embedded in everyday work, development becomes something more durable: a process that gradually reshapes how leaders think, act and guide their teams.

With that in mind, the Goldcrest Leadership Pathway was designed specifically to tackle transfer head‑on. And because the GLP is sector‑specific, the scenarios, tools and conversations mirror the realities of financial services.

Explore the Goldcrest Leadership Pathway to see how we design for impact from the start and keep it growing throughout the year.

Instilling trust in a team

Trust: Defined

Within a team, trust is characterised by a mutual understanding and knowledge of each member’s skills and abilities. Crucially, that involves knowing what other team members can and cannot do. For that reason, it is a purely neutral concept that can be earned through shared experiences among team members. Over time, a person’s belief and trust in another team member’s abilities can change and evolve, based on new evidence and behaviour.

Why instilling trust is vital between team members

Trust is essential to any high performing team. Patrick Lencioni’s seminal work “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” places trust at the foundation of a functional team for good reason. Many of the most serious challenges to an effective team functioning optimally derive from its absence.

But the formation of trust is a complex and gradual process, established through ongoing interactions. By its very nature, it is something to be granted rather than made during those interactions. Individuals cannot insist someone trusts them. However, individuals can establish the conditions, which make them more trustworthy.

The same is true within teams. Instilling trust within a new team demands proactive encouragement. Largely based on exchanges between team members, over time it evolves and develops. It is galvanised by shared experiences, wins and losses. Teams are rarely static and the high performing team is critically aware of the varying capital within the group as members change, relational bonds tear and repair, and reputations are built.

Trust as an enabler

Effectiveness of action is critical to high performance and trust is crucial to enable this.

When strong trust exists within a team, the division of labour can be clearer because there is confidence in the reliability of others to perform their roles. When we trust fellow team members implicitly, it allows us to focus on our own activity without double guessing and inefficiency. It means we don’t have to seek assurance, as we simply know and trust how another team member will perform.

It is vital, though, to dispel misconceptions about instilling trust. It should not be mistaken for blind faith. It must be justifiable either to demand it or extend it. Trust must be given and earned appropriately, but it must also be given genuinely and sincerely.

How Goldcrest Partners Can Help

Over time, most people will have developed the critical capacity to evaluate the triggers, cues and data to help decide whether to trust or not trust. However, this becomes more difficult when we encounter novel situations. Conversely, though, a high performing team is able to calibrate the context much more quickly and accurately than an individual.

Goldcrest Partners can help your team become capable of navigating and interpreting trust with other team members. With our experience of improving team performance, we can support leaders striving to establish a better environment for trust to flourish – at pace.

Given the benefits that can be reaped when trust is strong within a team, it can be one of the most significant actions a leader can make. Recognising the value of trust and how to cultivate it, to create a high performing team, is a vital first step in achieving team goals.