How to improve performance by increasing team flow
The Secret to Great Teams
Look at the picture above. What do you see? Racial diversity? Age diversity? Cookies?
Look again, this time focusing on people’s eyes.
The highest-performing teams don’t excel because they are great at sales, engineering, or marketing.
They excel because they listen actively to each other. They make it safe for everyone to be honest. They normalize empathy, vulnerability, and trust.
This creates a feeling of flow that bonds people together. The team becomes SUPERCONDUCTIVE — moving at great speed with no emotional friction. It’s an experience that changes everyone who feels it, made clear in the following true story.
The “Sheer Beauty” of Team Flow
On his death bed, when Olympic rower Joe Rantz reflected on winning the eight-oared rowing race at the 1936 Olympics, it wasn’t the gold medal that made him tear up in joy, or beating the German team in front of Adolf Hitler, or representing America on the world stage.
What made him emotional was the feeling of being on that team. As author Daniel James Brown wrote in The Boys in the Boat:
“It was a shared experience — a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.”
– The Boys in the Boat
The sheer beauty of being part of a superconductive team.
This doesn’t just produce happier people. It produces better performance, because it unleashes the deepest levels of commitment and service. Before there were titles, before there was money, there was the tribe. As humans, we are hardwired to outperform when we are part of a closely knit tribe.
But this is not a given. In order for a team to become Superconductive, certain things have to happen, and certain other things have to stop happening.
The Curse of Star Talent
You might ask, “But what about talent? In order to reach the next level of performance and growth, don’t we just need to recruit or develop better talent?“
In sports like baseball, yes. Every action is isolated. People play on a team, but not as a team. Stars make a difference.
But most jobs today are less like baseball and more like rowing, with team members working together on shared goals.
What happens when leaders treat rowing like baseball? (What if rowing went Moneyball?)
When the fastest rowers are put in the same boat, they lose to a boat filled with slower rowers who are better at pulling together.
The same thing is true in the workplace. A team of all “rock stars” struggles with ego and in-fighting, but teams with less exceptional talent collaborate, re-think, and generate better results.
For jobs that require collaboration, team flow is not the icing on the cake — it’s the cake.
Improving performance is not about the WHAT (outcomes), the WHO (talent), or the WHY (purpose). It’s about the HOW — how deeply people connect to each other.
Superconductivity is the ultimate competitive advantage because it helps everyone bring out the best in themselves and each other.
And it’s a result of specific and trainable skills.
Superconductivity is the ultimate competitive advantage, because it helps everyone bring out the best in themselves and each other.
And it’s a result of specific and trainable skills.
The Hard Case for Soft Skills
If you want to know how greater flow can help your business, ask yourself:
• How skilled are team members at giving and receiving feedback frequently, without anyone feeling called out, put down, or made an example of?
• Do people sweep issues under the rug? Are there any signs of built-up friction and strain?
• Is everybody bought into personal growth as a pathway to team (revenue) growth?
This matters less for small teams of 3 or 4 people. But as team size and complexity increases, there are more opportunities for friction because of blind spots, defensiveness, and ego. Team size can become a liability instead of an asset.
Superconductive teams want high intellectual friction, but low emotional friction. They argue over decisions, but with humility and respect. Team size becomes an asset again as people learn how to speak, listen, and reflect, improving ideas together without blame or fear of repercussions.
The Superconductive Team helps you get there faster by teaching each team member to:
- turn unresolved emotional friction into fuel for greater clarity and trust
- prioritize the two most important qualities for strong leadership — humility and drive
- align their growth as a person with what the business and team need from them
- practice specific skills that increase psychological safety and flow
- extend tools at home (if desired) so their loved ones also have greater flow and your team members are undistracted
