Creating high-performing teams
Keep your best people, reduce friction, improve collaboration and build the trust that drives high performance.
Stronger Teams. Safer Workplaces. Increased Performance.
The strongest teams are the ones where people can speak up. When employees feel free to share ideas, raise concerns, or admit mistakes without worrying about backlash, they bring their best work and drive results together.
When that freedom isn’t there, people hold back. The idea isn’t get voiced. The concern isn’t raised. Over time, that silence turns into frustration, disengagement, and quiet exits. Every month it goes unaddressed, the costs grow – staff turnover, delays, missed opportunities.
Toxic culture rarely starts with one big incident. It builds slowly through avoidance, silence, and missed chances to address problems early.
Most companies try to fix these issues with pizza lunches, wellness webinars and team-building days. They might feel good in the moment, but it’s like putting a band-aid on a broken arm. They don’t solve the root problem.
Our training gives your team the skills to recognise and respond to these moments before they escalate into performance issues, HR challenges, or costly resignations. Everyone learns how to communicate under pressure, navigate difficult conversations, and create a culture where people speak up, take ownership, and stay.
This is psychological safety in practice – not comfort, but the daily behaviours that allow teams to move faster, surface risks sooner, and avoid the hidden costs of silence, misalignment, and slow decision-making.
At A Glance
What it is: The foundations every team needs to work with trust, speak up early, and perform under pressure. Grounded in the principles of psychological safety to create high-performance.
Why it matters: Faster problem-solving, fewer HR headaches, stronger retention, and teams that actually deliver.
Who it’s for: All staff (Foundations) | Executives, HR, and Managers (Leadership Intensive).
Formats: 60-min Foundations (all staff) | 8-hour Leadership Intensive
Delivery: On-site (in South Africa) or virtual anywhere.
Outcomes: Clear communication, less friction, high-performance, higher engagement, constructive conflict, better execution, increased revenue.
Our Programs: Choose Your Training Approach
We offer two proven approaches to strengthen trust and performance, designed to meet different needs and implementation timelines:
Foundations for High-Performing Teams (60-Minute Team Session)
A fast, high-impact session for all staff. Your team walks out with tools they can apply in their very next meeting.
- Audience: All staff
- Delivery: On-site (SA) or online
- Outcomes: A shared definition of trust, clear language for raising issues early, better meeting behaviours, and prompts that make it easier to speak up.
Leading High-Performing Teams (8-Hour Leadership Intensive)
For leaders who need to drive culture change and keep performance high under pressure.
- Audience: Executives, Leaders, Managers, HR
- Delivery: On-site (2 days) or online (2×4h)
- Outcomes: Turning conflict into collaboration, advanced communication, structured feedback processes, and a rollout plan for sustaining a high-performance culture.
Most organisations start with the 60-Minute Foundations Session, then deepen the impact with the Leadership Intensive for managers and team leads.
What We Cover
Team Training: Foundations for High-Performing Teams (60 Minutes)
This session gives your entire team the practical tools to build trust, communicate effectively, and turn conflict into collaboration. It’s grounded in proven frameworks and real-world application. Participants leave with immediately actionable skills they can apply in their very next meeting – so the return on your training starts the same day.
Understanding Team Safety in Practice
Your people learn what real team safety means, not being “comfortable,” but creating conditions where they can raise issues, admit mistakes, and contribute without fear. We introduce the four types of safety that build strong teams and show how these behaviours consistently drive performance.
Spotting What Breaks Teams
Most teams unintentionally undermine their own performance through everyday habits. We help participants identify and eliminate the silent culture killers that destroy trust and engagement and show them how to spot the early warning signs before these issues escalate into costly staff turnover, delays, or HR challenges.
Active Listening That Works
Better listening leads to better collaboration. Participants complete a listening assessment and learn practical techniques they can use immediately to improve interactions. The payoff is fewer misunderstandings, stronger relationships, and faster problem-solving.
Building Trust Through Daily Actions
Trust isn’t built through team exercises – it’s built through consistent daily behaviours. We show participants the specific, everyday actions that create lasting trust, including how to handle mistakes, give recognition, and adapt to different personalities. These micro-behaviours are easy to implement, cost nothing, and create measurable culture shifts within weeks.
Feedback That Strengthens Performance
Most people avoid giving feedback because they’ve seen it go wrong before. We teach a framework that makes feedback constructive and relationship-building, without creating defensiveness or conflict. Teams who apply this see productivity and morale improve quickly.
Turning Conflict Into Collaboration
Conflict doesn’t have to derail performance. We show participants how to distinguish between destructive and productive conflict, and give them strategies to turn disagreements into solutions. Meetings become decision-making sessions, not battlegrounds.
Creating Sustainable Change
Lasting results come from new habits, not one-off events. Participants leave with specific daily actions and a personal action plan for continued growth. This ensures the training continues to deliver results long after the session ends.
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Leadership Intensive: Leading High-Performing Teams (8 Hours)
This program equips leaders with the advanced tools and practice needed to embed a culture of trust and accountability. It builds on the foundations training and ensures managers aren’t just supporting change — they’re actively driving it.
Advanced Self-Awareness for Leaders
Leaders learn to recognise their own blind spots and triggers so they can lead with clarity in uncertain or high-pressure situations.
High-Pressure Communication
We cover techniques to keep decisions moving even when discussions get tense or complex. Leaders practice how to communicate in a way that maintains momentum without shutting people down.
Emotional Regulation
Managers set the tone. We give them tools to manage their own stress responses so they can create stability and confidence for their teams.
Action Planning for Culture Change
Leaders leave with a concrete plan to embed these behaviours at every level, ensuring consistency across teams and departments.
When leaders master these skills, trust cascades through the organisation. People raise issues sooner, align faster, and contribute their best work consistently.
Ready to Strengthen Your Workplace Culture?
High performance isn’t built on slogans or perks – it’s built on trust and accountability. When people feel safe to speak up, share ideas, admit mistakes, and engage in productive conflict, everything else becomes possible.
Our training gives your team the practical skills to create that safety, starting immediately.
Contact us today on ann@flagacademy.co.za or 078 458 5338 to discuss how this training can transform your workplace culture and drive the results you need.
The Cost of Silence. The ROI of Safer Teams.
The real cost of silence rarely shows up on a budget line, but it drains organisations every day.
It looks like:
- Feedback that never gets voiced
- Tension that goes unresolved
- Projects delayed because concerns weren’t raised early
- Good people walking out because they didn’t feel heard
Left alone, these patterns quietly eat away at trust, culture, and performance. The longer it’s ignored, the more expensive it gets – in turnover, rework, and wasted potential.
Our training gives your people the skills to stop silence before it becomes a risk. Teams learn how to speak up early, resolve friction quickly, and create the kind of culture where performance and retention grow together.
What Changes When Teams Learn These Skills
- Innovation increases because ideas aren’t held back
- Issues get resolved faster because they’re raised sooner
- High performers stay because they feel valued and able to take informed risks
- Meetings become productive instead of cautious
- Leaders make better decisions with full information
- Conflict becomes constructive and solution-focused
- Engagement rises because people feel respected and included
- Stress and burnout drop because people aren’t managing fear
- Learning accelerates because mistakes are seen as opportunities
- Customers benefit from confident, empowered employees
Every time someone hesitates or avoids a conversation, your organisation loses clarity, time, and trust. Multiply that by every team, every month, and the cost becomes impossible to ignore.
Our programs help your leaders and staff cut these losses at the source – building workplaces where people speak up, take ownership, and stay.
Some of our Featured Clients
Not Sure Where the Gaps Are?
This 3-minute scorecard reveals hidden gaps in trust, communication, and team culture, the kind that often go unnoticed until they show up as missed deadlines, low engagement, or unnecessary turnover.
If you want your team performing at their best, start here.
How to Build Psychological Safety at Work (7 Simple Steps)
Our training is designed to build high-performing teams and the foundations are rooted in what researchers call Psychological Safety. If you’ve come across the term and are wondering how to apply it in practice, here are 7 steps you can start using today.
- Set the tone – Encourage your team to speak honestly and openly.
- Admit you don’t know everything – When leaders own their mistakes, it shows others it’s safe to do the same.
- Invite everyone to contribute – Don’t let the loudest voices dominate; make space for quieter ones too.
- Listen actively – Pay attention, repeat back what you heard, and close the loop so people know they were understood.
- Normalise learning from mistakes – Talk about slip-ups quickly, take the lesson, and move forward together.
- Keep the feedback flowing – Short, regular check-ins stop small issues from becoming big problems.
- Celebrate speaking up – Thank people who raise concerns early or challenge ideas constructively.
These steps reflect the daily behaviours that build trust and openness inside teams. Our training takes these principles further, giving your staff and leaders the tools to apply them consistently and embed them into your culture.
What Is Psychological Safety?
Researchers like Amy Edmondson describe psychological safety as the belief that people won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, or mistakes. Google’s Project Aristotle confirmed it’s one of the strongest drivers of team effectiveness.
At FLAG, we use this research as a foundation, but we focus on practical behaviours leaders and teams can use every day to improve performance.
Why Psychological Safety Matters
Studies show that when psychological safety is present, staff retention is higher, teams learn faster, and innovation increases. In high-stress workplaces, burnout and turnover intent drop dramatically.
Without it, issues fester in silence until they explode into complaints, disengagement, or costly exits.
That’s why our programs don’t just explain psychological safety, they show leaders and staff how to apply it in daily practice to cut risk and drive performance.
Employees don’t leave companies, they leave toxic cultures. Create an environment where people feel safe, and they’ll show up, speak up, and stay.