Tom Reynolds and Bryan Powell: Helping High-Performing Teams Excel

For Tom Reynolds and Bryan Powell, a high-quality team performance is not the result of a lucky combination of team members and talent. Instead, they argue, it’s the engagement and authenticity of the team members that drives trust, accountability, and psychological safety among the team. As coaches and consultants whose work focuses on leadership coaching to improve team operations, they recognize the importance of authentic communication and engagement in helping teams become their best. They believe in the link between high-performing teams and proper executive leadership, and that a team’s performance can be bolstered by the right combination of trust and accountability.

Breaking the Silence

Reynolds and Powell bring a rigorous, evidence-based approach to their coaching, a result of their academic training in psychology and business. Reynolds, used to complex, high-pressure professional environments like financial services, and Powell, who comes from a blue-collar background but boasts 4,000+ coaching hours and graduate-level training in organizational leadership and performance psychology, know that in many complicated organizations, mistakes can be costly and are sometimes due to the gap between the team’s potential and its work. 

Together, they argue in their book, The Efficient Frontier of Teaming, that teams can stall when they focus only on tasks and output, ignoring the dynamics around them, leading to a combination of high capacity and low psychological safety. This, they feel, leads to what they call “silence,” not innovation. This “silence,” an ongoing stagnation, can eventually lead to underperformance. Leaders might believe they are seeing a harmonious team at work when, in reality, they are observing quiet compliance. 

Designing with Trust and Accountability

Their work is unique in that it links performance to psychology. They approach teams as a whole living system to be both designed and carefully maintained, with trust and accountability as mutually beneficial elements. Psychological safety, they explain, is necessary for team members to take risks, offer important feedback, and learn from mistakes without fear of repercussion. Accountability, in turn, means that high standards and proper execution move forward without stumbling.

For them, coaching can reveal cracks in the organization’s armor, and they want to guide teams to tackle issues such as awkward dynamics and morale loss that can lead to “silences.”

“Having appreciation for a diversity of thought and experience is what leads to a higher level of performance,” Reynolds explains, “not group thinking or other bias that appears when everyone is meant to fit the square peg in the round hole.” Once issues are openly addressed, he and his partner often find that group performance naturally improves.

Aiming for Authentic Engagement

Tom Reynolds and Bryan Powell’s coaching style, built over years of work and observation, is detailed in their book “Efficient Frontier of Teaming.” The book offers a framework for leaders to implement their directives. For both of them, their work at building better-functioning teams is more than a simple consulting job. It’s a movement they feel can shift leadership into a more positive direction.

Their work aims to help teams be their authentic selves and bring their diverse ideas to the workplace every day. Their dream is to shape how organizations define “effective teamwork,” creating a workplace culture where performance no longer crushes individuals but instead carries them fully to the creative table.