These eight aspects, and these eight precisely worded items, validly predict sustained team performance:

1. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.

1. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.

1. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.

1. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.

1. My teammates have my back.

1. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.

1. I have great confidence in my company’s future.

1. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

You might notice a few things about these items right away. First, the team members are not directly rating their team leader or their company on anything—they are rating only their own feelings and experiences.

Second, we know that if you do happen to work on a team you are twice as likely to score high on the eight engagement items, and that this trend linking engagement to teams extends to multiple teams—in fact, the most engaged group of workers across the working world are those who work on five distinct teams.

Third, just like Lisa, those team members who said they trusted their team leader were twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work.

Somehow, on the best teams, the team leader is able not only to identify the strengths of each person but also to tweak roles and responsibilities so that team members, individually, feel that their work calls upon them to exercise their strengths on a daily basis. When a team leader does this, everything else—recognition, sense of mission, clarity of expectations—works better. But when a team leader doesn’t, nothing else that he or she tries, whether in the form of money or title or cheerleading or cajoling, can make up for it. Ongoing work-strengths fit is the master lever for high-performance teams: pull it, and everything else is elevated; fail to pull it, and everything else is diminished.

Two questions in the survey showed the strongest relationship to a worker’s feeling of trust in his team leader:

• Do I know clearly what is expected of me at work?

• Do I have the chance to use my strengths every day?

This data suggests that these two conditions—knowing what is expected, and being able to play to one’s strengths—are the foundations of trust. When a team leader, despite the ambiguities and the fluid and fast pace of the world of work, can help team members feel clarity about expectations and a sense that their best is recognized and utilized frequently, then trust is built, and a Fully Engaged team becomes more likely.

The item “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work” exhibited the strongest connection to overall engagement and the strongest connection to other items in the survey. The item “My teammates have my back” showed the second-strongest connection, and the item “In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values” had the third-strongest connection.