Imagine you are sick, but you don’t know exactly what’s wrong. You go to the doctor and she is puzzled, too. You undergo a bunch of tests including bloodwork and a scan, and the doctor asks questions about your symptoms. Using this structured, objective process, the doctor forms a complete picture of your health and gets to the root cause of what’s ailing you. In business today, teams need the same sort of doctoring.
Teams are the primary unit of many workplaces, and their problems are diagnosed through team assessments. In this guide, we go over everything you need to know about picking the right assessment tool, how assessments work, and what assessment to use in situations such as remote teams, startup teams, and teams that struggle with trust and ineffective communication.
A team assessment is an exercise that allows you to evaluate a team’s strengths and weaknesses. As a recognized management technique, team assessments began drawing attention in the 1970s and 1980s, after American organizational practice wholeheartedly embraced the idea of teamwork as a primary driver of success (in professional sports, which has always emphasized teamwork, different team assessments have been used for even longer).
Team assessments can be conducted in various ways: in-person sessions, via email, or with tailor-made online surveys and apps. Many assessments use specially designed worksheets.
Some team assessments are based on particular theories about what drives effective teamwork. These include the work of management theorist Meredith Belbin, who suggested that good teamwork was predicated on the presence of different types of personalities on a team and having individuals who fit specific behavior roles, and of business consultant Patrick M. Lencioni, who identified five major team dysfunctions.
Other assessments focus on different measures of team effectiveness, such as the quality of organizational support, clarity of goals, a team’s ability to learn and grow, team diversity (not only in terms of culture, race, gender, but also thinking styles and personalities), and, most importantly, the ability to deliver results.
WHEN TO PERFORM A TEAM ASSESSMENT
Team assessments provide more value to the team at some times over others. Unfortunately, team assessments are too often done only after things go wrong. While this is a perfectly legitimate reason for an assessment, organizations can reap more benefits when they do not think of team assessments only as a response to difficulty. Conducting assessments before problems arise can avoid or mitigate them as well as potentially save time and money.
Here are some good times to do a team assessment:
- To strengthen a team that is having problems
- To get a new team to start on the right foot
- To help a team grow
- To prevent future problems from arising
- When team members turn over
- To bond teams in situations such as remote teams and startups
- Before a major strategic shift or campaign towards a big goal
- As part of ongoing team development to baseline then compare at intervals
Team-building experts say that early in the team life cycle is a prime opportunity for a team assessment. Make sure team members get off on the right foot by learning about each other’s strengths during the forming stage.
That can reduce conflict that occurs during the storming stage. These assessments are also useful for introducing new members to a team, since turnover is not unusual. When teammates haven’t met each other before (such as with new teams or remote teams), or when getting things right the first time is critical (such as with startups), these assessments lay a strong foundation for the team.
Reactive assessments are usually conducted during the storming stage, which is when problems are most likely to appear. Even if the forming stage sets a strong foundation in terms of interpersonal relationships, conflict can rarely be eliminated.
At this point, some team assessments help members negotiate and grow past their differences, as well as find some middle ground. The storming stage is also a good time to use an assessment to determine team performance baselines, so you can compare performance in the norming and performing stages. If conflict is resolved successfully, you should see performance improvements.
We are using Great People Inside with a large variety of tools for assessment.