A Blueprint for Team Assessments

The importance of teams to the ultimate success of organizations is unquestioned. Despite this critical role, relatively few organizations have consistent processes in place to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of their teams. Well-crafted assessments can help two types of questions: tactical questions that deal with issues at the “local” level, and strategic questions that deal with issues across teams and the ultimate value of teams to the organization. Here are some guidelines for developing and implementing teams assessments that meet both needs.

The Tactical: Assessing and Fixing Teams

Within the team itself, the first line of defense in promoting team effectiveness should be qualitative self-examination. At pre-determined, scheduled points in their lifecycles, teams should pause to critically assess how well they are functioning and what may be standing in the way of their effectiveness. Self-examinations are best conducted through the use of structured group discussions, as such questions as “How are we doing?”, “What are we doing when this team is particularly effective?”, “What are we doing when we are less effective?”

The ability of teams to self-correct is essential to their effectiveness. But unless there is a steady stream of feedback from team members to cross-team management, it’s difficult for management to know if their teams are effective. To provide team management with actionable feedback that can be used in real time to keep their teams running effectively, measurement systems are needed that adhere to the following principles:

• Regular Feedback. Assessments should be available on an ad hoc basis if concerns arise about a team’s effectiveness; however, all teams within an organization should be expected to provide feedback on at least two occasions. One of these is the point at which they should be performing at peak effectiveness (i.e., after forming, storming, and norming, following Tuckman’s [1965] model), typically three months from kick-off. Because there is still time for intervention, this point is critical in providing feedback that can be used for course correction. The other point comes at the conclusion of the team’s project or function. This measurement point provides diagnostic information useful for making changes in the next team’s composition, training, and management, and for gleaning experience useful for other teams that are still in process. Depending upon the stages of a team’s lifecycle, which vary according to a team’s purpose, there may be several starting and stopping points. For example, product development teams that pass through multiple functional phases (ideation, development, launch), may warrant multiple assessments.

• Timely Feedback. For assessments to be useful, feedback needs to be collected and disseminated to management quickly. Especially in this era of virtual teams, in which team members work in different parts of the world, organizations that conduct team effectiveness assessments via platform-based surveying and reporting are best equipped for speedy feedback. Additional benefits of platform-based surveying for team members include ease of responding to the survey instrument (an important consideration, especially when multiple measures are taken over time) and built-in security measures to safeguard respondent anonymity (i.e., no paper surveys lying around the office).

• Central Management of Team Assessments. Although functions can be organized in a variety of ways, it is best if the measurement of team effectiveness is centralized. A cross-team vantage point permits management to identify and correct problems within particular teams as well as to identify consistent areas of strength and weakness across teams. From the inception of each team, team members, leaders, sponsors, and others need to know who is in charge of measuring and managing team effectiveness. And, in order to establish buy-in, they need to know the purposes and procedures associated with assessments.

• Consistent Evaluation Using Identical Metrics. Echoing the need for central management, assessments need to be conducted using exactly the same measures to ensure that the assessments of different teams (and at different points in time) are directly comparable.

The Strategic: Maximizing Value from Lessons Learned

With a strong foundation of regularly collected, consistent feedback to team management in place, important strategic insights can be gain by judiciously analyzing team effectiveness data. With careful planning and analysis, “ordinary” team assessments can yield extraordinarily useful information of strategic value.

• Use of Normative Benchmarks. Once assessment data has been collected and stored, the organization (or its consultant) should maintain a database of performance norms, such as average and peak team performance, which can then be available as benchmarks. Ideally, the organization should also compare team effectiveness scores to best practice benchmarks in order to track progress toward ideal team performance. Normative benchmarks form important supports for standards of action; for example, allowing management to specify under what conditions interventions will be employed (e.g., when teams are provided special training or facilitation).

• Identify Drivers of Team Effectiveness. Drivers analysis refers to a set of statistical tools useful in identifying those dimensions with the greatest impact on overall team effectiveness. These dimensions may include aspects of team leadership, team process, team direction/focus, and team communication/organizational connection, which in turn are composed of more specific examples of each, for example, “There is an action plan to deliver the team’s goals” might be an indicator of the team direction factor. Additionally, drivers of both team effectiveness (positive drivers) and team ineffectiveness (negative drivers) can be separately identified, since different factors may underlie each. By identifying drivers, corrective actions can be targeted most efficiently, and best practices shared across teams.

• Assessment Dimensions tied to a Theoretical Model of Team Effectiveness. In the words of renowned psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951), “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” That is, if you know how the constructs you are measuring are related to each other, you can distinguish causes and effects, make accurate predictions, and identify the levers for achieving desired outcomes. Accordingly, assessment tools should be explicitly related to a theory of team effectiveness to realize these benefits as well as a shared perspective and language within the organization.

• Real World Outcomes of Team Effectiveness. In order to quantify the dollar impact of effective (and ineffective) teams, it is important to include real-world measurements of team outputs. Depending on the type of team, it can be relatively easy to calculate the dollar value of team deliverables. For example, product teams can be evaluated based on the market success of new product launches, and cost reduction teams can be evaluated based on the amount of savings realized. Once a sufficient number of teams have been evaluated, the dollar value of team effectiveness (and, just as importantly, the dollar cost of team ineffectiveness) can be estimated, providing the HR manager with an extremely useful metric for relating team issues to senior and financial management.

  Considering the enormous reliance placed on teams in the development and execution of business strategies, it seems fitting that the effectiveness of teams should be viewed strategically. By following these guidelines, organizations can exponentially increase the value of their team feedback systems by identifying the best prospects for improving team performance.