ONLINE TEAM ASSESSMENT

Team-based work has become the dominant mode of collaboration. While almost all social and business goals today require multiple perspectives and skills, collaboration is easier said than done.

True collaboration cannot be mandated and is more than coordination of effort.

Few teams, however, know how to really collaborate. Many teams just go through the motions and demonstrate lackluster performance.

Objectives

1. Understand key characteristics that distinguish average performing from high-performing teams
2. Assess your team’s behaviors, attitudes, and processes for these key characteristics – you can take this assessment individually or jointly as a team
3. Build your team’s collaborative capacity – its ability to perform together – by jointly taking the assessment and by addressing key areas of improvement
4. Support team building by having an objective starting point for a discussion about what team members need from each other
5. Improve team performance by following concrete suggestions for areas

This tool assesses your team’s ability to collaborate in a manner that makes the team high-performing. You can use it when:

• You or your team want to find how the team is performing in regard to 12 key characteristics that differentiate high-performing from average-performing teams
• You or your team want concrete suggestions to improve the team’s collaborative culture
• Your or your team want to benchmark a team’s collaborative capacity against others who have taken this assessment

What This Tools Is – And Isn’t

There are many attitudes, processes, and behaviors that need to be in place for a team to become high-performing. This tool is not a comprehensive test that allows you to score a team in all relevant ways.

What the tool does is to focus on 12 key characteristics that organizational research shows to be crucial to move “from good to great”.

Many teams have their basics in place (defined roles, defined objectives), hit average performance levels – but can’t get into high-performance mode.

This tool helps teams to move beyond “doing okay” towards taping diversity of thought, improving decision effectiveness, and inviting more trust to engage in the “right fights”.

How To Use This Tool With Your Team

1. You as well as every team member needs to register and then join a team on the account page – otherwise we cannot compute team averages. Just hit the login/register icon in the main navigation.
2. One of you must create a group name that uniquely represents your team. The creator of this group must provide the group name and his/her user name to all team members who wish to take the assessment. It’s recommended to invite others to the assessment only after a group name for the team was created to simplify the process.
3. Now every team member registers and joins the group. This happens on your account page after you log in.
4. Every team member individually rates the team.
5. Once everyone has given their feedback the charts on the second page (after the submit button) shows your team’s average and how your team compares against your assessment and the overall benchmark.
6. You also see specific recommendations to improve team collaboration for the lowest scored areas

Bear in mind that after submitting you will always see data presented based on submitted feedback. The chart will only be representative of everyone’s input once all team members have provided their ratings.

Only after everyone has given her/his feedback will the shown team average correctly represent your team members’ feedback.

What to look for

• What are the lowest scored areas? That’s a great place to start a conversation.
• As a registered user you will be given specific data and suggestions to work with the three lowest scored attributes. Work with these questions individually or bring these questions to your team.
• Where do your ratings differ from the overall benchmark? How do you explain that difference? How can you improve?
• If taken jointly with others, where do your ratings and the team average differ? What may explain your different point of view? Discuss with others how they scored and why.
• Look where team ratings differ from the benchmark. What does your team do better or worse than others? What does it take to maintain your strengths? What will improve your weaknesses?

Work with the recommendations that the instrument provides.

Most importantly, start a conversation. Make time to discuss what supports team effectiveness.

Most teams struggle to go beyond lackluster performance because they don’t actively discuss and pursue what needs improvement.

Background

The idea for the tool is based on two observations:

1. Most teams do okay – but aren’t great and only elicit lukewarm passion among team members. They need guidance not to go from poor to average, they need guidance to go from good to great.
2. Collaboration cannot be mandated. It’s a decision people make or not. That decision is rational as much as emotional. So we looked into what supports that emotional buy-in.

The assessment items were selected based on research such as “The New Science of Building Great Teams”, work that comes out of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence as well as our own research at http://collaborative-capacity.com.