High Performing Teams Through Actionable Understanding

Team Diagnostic Exercise

In our team building programs, we've found, by using an effective data-driven process, we can help facilitate the creation of high performing teams while giving them the tools to maintain it, as part of doing this, we've also found we can help increase their ability to lead inclusively, and deal with both unpredictability and ambiguity.

Our team programs run on evidence rather than exercises. We assess the conditions a team's work actually depends on, find the one that's holding the rest down, and give the team a way to keep reading itself once we've gone. Teams that do this find they handle ambiguity and disagreement better — not because they've been trained to, but because the thing that was absorbing that capacity is no longer in the way.

When we ask teams to do the exercise individually below, we find a wide variance on nearly all teams (often unexpected). We also find that it is an effective tool to facilitate a discussion to achieve a consensus on where the opportunities and threats lie.

Instructions Rate your team as it actually operates today — not as you'd like it to be. 1 is really bad, 3 is rather poor, 4 is OK, 7 is ideal, 8 is a bit too much, 9 is over the top.

The scale runs past ideal on purpose. Every condition below can be underdone, and every one of them can be overdone. A team that has too much of one of these is not a team that's winning at it.

1

Rate your team on… When something unfamiliar shows up, this team takes it in rather than filing it as noise.

What a 9 looks like Chases every new idea; nothing gets consolidated.

2

Rate your team on… The person who has to live with a decision is able to make it.

What a 9 looks like Everyone decides everything; the team stops moving together.

3

Rate your team on… People say the inconvenient thing to the person who needs to hear it.

What a 9 looks like Everything is aired constantly; nothing gets settled.

4

Rate your team on… We mean the same thing by the same words.

What a 9 looks like Shared shorthand becomes so tight that it hides real disagreement.

5

Rate your team on… There’s enough room in the schedule to absorb a problem without something breaking.

What a 9 looks like So much room that nothing carries urgency and problems never surface.

6

Rate your team on… Someone will stop work in progress when it’s clearly going wrong.

What a 9 looks like Work is halted so often that little finishes.

7

Rate your team on… We can tell a real change from ordinary fluctuation.

What a 9 looks like Every wobble triggers an alarm; the team lives in false positives.

8

Rate your team on… Information reaches us in time to do something about it.

What a 9 looks like Everything is real-time; the team reacts to noise as fast as it reacts to signal.

9

Rate your team on… Things we raise come back to us with a resolution.

What a 9 looks like Closing the loop becomes the work; tracking outweighs fixing.

10

Rate your team on… We share one version of where the work actually stands.

What a 9 looks like Dashboard upkeep costs more than it returns; precision that isn’t real.

11

Rate your team on… Weeks later, we can reconstruct who decided what, and on what basis.

What a 9 looks like It feels like surveillance; people stop putting things in writing.

12

Rate your team on… Work can be backed out if it turns out to be wrong.

What a 9 looks like Nothing is ever committed; everything stays provisional.

With many, there is a stigma attached to the subject of team building programs because many are designed with the objective of being fun and social but with little demonstrated lasting value. There is nothing wrong with fun and social for a holiday party, but investing time with your team can and should build the foundation for success and not just be a fun kick-off.

Here we discuss how team building should be laying the foundation for team performance.

Many teams reach a level of high performance, for a time, but then backslide, taking a long time to regain it and then they invariably backslide again. With dispersed and hybrid teams, this is even more common.

In this video discussion, we introduce the two team paradoxes and discuss how to diminish the level backsliding by having the fundamentals in the place.