Assess Your Team's Strengths: Discover 7 Success Factors and a Free Excel Tool
Teams, much like businesses, are complex and unique entities that evolve over time. As a leader, it falls upon you to navigate the challenge of improving your team's potential for successful alignment and execution. It's no small feat.
With more than two decades of internal and external consulting, I’ve identified consistently effective methods and tools to facilitate strategy alignment. I’ve partnered with teams at various organizational levels (C suite to shop floor), and spanning multiple industries and geographies. I’m sharing this particular tool, because it’s simple … and it works. This survey generates data that helps leaders know where to engage and focus their efforts to ensure superior team alignment and results.
7 Team Success Factors
Conducting an effective strategy session requires a great deal of planning with specific objectives in mind. When the goal is team alignment, establishing clarity on the following success factors plays a crucial role in enabling team effectiveness and execution:
1. Strategy Clarity & Goals Alignment:
Assess if leadership communicates a clear vision and key deliverables.
Examine if team and individual goals align with these deliverables.
2. Organizational Design:
Evaluate team/organizational design and its affect on collaboration and efficient execution.
Understand benefits and unintended consequences to design alterations.
3. Organizational Competencies:
Identify essential skills and capabilities required for success in your market.
Develop and measure these capabilities as your team/market evolves.
4. Role Clarity:
Ensure team members have a clear understanding of their individual roles.
Address any gaps or overlaps that may arise.
5. Team Governance & Operating Norms:
Evaluate the effectiveness of your vision/mission, key performance indicators, and meetings & communications cadence.
What dashboards or documents exist to efficiently drive and measure these activities?
6. Decision Making & Escalation:
Establish clear guidelines on decision-making approaches.
Align on when and how to escalate non-routine matters.
7. Trust & Team Dynamics:
Assess the level of trust and cohesion within the team.
Explore team relationships, work styles, and conflict management.
Gut Feelings Backed by Data
Knowing how to ask the right questions at the right time is critical, and so is having a simple tool to validate your observations. I have found that a combination of personal interviews (qualitative observations) and a data driven self-assessment (quantitative) provides a more accurate picture of the organization, its leaders, and their strengths and opportunities. This qualitative/quantitative discovery approach has proven successful for our clients time and again.
Team Effectiveness Survey
So many clients and peers have asked about go-to tools and methodologies that I decided to share one with our readers. We call this a Team Effectiveness Survey. It’s a free user-friendly Excel-based tool that allows team members to self-assess and discuss 7 success factors, and two qualitative team aspirations. Once all team members populate this survey, a one page spider chart is generated depicting the quantitative survey responses. Collating the qualitative responses is a simple cut and paste task.
Click here to access this free Excel tool, complete with step-by-step instructions for self-administration. It's time to unlock your team's superpowers and pave the way for remarkable achievements.
It's time to unlock your team's superpowers and pave the way for remarkable achievements.
