Health Check on Teamwork: What’s Your Status?

Over the past twelve months, most teams have had to endure a level of challenge they’ve never experienced before. These difficult times have undoubtedly highlighted the strengths and/or pitfalls of every team’s ability to maintain a high level of performance and achieve results while responding to crisis. As organizations and teams continue navigating their way through an ever-changing landscape, is your team in a state where it can successfully take on the next twelve months and whatever the future will bring?

How to Evaluate Your Team

To ensure your team is calibrated and able to reach the full height of its potential, getting an accurate assessment of where the team is now and what development is needed to get it to where it needs to be is essential. Now is the time to help team members make a successful transition to a more typical working situation, rebuild emotional connections with their colleagues, and explore the wide variety of issues, needs, or decisions that teams will confront as they return to in-person work and the new business environment. Teams need to be tackling topics like the following in order to bounce back to high levels of performance and effectiveness:

• Shifts in the enterprise strategy
• Reorganization of corporate functions and roles
• The arrival and assimilation of new team members
• The departure of familiar team members
• Communicating effectively with virtual team members, clients, or stakeholders
• Resolving concerns, differences, or areas of tension
• Exploring sensitive issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Resetting processes and disciplines
• Mapping out new strategies, goals, and priorities for the team
• Clarifying expectations and working agreements between team members
• Building trust, unity, and collaboration
• Learning new skills and competencies or refreshing existing ones

Strengthen Your Team Assessment

To better understand the current state of your team, take our 15-Point Inspection. This assessment is designed to evaluate a team’s strengths as well as its opportunities for improvement. The insight you gain will allow you to pinpoint target areas in your team-development initiatives to unleash the full potential of your team and be well-positioned for success as the business environment begins to stabilize.

While rapidly shifting circumstances have certainly taken a toll on leaders and teams, the future holds a lot of promise—and change of any type offers an opportunity for leaders and teams to start fresh and begin anew.