Do you ever wonder whether your team is as healthy as possible? Ever question whether you’re fit as a fiddle or if a thorough checkup might reveal you’re headed for trouble? It’s like asking if your team’s blood pressure is climbing or your cholesterol is too high.
But unlike those medical diagnostics, we don’t have readily accessible tools to assess the health of your team. There isn’t a sphygmomanometer[1] we can use to measure your team, like blood pressure; no X-ray machine to let us see right through to your bones and connective tissue. So, what should you look for if you’re trying to conduct your team’s annual physical?
Signs You Have a Healthy Team
I would include a few diagnostic characteristics in my Dr. Liane team checkup.
Output
A healthy team delivers on its commitments. If your team is meeting deadlines with work that requires only minor iterations and improvements, that’s a good sign that things are working as needed. You can learn plenty about your output by examining how well you deliver on your project plans.
Let’s use an example. Imagine you’re part of a marketing team and committed to creating a new web campaign to drive traffic before a product launch. You do the research, build the storyboard, execute the creative, and roll out the program on time and in a way that thrills everyone in sales and product management. That’s a good indication that your team can generate the required outputs.
Health Check Diagnostics for Output
???? Delivering required products or services
???? Meeting deadlines
???? Requiring few revisions
Outcomes
While pushing work out the door is an essential sign of vitality, it’s possible that you’re getting stuff done without moving the needle on the things that matter. That is to say, outputs are not the same as outcomes. The next question is whether your work is leading to the desired changes. For our marketing team example, if your web campaign is launched on time but doesn’t create the bump in traffic or leads you were hoping for, that’s a sign that you need to rethink your approach. Team effectiveness isn’t just about getting stuff done; it’s about getting results.
Health Check Diagnostics for Outcomes
???? Seeing progress on leading indicators
???? Changing the trajectory of key performance indicators
???? Having the desired effects
Efficiency
I’ve seen many teams who are good at getting the right things done in a way that moves the needle on the measures that matter. Unfortunately, some of these teams make meaningful progress at approximately the pace of sap running in the spring. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Effective teams are also efficient teams. They learn how to deliver faster, with less energy, and with fewer resources. Our marketing team might be inefficiently building every campaign from scratch, or it could be accumulating a database of creative assets or developing repeatable processes that allow them to get each successive campaign out the door with less investment.
Health Check Diagnostics for Efficiency
???? Decreasing time required to execute
???? Reducing effort to get required results
???? Codifying or automating repeatable approaches
Trust
Efficiency and effectiveness aren’t the only measures of a healthy team; it’s important to consider how your interpersonal dynamics affect the experience of working together. The best teams have solid foundations of trust that promote candid communication, transparent feedback, and timely information sharing.
Trust exists at multiple levels, from a basic connection among individuals to confidence in one another’s competence, comfort in relying on your teammate’s dependability, and a belief in everyone’s integrity. In the marketing team, trust might mean the difference between a team that shares innovative, unconventional ideas freely and one that takes the path of incremental tweaks and safe bets.
Health Check Diagnostics for Trust
???? Believing in each other’s competence
???? Counting on each other’s dependability
???? Having each other’s backs when you’re vulnerable
Signs and Symptoms Your Team Isn’t Healthy
Just as with your own health, monitoring the well-being of your team means paying attention to indicators of health and fitness while simultaneously watching for symptoms of underlying problems. As you’re boosting your outputs, outcomes, efficiency, and trust, be on the lookout for any of the following signs that something troublesome might be emerging:
- People stop listening to one another and become rooted in their own positions
- Factions develop where subgroups talk among themselves but not with each other
- Subgroups convene meetings-after-the-meeting
- Team members shirk their commitments and make excuses
- People withhold bad news until it’s too late to do anything about it
- Everyone avoids conflicts and leaves the important concerns unspoken
- Individuals descend into persons, counterproductive conflict
Teams don’t often go from healthy to dysfunctional overnight; it can be a slow process. Similarly, if your team is already experiencing malaise, you’re not going to become the picture of health right away. Stay focused on the mindsets, processes, and behaviors that help you build trust, find efficiencies, deliver results, and have an impact, and you’ll find that your team gets progressively healthier.
What would you add to our list of team health checks?
[1] I loved having my blood pressure taken as a kid, so the nurse practitioner in my clinic said that if I could ask for it with the proper name, she would take it any time!
Additional Resources
Team Effectiveness Starts With You Being an Effective Team Member
The Ultimate Guide to Toxic Teams