Team Collaboration Assessment

𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐛𝐞? Struggling with team performance can often feel like trying to solve a puzzle with missing pieces. Here are some key areas to evaluate that might help you identify the root cause: 1. Clarity of Goals and Roles Are team members clear on their objectives and individual responsibilities? Misaligned or unclear goals can create confusion and inefficiency. 2. Communication Gaps Is there open, transparent, and effective communication within the team? Misunderstandings, silos, or lack of feedback can hinder collaboration. 3. Leadership Style Is leadership empowering and supportive, or overly controlling? The right balance can inspire performance and trust. 4. Skill Gaps Do team members have the skills and resources they need to succeed? A mismatch between skills and tasks can lead to frustration and low output. 5. Team Dynamics and Trust Is there mutual respect and trust among team members? Poor dynamics can lead to conflict, disengagement, or a lack of cohesion. 6. Workload and Burnout Are expectations realistic, or is the team overburdened? Overwork can cause stress, impacting performance and morale. 7. Recognition and Motivation Are achievements celebrated and efforts acknowledged? Lack of recognition can lead to disengagement and lower motivation. 8. Alignment with Values and Culture Does the team feel connected to the organization's mission and culture? Misalignment can reduce commitment and enthusiasm. A candid team discussion or even anonymous surveys can help identify what’s really going on. Once the issues are pinpointed, targeted actions—such as training, better communication strategies, or workload adjustments—can make a significant difference.

Most organizations want more collaboration. Fewer know specifically why and that ambiguity is usually the reason the efforts to build it do not hold. This is the starting point for any serious attempt to increase teamwork across an organization. Clarity about where collaboration is actually needed, how it creates value in that specific context, and what would be lost if it did not improve. Without that clarity, the actions taken tend to be generic culture programmes, team-building exercises, values statements and the results tend to be correspondingly shallow. When you have that clarity, the research points to a set of levers that work. All of them, not one or two. People: teams with higher average levels of agreeableness tend to be more cooperative. Hiring and developing for this matters. Leaders who support change and model learning have the power to drive team culture more effectively than almost any structural intervention. Tasks: framing work as genuinely interdependent so that each person can see how their contribution connects to the whole makes cooperative behaviour more likely and attracts more cooperative people over time. Recognition: at the point where bonuses, promotions, and assignments are decided, the behaviours that are rewarded shape the culture more directly than any stated value. If collaboration is not being actively recognised at those moments, the culture will not sustain it. And one finding from the research on multi-team systems that I find particularly important is coordination among leaders across teams matters more than coordination within individual teams for overall system performance. In other words, get the leadership layer aligned on goals and values and then give the operational teams the autonomy to execute. Trying to coordinate directly at the operational level is actually counterproductive. The collaboration challenge is a leadership challenge. It starts, and is sustained, at the top. #Collaboration #TeamPerformance #LeadershipCulture #OrganisationalBehaviour #RandallPeterson

What a week. We are closing it with a new publication. Together with Lisa-Maria Marquardt and Prof. Dr. Carsten C. Schermuly, I am glad to share our new paper: “Coordination of collaboration in hybrid teams (CoCoh): Development and validation of the construct” The paper starts from a simple but important observation: hybrid work is often discussed in terms of where people work, but much less in terms of how collaboration is actually coordinated within teams. Yet this is exactly where many of the real challenges begin... We introduce and validate the CoCoh, a new way of understanding and assessing how collaboration in hybrid teams is coordinated. Rather than reducing hybrid work to office presence or remote work percentages, the concept captures how teams align across work location, time, collaboration modality, and individual preferences. This allows for a more differentiated view of what makes hybrid teamwork work well. For practice, this is especially relevant. The findings suggest that successful hybrid work is not simply a matter of setting attendance rules. It is also a matter of making coordination visible and manageable. The CoCoh can help organizations, leaders, and teams identify where collaboration is already working well and where more alignment is needed. In this way, the scale can support targeted team development and contribute to outcomes such as satisfaction, performance, and commitment. Thank you to Lisa-Maria Marquardt and Prof. Dr. Carsten C. Schermuly for the collaboration on this project. We did it! :) Here is the link to the manuscript: https://lnkd.in/d4XTUru5 #HybridWork #Teamwork #OrganizationalPsychology #FutureOfWork

Most teams say they collaborate. Very few actually do. Because collaboration isn’t just being friendly. It isn’t helping when asked. And it definitely isn’t sitting in the same meeting!! There’s a spectrum most teams move along… Co-existence → Polite alignment → Low challenge. Low integration People work alongside each other. They share updates. They protect their patch. Conflict is avoided because harmony feels safer than tension. It looks calm. It feels professional. But performance plateaus. Cooperation → Responsive help → Still operating in silos Support is given when requested. Information flows when needed. There’s goodwill, but accountability remains individual. It’s better. But it’s still transactional. Collaboration → Mutual challenge → Shared thinking. Shared responsibility Problems are owned together. Ideas are built on, not defended. People challenge each other’s thinking, respectfully. Success and failure are shared. This is where performance shifts. And it’s not a rigid ladder. Teams move between states depending on pressure, incentives and leadership behaviour. The science backs this up. Amy Edmondson’s research shows high-performing teams aren’t conflict-free, they’re challenge-capable. People speak up. They surface risk early. Patrick Lencioni identifies avoidance of conflict and lack of accountability as core dysfunctions. Without healthy challenge, accountability stays personal... not collective. Anita Woolley’s research on collective intelligence (MIT) found team performance correlates less with individual brilliance and more with social sensitivity, balanced participation and shared ownership of thinking. In short... Politeness without challenge doesn’t drive performance. Helpfulness isn’t collaboration. Harmony without tension creates mediocrity. Real collaboration introduces productive tension. It sounds like... “I see it differently, can we test that?” “What are we missing?” “If this fails, we all own it.” High-performing teams require both individual and collective accountability. When “my targets” become “our outcome.” When people care more about the result than about being right. When they focus on the shared interest, not defending personal positions. When leaders model challenge without ego. But here’s the reality. Collaboration doesn’t sustain itself on goodwill alone. It needs design. Research on sustained collaboration shows three levers matter... → Structure: create the links that force and support cross-silo work → Practices: build habits of inquiry, perspective-taking and shared problem-solving → Shared objectives: measure outcomes across silos, not just within them Otherwise collaboration becomes alignment theatre. So the real question is… Where does your team actually sit? Co-existing? Cooperating? Or genuinely collaborating? #Leadership #TeamClimate #Collaboration #Performance #PsychologicalSafety

Most teams say collaboration drives performance. Our data shows collaboration often destroys it when unmanaged. 1. Network Size Healthy networks sit around 60 to 150 weekly collaborators. The typical employee has 72. Yet 20% sit in isolation risk. Isolation feels like low visibility and zero support even when busy. 2. Core Working Group High performers work with 5 to 12 close collaborators a week. The typical employee has 11. But 35% interact with 15 or more. That is not collaboration. That is context switching at scale. 3. Cross Team Contact Some partner teams spend only 12 minutes together a week. 12 minutes. That is not partnership. That is friction disguised as alignment. 4. Distributed Overlap Teams need roughly 4 to 6 hours of overlap per day to move fast. Too little overlap slows decisions. Too much real time communication kills focus. Balance wins. 5. Meeting Load Employees sit in about 11 hours of meetings weekly. Healthy range is about 4.5 to 8. Beyond that, productivity falls and decision cycles stretch. High performing teams do not collaborate more. They collaborate correctly. Small trusted groups. Meaningful cross team touch points. Enough sync to align. Enough async to think. If you could change one collaboration rule inside your company tomorrow, what would it be?

The most collaborative engineer on the team got flagged as "not collaborative enough" in his review. The least collaborative one got praised for "exceptional teamwork." The company measured collaboration by visibility. Meeting attendance. Slack activity. Cross-functional "touchpoints" in a system that counted interactions without evaluating what they produced. David was in every meeting. Every standup, design review, cross-functional sync, optional brainstorm. His calendar was full. His Slack presence constant. He looked collaborative because he was always in the room. What he did in those rooms was different. Rarely contributed new thinking. His comments restated what others said. His meetings generated action items that landed on other people's plates. Present everywhere. Generative nowhere. He looked like the team's connective tissue. He was a bottleneck absorbing meeting time without unblocking anyone. James worked differently. Attended meetings where his input mattered. Skipped the rest. Between meetings, he did the collaboration that's hardest to measure, pull request reviews that taught junior engineers to think about edge cases. Documentation that prevented three teams from building the same integration separately. Forty minutes on a call with a product manager untangling requirements before they became a two-week misunderstanding. His calendar had gaps. The tracking system rated him as less collaborative. When I asked team members who actually helped them get unblocked, James came up in every conversation. David came up in none. The system measured presence and called it collaboration. Presence is the easiest thing to track and the worst signal of contribution. The engineer in every meeting might be essential. They might also be someone who hasn't declined a calendar invite in two years and contributes nothing a summary wouldn't cover. Real collaboration is async reviews that catch bugs before production. Documentation that saves three teams from duplicate work. The conversation that resolves a disagreement before it becomes a six-week detour. None of that gets counted by systems that track interactions. I worked with the manager to redesign their collaboration evaluation. Less "how many meetings attended" and more "who do teammates say unblocked them this quarter." The answers were consistently surprising. Fullest calendars were rarely the names others credited. The quietest contributors were doing the most valuable collaborative work. Just not in rooms where someone could count it. ♻️ Comment and repost if you've watched presence get rewarded while actual collaboration went unnoticed ➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for measuring what matters in engineering teams

We often say, “We need better teamwork.” What kind of teamwork does the work actually require? Studies on teams show that the kind of teamwork needed depends on how much people rely on each other. For example, scheduling shifts for staff only needs coordination. An assembly line requires people to cooperate in a shared process. Real collaboration happens when people bring their ideas together in activities like group brainstorming to create something new as a team. When leaders choose the right type of teamwork for the job, teams perform better. The first level is coordination. In this stage, people organize their own tasks so everything runs smoothly. Each person focuses on their part and tries to be efficient. The second level is cooperation. Each person handles a part of a shared process, and the outcome depends on how well these parts work together. The highest level is collaboration. At this stage, people work together to create the result. They share their viewpoints, ask questions, and combine their ideas to make something no one could do alone. The leadership question is: Are you designing the work around the actual level of interdependence your team needs? To help you assess this, consider these guiding questions: ➡️ Does this task require people to simply coordinate their efforts, or do they need to actively share information and ideas to succeed? ➡️ Could one person complete the work alone, or does it truly depend on input and decisions from multiple people? ➡️ How much does the outcome depend on people working together in real time versus working separately? Reflecting on these questions can help you choose the right teamwork approach for your team's needs. When we understand the differences among coordination, cooperation, and collaboration, we can establish better routines, communicate more clearly, and set the right expectations. This helps the team work together more effectively. To put these ideas into practice, you can take a few concrete steps: ❗ Review current workflows to see if the level of teamwork matches what the work actually requires. ❗ Clarify each team member's roles and responsibilities, so everyone knows how they contribute and where they need to rely on others. ❗ Adjust meeting formats and agendas to support the right kind of teamwork, such as using meetings for brainstorming when collaboration is needed or for status updates when coordination is enough. This framing is inspired by Britt Andreatta’s 2018 book Wired to Connect: The Brain Science of Teams and a New Model for Creating Collaboration and Inclusion, in which she distinguishes among coordination, cooperation, and collaboration.

Most leaders build teams of A-players. Then watch them work in silos. The people aren't the problem. The system is. Brilliant individuals don't automatically create brilliant teamwork. They compete instead of collaborate. Duplicate efforts instead of dividing them. Leaders assume smart people will figure it out. Smart people assume everyone else knows the plan. Nobody does. But when teams actually work together: ✓ Problems get solved faster. ✓ Innovation accelerates. ✓ Leaders stop firefighting. Here's how leaders design teamwork that actually works: 1/ Set explicit collaboration norms: Example: 24h Slack response max, use 'I need...' language. ↳ Eliminates post-meeting politics ↳ Saves hours on damage control 2/ Map decision authority clearly Example: RACI chart with decision authority and roles. ↳ Stops territorial battles before they start ↳ Accelerates execution speed 3/ Install predictable coordination touchpoints Example: Monday priorities alignment. Wednesday blockers check. Friday wins review. ↳ Makes collaboration automatic, not accidental ↳ Builds trust through consistent connection The gap between hiring collaborative people and collaborative systems? Most leaders hope for the first. Smart leaders design for the second. 📌 You can´t help your team change when you are running on empty. The CORE assessment measures your performance capacity across 4 dimensions and gives you your score in minutes. https://lnkd.in/dTah6_z2 🖋️Follow Maria Luisa Engels for more on high-performance leadership. 🖊️ Share this if someone needs to see it.

After studying hundreds of teams across sectors, I've developed this quick assessment to help you gauge your team's current state: 𝗥𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 (𝟭-𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝟱-𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵): 🔄 𝗣𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲: Team members understand and agree on the team's purpose and goals  📊 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀: The team consistently accomplishes what it sets out to achieve  🗣️ 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Conversations are balanced, productive, and include diverse perspectives  🤝 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: There are clear agreements about how decisions will be made  💪 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: Members buy into decisions without hidden reservations  ⚙️ 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Members share expertise in ways that enhance productivity  🔎 𝗥𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: The team regularly evaluates its process and productivity In my research, I've found that teams often score high on purpose but low on reflection—creating a dangerous hidden spot in their development. The most significant predictor? Teams that scored highest on "interpersonal communication" consistently outperformed all others on their ultimate outcomes. Want to take the full assessment with your team? It's available in The Art of Coaching Teams. What's the single most important indicator of team effectiveness in your experience? Let's discuss. P.S. Check out my on-demand webinar for leaders: 5 High-Impact Practices for Teams in Transition https://lnkd.in/gAZEj-ZC #TeamEffectiveness #LeadershipDevelopment #TeamAssessment #OrganizationalSuccess #TeamPerformance