What gets measured gets improved, and when you measure the Five Dysfunctions of your Team through the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment, you have the ability to improve your Team’s performance.
Here you are. You read the book, and you took the Team Assessment. These are significant first steps on a journey that will transform your organization.
Now, you are seeking to extract meaningful insights from the Team Assessment. Hope is not a strategy - hopefully your Team completed the Assessment and revealed the dysfunction on your Team. Please drop me a line if it did not reveal any dysfunction because that would be a first in my decades of experience.
Every team has something to work on - to reduce the bad friction and increase the good. It is completely normal for your team to have some level of dysfunction. The good news is that this is fixable.
Most importantly is your intention. If you and your team have read the book and completed the Team Assessment, doing nothing is not an option. Your team is watching. Now is the perfect time to take two steps forward.
Let us take a look at what you can gain from the Team Assessment, how to interpret your results, and how to take action.
What can you gain from the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment?
The goal of any assessment should be to gain objective insights. However, it is up to you to create meaning from those insights. If your goal is to take the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment and improve your team’s performance, then you must consider three key outcomes from the Assessment: awareness, alignment, and transformation.
Awareness
One of the most valuable takeaways from the Assessment is self and interpersonal awareness. The Assessment can be used to discern precisely where your team can improve. This awareness serves as the foundation for the action you will take.
Alignment
Your Team derives the greatest value from the Team Assessment when you are committed to a significant result. The results from the Team Assessment can help you improve team focus and get on a better path. You must identify where you want to be, or your north star, and commit to getting there together as an aligned unit. Once your team is in alignment, you can take steps to get there.
Transformation
Finally, when you know what to look for, you can use the Team Assessment results to bridge the gap between your vision and your Team’s potential or a process of transformation. With your goals identified, you can take the results and begin to lay out strategic planning with milestones for 30 days, 90 days, a year, and more.
How do you interpret the results of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment?
How you interpret the results depends on your objective.
On the most basic level, the Team Assessment literally asks you and your team what you believe should be done to reduce and stop dysfunction. Once your team completes the Team Assessment, you will have objective data in the form of feedback from Team members. The Team Assessment is very, very clear and prescriptive about what to do.
The seeming clarity of the interpretation of the Team Assessment results can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the results seem unambiguous. On the other hand, comprehensibility may prevent you from realizing that your own bias and lack of experience with implementation will inhibit you from positive, permanent, and impactful change. And as mentioned previously, doing nothing is not an option. Your team expects real action.
How can you take action on your Team Assessment insights to generate real results?
If your goal is real transformation and change, then bias and experience are problematic. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these challenges.
The most effective way to bring objectivity, understanding, and truth to your Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment results is through a third-party, experienced practitioner.
Self-facilitation is nearly impossible and can interfere with the results you are seeking to achieve. You need an unbiased, outside expert who can come in objectively, congratulate you on being normal in your team dysfunction, and then help you and your Team understand each other and themselves.
An experienced practitioner will evaluate your results in tandem with other assessments that measure “personality” like the DISC or TriMetrix® HD Assessment to gain the complete picture of your team dynamic and individual team members. Powerful assessments like the TriMetrix® HD help make it safe to ask the hard questions and to challenge one another to break through each dysfunction and invite team members to honor the greatness in one another.
Ideally, an experienced practitioner will follow the ideal process of Assess, Transform, and Accelerate to maximize your Team’s experience and ultimately, performance. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment is one tool used to identify the existing state during the Assess phase. From there, your practitioner will develop a plan to transform your team’s performance to the ideal state or vision.
Good leaders will review their Team Assessment results in isolation. Great leaders will slow down to speed upon by investing in their team and their future through a Five Dysfunctions of a Team Workshop to make the most of the insights and drive the Team toward excellence.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment is just the first step on the road to improving their standard of organizational performance. Learn more about our Assess process and download a free preview of a Five Dysfunctions of a Team Assessment Report (TAR) here.
Schedule a brief dialogue to get started unleashing your team's potential.
