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If you’ve ever emerged from a team building day constructing rafts or bridges and wondered what difference it really made, you’re not alone. So often, activities that claim to be team building do nothing of the sort.

They might offer a temporary diversion from day-to-day work priorities, but they don’t enable a step change in team cohesion and performance. The simple reason being that they don’t address what’s causing the team to be sub-optimal in the first place.

But before we get into the solution, how do you know your team is not already performing to its full potential?

Signs of a sub-optimal team

Very often teams are ‘fine’. They can deliver under pressure, but there is a lack of trust and shared ownership of the challenges the organisation faces. Divisional leads keep to their own ‘turf’ and cross-functional collaboration remains sporadic at best.

It often falls to the chief people officer to be the voice of truth here; to speak up and challenge the team that ‘fine’ is not good enough. High performing teams are transformative for organisations – especially high-performing senior leadership teams. There is a huge, missed opportunity in letting a team continue as ‘fine’.

Diagnosing your team’s needs

The solution – and the route to high performance – is in first understanding exactly where your team is at, developmentally.

At Complete, we do this through a Team Development Index (TDI) assessment. There’s no guesswork, it’s a clear, benchmarked and validated way to know where you team is at now, and where it has the potential to go.

The TDI assesses a team against six key factors:

• Activism – A laser focus on priorities, taking responsibility for the outcomes, and debating prioritisation criteria.
• Strategic Power – The ability to create a compelling, distinctive, achievable, and sustainable vision and strategy.
• Relationship Quality – The strength of relationship bonds, psychological safety, willingness to support and develop each other.
• Entropy – The ability to handle differences of opinion constructively.
• Coherence – The ability to align quickly and effectively after robust debate.
• Personal Engagement – A personal commitment to the success of the team and its members, not just one’s own silo.

Where your team sits in these six areas will influence its overall team level. There are nine levels of team development. Starting with what is essentially ‘pre-team’ – a group of individuals – up to ‘united fellowships’. However, you don’t need to wait until level nine to realise many benefits of high-performance. Moving up to a level five or six team can be a huge achievement and there’s a massive difference between the experience and outputs of a level two team, compared to a level five team.

Benchmark the team journey

The TDI sits within the Complete Team Journey. It’s a developmental assessment that gives teams the analysis and insight to start a journey to higher performance.

Crucially, it enables a benchmark – not only one that shows the team’s progress (when repeated months later) but also one that enables the team to see where they sit against other teams in other industries.

It’s incredibly useful evidence for the HR department to use when trying to convince a sceptical senior leadership team that a team could be performing better.

Many organisations have already used the TDI to kick-start their own team journeys and are seeing the benefits as a result. You can explore the case studies on our website:

Tesco’s story of team transformation

YBS unlocks new levels of team capability

To request more information on the Team Development Index and whether it might help your senior leadership team, contact us.