Team self assessment template

When they feel they are finished, ask the group if anyone feels strongly about changing the clusters. If they do, invite them up to make the changes. Repeat this until nobody objects to the clustering. It may take a few rounds, but eventually you will arrive at a selection of statements that nobody strongly disagrees with. This is a consent-based group decision. The aim of this step is to see what statements the group feels strongly about. You're going to do that through dot voting.

Give each team member a sheet of small coloured sticky dots. They should all be the same colour, so you can't tell who voted for which statement. Ask the team members to look at the clustered statements. They should stick a dot on the statements that they thing are important to this team. The things they think should be addressed, changed, or celebrated.

There is no limit to the amount of dots they can use. The spread, density, and frequency of the dots will give you an immediate sense of what the team thinks is important. The aim of this final step is to digitise the insights from the workshop and figure out the next steps! They should take a picture s on their phone, and transfer the information onto a collaborative, editable document. Something like a Google Document.

Now is the time for a group discussion. The team should decide what to do with this information. Here are a few suggestions:.

Facilitator notes: Editability and collaboration is key to this document being useful. The information and insights belong to the team. It is now the team's responsibility to make change. Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations. Source: Hyper Island toolbox.

Hyper Island designs learning experiences that challenge companies and individuals to grow and stay competitive in an increasingly digitized world. Companies allow you to self-assess before they formally evaluate you — by writing your self-evaluation, therefore, you have the opportunity to enumerate your successes and demonstrate that you recognize your job requirements.

An accurate self-evaluation shows that your organization should reward you according to your achievements in the many facets of your job. Next to receiving a positive annual review from your employer, nothing is more important to your success and advancement than your self-evaluation. A self-evaluation template is the perfect opportunity to remind them.

But, what is the best approach to enumerating your own accomplishments? Regardless of if your review is glowing or illustrates that you need additional training to succeed in your role, a self-evaluation is the perfect vehicle for you to reflect on your accomplishments and identify areas for growth. Once you have downloaded one of the free self-evaluation templates in this article, fill in the following applicable self-assessment fields:.

Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

Try Smartsheet for free, today. Get a Free Smartsheet Demo. In This Article. Employee Self-Evaluation Template. Keep your employees connected, informed, and engaged with Smartsheet. Simple Performance Review Template. Employee Self-Assessment Template. Staff Skill Self-Assessment Template. Printable Self-Evaluation Template. Annual Manager Self-Evaluation Template. Risk-Management Self-Assessment Template. This indicates their leadership style.

Teams need people who complement each other, but they must coordinate their work. Some aspects of effective collaboration, such as communication, tend to deepen naturally with time. Others, such as group cohesion, have to be actively worked on.

The members of a successful team are all oriented toward achieving the same purpose, and they have the same idea for how to get there. If goals diverge further, tensions or even conflict may appear, costing the team more time and money.

Teams who fall victim to groupthink have little trouble developing consensuses, but this is only because they actively refuse to consider anything beyond a small subset of ideas and do not want to engage critically with unfamiliar or dissenting alternatives.

There are, however, team learning and negotiation techniques that can reduce the effects of groupthink. One of these is concept attainment, a teaching technique that can be used with groups of middle-school age and older.

Concept attainment promotes understanding of concepts via observation, rather than using concrete definitions. For example, a concept-attainment-style lesson on different schools of art might show students several different art works and encourage them to form definitions for each school based on common characteristics.

The same can be done with groups of adult learners. The technique relies on the group building a consensus to define concepts, but it also reduces groupthink by removing the boundaries created when concepts are defined outright. This tends to make alternative definitions seem somehow wrong.

Another technique for building consensus while minimizing groupthink is the Delphi method. This technique was developed during the Cold War to project how technology might change warfare. But it can be used to develop consensus around any continuous variable.

To begin the exercise, each member anonymously estimates a given variable. The group then reviews the anonymous estimates, and sets a baseline for the next round of estimates; the process is repeated until a consensus is reached. The fact that estimates are made anonymously and concurrently prevents groupthink, as each participant is not aware of the limits that other participants impose on their own estimates. Earlier, we discussed how team assessments are based on theories of what makes teams work.

This is why the Five Dysfunctions are represented as levels on a pyramid, with the absence of trust represented as the foundation of the pyramid. A lack of trust, says Lencioni, is the root of all dysfunctional behavior. But since trust is an inherently personal relationship, how does one improve it throughout a team? This works especially well when a team is still young, but it can work with people who already know each other, too.

Try having team members complete a personality instrument such as the MBTI or Everything DiSC Workplace, and then share their results with the team, with insight into how they think their personality type and natural traits influence their behavior. Open-ended questions that encourage people to talk about themselves are the best choice here.

For more on team-building questions, check out our comprehensive resource that includes example questions to try with your team. And lastly, make sure your team members see each other face to face often. This can happen for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, team members may not be confident enough to challenge senior figures within the team, or they may keep clear of conflict out of desire to be accepted by everyone in the team. At other times, the avoidance of conflict at a team level may be a function of a general reluctance to deal with conflict among a majority of team members.

If results are shared with the team, these tools have the added benefit of enhancing mutual understanding of conflict styles, which can make things a little easier for everybody.

To address a lack of productive conflict at the team level, set clear expectations for how team members are supposed to interact with one another: fairly, equitably, critically, and with an open ear. You may also want to set rules for engagement; some teams, for example, allot people uninterrupted time to speak during discussion sessions. These things can help productive conflict emerge during meetings, which can otherwise be intimidating for those reluctant to engage in conflict.

If your team displays a general reluctance to deal with conflict, talk to the team leader about having someone to ask the tough questions and thrash out the decisions that team members are reluctant to make. This results in a lack of commitment to team decisions and team goals, which can cripple a team. This kind of commitment problem is best treated by addressing the underlying causes: lack of trust and reluctance to engage in conflict.

Lack of commitment can spring from other causes besides a lack of trust and productive conflict. Sometimes teams struggle to set goals for themselves, or the goals they set are unclear. When decisions are made in a meeting, review them at the end of the meeting, and make sure the communication is cascaded. Lencioni explains the cascading communication tool as a way of having leaders communicate key messages to their staff, who do the same with their staffs and so on.

Sometimes, a team makes decisions based on the views of a small majority. When this happens, you need to ensure that the whole team commits themselves to the decision — but how?

But since a compromise does need to be reached, have the team set up a contingency plan that allows them to revisit the decision. Articulating the worst-case scenario might also be a viable tactic here. Like a lack of commitment, the absence of accountability is a result of preceding dysfunctions. That said, there are some things a team leader or supervisor can do to ensure the team practices accountability. Then, publish a set of behavioral standards which the team is expected to follow.

Get each team meeting started with a lightning round , where team members quickly report on their progress since the last meeting. But you can also cultivate this directly. Also, make sure that a team's thematic goal is in clear alignment with organizational goals. You can also incentivize team performance by having compensation programs reward team-based achievements.

Lastly, remember that in most organizations, people shoulder a number of responsibilities besides their membership in a team. A general rule of thumb is to have people prioritize their responsibilities to the teams they lead over the teams they participate on. If lack of trust leads to fear of conflict and a variety of other problems, it follows that building trust would reduce fear of conflict and prevent the succeeding dysfunctions: lack of commitment, accountability, and poor results.

If the five dysfunctions are the root causes of problems with teams, the five behaviors help you avoid those problems. The five behaviors are simply the reverse of the dysfunctions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Just like the dysfunctions, each positive behavior breeds the next. By building trust, you lay the foundation for an effective team. There are several things to keep in mind when selecting an assessment for your team and your situation. No single assessment works for all situations or teams.

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Cost, as always, is a consideration. But the most effective and sophisticated tools cost more and are usually part of a package that involves a consultant to oversee the assessment, explain the results and draft action plans. These engagements typically run into thousands of dollars. Before selecting the assessment tool, isolate what you want to learn about your team. Are you looking to gauge the quality of team processes, such as communication or delegation?

Always aim to address the biggest problems first. In fact, shoot your team an email, or have them answer a few questions with a simple online survey to get their input on the type of assessment needed. Download Assessment Form Here. If the assessment is to be followed by a discussion, workshop, or group facilitation, run the assessment before you start working with the group, so you have the results to shape the rest of your program.

Make sure all team members participate. If you're facilitating the session, make sure you set a good example. Keep in mind that even within each broad assessment category, different assessments are designed for different purposes.

Better still, bring in a professional to run the assessment. Lastly, remember that team assessments are simply an evaluation tool that cannot necessarily override the nuance and subjectivity involved in teamwork.

Trust your team. Personality and behavioral style assessments try to help individuals understand their behavior as a function of naturally emerging personality or style traits. Understanding your own behavior helps put your strengths into perspective, while allowing you to understand how your coworkers perceive you. Your coworkers do the same, which creates a greater, team-wide understanding of why people behave the way they do. Personality and behavioral style assessments are designed to be taken by everyone in a team or workplace as a way of understanding how coworkers can work together most effectively and minimize frustration.

These tools are not suited to solving specific problems, but they provide a common language for people to understand workplace behaviors. Tips: Assessments of this type often produce lengthy personality reports - allow your team some time to digest them before debriefing.

When working with teams, raise the question of behavior style representation in your team. Does your team have a single dominant style? What does that mean for their work? Personality and behavioral style assessments can be tailored to highly specific skill assessments. Leadership assessments usually have two main aims: helping leaders understand the behaviors they exhibit their leadership style , and helping leaders understand how they are seen by the people around them.

These assessments usually look at such things as communication, creativity, decision making, planning, goal setting, progress monitoring, team communication, coaching, and operational knowledge. Some are degree assessments, gathering data from people at all levels of the organization who interact with the leader to create a holistic picture.

Leadership assessments are designed to be used with people who have occupied leadership positions for long enough to have settled into a reasonably consistent leadership style.

Gather feedback discreetly and as always, discuss the results privately. Team assessments are based on diverse approaches. Think about your reason for conducting the assessment. Are you trying to help new team members understand each other better? Is your team running into communication problems? Choose a tool that focuses on the subtleties underlying this problem. Select an assessment that examines performance factors. Tips: Behavior style assessments and leadership assessments can also be viewed and used as team-building assessments.

The former increases interpersonal understanding, which improves collaboration. The latter improves leadership, which can strengthen team efforts. While assessments that focus on leadership and behavior styles are helpful for all teams, new teams should prioritize trust, which according to Patrick Lencioni, is the foundation of all good teamwork.

Assessments may focus either on the trustworthiness of individual team members or shared trust within a team. Since trust is a highly abstract concept, different assessments measure it in unique ways. Regardless of which trust assessment you choose, however, some determinants of trust appear to be almost universal — comfort with intimacy, reliability, integrity, and loyalty. And the end goal of all trust assessments is the same: helping team members build better relationships.

While levels of trust may generally be lower among new teams, their newness also makes them more receptive to trust development exercises, which can double as team bonding exercises. Tips: Trust-building exercises can be difficult to conduct because many determinants of trust are really moral characteristics. By revealing how people think, act, and behave — usually in terms of comparing themselves to others — these exercises build mutual understanding. This fosters empathy and better communication.

The MBTI is a personality inventory that classifies people into one of 16 personality types according to how they perform on four continuums. Tips: Exercises to build understanding can be fun. Find out what activities team-building experts recommend. First, who or what is the assessment supposed to evaluate? Are you interested in the nature of a leader, an individual team member, or a team as a whole? Or are you conducting the assessment to improve general performance and reduce the probability of problems in the future?

Answering these questions will help you to determine whether you need an assessment for individuals, teams, or leaders, and whether you need an assessment that targets a specific area of concern or one that aids overall development.

The Leadership Gap Indicator is designed to help organizations understand where and how leadership training efforts are best directed. But organizations may define good leadership in different ways. Leadership might entail one set of competencies in one organization or industry, and a completely different set in another. It works by surveying employees to gauge their perceptions of the climate.

However, some organizations are not necessarily supposed to be conducive to creativity and innovation. Another low-cost, self-led option is Gallup StrengthsFinder test.

If you want to see how far you can get with DIY assessments, start simple. Have a few managers assess team members privately and then compare results.

Personality assessments e. MBTI , strengths assessments e. Strengthsfinder , specialized performance assessments, DIY performance assessments. When working with individuals in cross-functional teams, use easy-to-understand assessments that provide a common language to help teammates understand each other. Pick one that comes close and adapt it.

Simple personality and strengths assessments e. Trust Quotient, Speed of Trust , tools for building understanding e. For new teams, stick with simple, easy-to-understand assessments like the MBTI, which some team members will already be familiar with.

Instead, pick tools that focus on building these vital foundations. General performance assessments e. Teams that have been working together for a while should have fairly robust levels of trust and understanding, and members will already know each other quite well, too. Assessments that focus on measuring aspects of effectiveness and productivity are a good choice. You may want to pick an assessment designed for use with specific team types. If you think your team has a trust problem, use a team trust assessment and trust-building exercises to identify and rectify it as soon as you can.

Tools for building understanding e. MBTI , tools for building trust e. Are your team members not speaking the same language?