What is Team Inventory?
It is excellent for starting a dialogue between team members, as well as between the leader and the team, which in itself can start a maturation process.
Later remeasurements allow monitoring the effectiveness of the development and determining further directions of progress.
The well-being of the team
- The 8 factors measure the well-being of the team at the individual, team and organizational level.
- The analysis of the individual level gives an idea of how the individual feels in the team, which gives an opportunity to manage individual creativity and turnover.
- The analysis of the team level the six factors examined and the two additional factors help to navigate through the many impulses and influences, and predicts what kind of development the team will respond to most easily in its current state.
- Examining the organizational level can help the manager and team members shape the positioning of the team within the organization.
Dialogue leading to development
The result, displayed with clean visuals
is excellent for starting a dialogue between team members about:
- what they are like as a team.
- what are their strengths,
- where are their development reserves.
The interpretation of the result also offers a great opportunity to address the relationship between the leader and the team. Our experience is that such a dialogue organically starts the process during which people working together move to a more mature level: they become a team. With the traceability provided by the Team Inventory, the curve of development can be well modeled and further development steps can be planned.
Factors
Self-integrity
The Self-integrity quantifies the degree to which team members can express their unique traits, resources, and temperaments freely, and how liberated they feel while working. This factor captures how fully individuals can be themselves and feel that they are allowed to bring their authentic selves to work.
Belonging
The Belonging Factor evaluates the team’s cohesion and ability to retain members. It examines whether members’ sense of belonging is compromised when they make mistakes, underperform, or challenge others—do they need to present a different version of themselves to maintain team approval? It answers how much value is placed on interpersonal relationships within the team.
Communication
The Communication Factor measures the openness of internal team communication. It provides insight into how free, fluid, open, and sincere the expression of opinions, questions, answers, requests, and topics is—essentially, how transparent the intentions, experiences, insights, and needs of team members are within the team.
Norms
The Norms Factor measures the strength and effectiveness of team norms. It examines whether the team has established its own rules, whether members consistently follow them, if interpretations are unified, and whether these rules actually support achieving team goals. This factor provides insight into how confidently team members navigate organizational processes and perform their tasks.
The Cause
The Cause Factor assesses how clear and inspiring the team's goal (not the organization's) is to its members, and to what extent it drives them toward achieving organizational objectives. This factor reflects the perceived importance and unifying power of the tasks the team performs. It evaluates how understandable, transparent, and motivating the common goal is for the team.
Structure
The Structure Factor assesses the team's procedural and structural levels. How transparent are the processes, roles, and decision-making mechanisms? How do roles build upon each other? It answers the question of how self-organizing the team is. It reflects the certainty (or uncertainty) within the team arising from role clarity, task distribution, process transparency, and the interdependence of team members.
The manager
The Leadership Factor measures trust in the leader and the leader's responsiveness to the team. It examines how the leader reacts to emerging situations within the team, whether they encourage team members to speak up, respond constructively to arising issues, recognize and leverage team members' skills, and foster honest dialogue within the team—thereby creating synergy between resources and personalities.
Operating environment
The Operating Environment Factor looks at the interaction between the team and the organization. It provides insight into how the team’s position and opportunities within the organization impact its well-being—how organizational culture, values, and rules influence the team, and whether the expectations set by the organization are realistic and achievable. It also reveals how team members perceive the availability of resources, their own empowerment, and room for influence, and how involved they are in changes that affect them.
A compass indeed
With this team diagnostic tool, the planned development processes can be made cost-effective.
It can be determined which intervention and which methodology is most amethodology is the most appropriate.
If the assessment of the situation is enriched by additional interviews, the emerging picture can be clarified and confirmed. In the absence of resources devoted to interviews and their analysis, it is suitable in itself for a snapshot of the team and for determining the first development steps.
For the interpretation of the results, we definitely recommend the help of a team coach or organizational developer who is experienced in using the tool in order to see the connections between the factors and to interpret the cross-effects.