When I wrote a short LinkedIn post about a recent High‑Performing Teams workshop with leaders from publicly-listed private education provider NextEd Group, I talked about learning together, great facilitation partners (shout out again to Natalie Murray and Vicki Millen), and how energising it was to see TeamHive research come to life in the room.

What I didn’t talk about much was the thing that quietly held the whole program together: A TeamHive 360 diagnostic, run across a large number of teams at the same time.

The program itself was designed and facilitated by Brave Insights, with TeamHive 360 used as the common diagnostic platform across the participating teams. This piece is about the scaffolding underneath the program – and what it makes possible when you’re working with many teams at once.

What We Did with NextEd

NextEd brought together around 40 leaders from across the organisation for a High‑Performing Teams workshop. Different teams, different roles, shared ambition: lift team effectiveness in a real, evidence-based way – not through slogans.

Ahead of the session, teams and key stakeholders completed the TeamHive 360. So when leaders walked into the room, they weren’t starting from a blank page. They already had:

• A snapshot of how their own team was functioning

• A view of how that lined up with what we’d expect from effective teams

From a Brave Insights perspective, that meant we could design the workshop around real team data, not generic assumptions. From a NextEd perspective, it meant leaders weren’t just hearing concepts; they were testing those concepts against their own context.

For a larger organisation, that’s the real value: you’re not guessing where to focus your energy, and you’re not forced into “one-size-fits-all” just to keep things manageable. You’re working from a shared diagnostic, applied consistently, but interpreted locally.

Why a 360 across many teams changes the conversation

Running TeamHive 360 with a single team is useful. Running it across a whole cohort of teams shifts the type of conversation you can have.

At scale, you can:

• Move beyond anecdotes. Instead of “we think communication is a problem”, you can see specific patterns in how teams are actually operating.

• See variation. Some teams are already strong on certain dimensions; others are wrestling with quite different issues.

• Target support. Rather than rolling out the same generic program to 20 or 40 teams, you can tailor follow‑up based on what the data shows.

In the room with NextEd leaders, this showed up in simple but important ways. We didn’t spend half the workshop debating whether there was a problem or not. The data had already done that work. Leaders could move more quickly to, “Given this is our profile, what are the implications for my team?”

That’s what I mean when I say TeamHive 360 speeds up diagnosis. The product doesn’t “fix” teams. It just helps Brave Insights (and other partners) get to the right conversations faster.

The PLUS model: Understanding the dynamics of a team

Underneath the 360 is the TeamHive PLUS model – four core drivers of team effectiveness:

• Purpose – why this team exists and how clearly that’s understood

• Learning – how the team learns, adapts, and improves over time

• Unity – how the team works together, especially under pressure

• Shared Leadership – how responsibility and initiative are distributed across the team, not held by one person

For a larger organisation, this sort of model matters more than people often realise.

It gives you a shared language leaders can use across business units, and a consistent way to look at team effectiveness without reducing it to “engagement” or “happiness”. It also lets you compare patterns across teams without turning it into a public ranking exercise.

Importantly, TeamHive is set up so that data are aggregated at the team and stakeholder level only – no individual scores, no manager ratings, no “gotcha” metrics. That keeps the focus where it belongs: on how the team is operating as a system.

Why “Learning” deserves extra attention

In the validation work we did with the University of Newcastle, one finding stood out:

The Learning dimension emerged as the strongest predictor of overall team effectiveness.

In plain terms: teams that learn well together perform better. They’re more likely to hit their outcomes and handle change without coming apart at the seams.

In TeamHive, “Learning” isn’t about whether people like courses. It’s about how the team:

• Shares and makes sense of information

• Reflects on what’s working and what isn’t

• Supports each other to try new things, improve, and occasionally fail without being punished for it

Those ideas are broken down into three sub‑dimensions in the 360, so leaders can see more precisely where things are working and where they’re not. For example, a team might be good at post‑mortems but poor at actually changing day‑to‑day habits. Another might be generous with informal help, but weak on building a shared understanding of how work should flow.

In the NextEd program, we couldn’t do a deep dive on every single team one by one – that’s not realistic in a large group setting. What we could do, and did, was give each leader time to:

• Work with their own team’s Learning profile

• Compare notes with peers who were seeing different patterns in their teams

• Draw out what those differences meant in practice back in their part of the organisation

The result wasn’t a theoretical conversation about “learning cultures”. It was a grounded discussion about the very real learning behaviours that were – or weren’t – present in their own teams. And because Learning is so strongly linked with overall effectiveness, time spent there was time well spent.

What this looks like in a large organisation

When a larger organisation runs TeamHive 360 across many teams at once, a few practical things become possible:

• Leaders walk into development programs with their own data, not a generic case study.

• The organisation can see cross‑team patterns – where things are consistently strong and where they’re fragile.

• Follow‑up support can be more surgical. Some teams might need help with learning behaviours, others with unity, others with clarifying purpose and roles.

In NextEd’s case, the High‑Performing Teams workshop wasn’t an abstract conversation about what “good” teams do. Leaders were actively working with real information from their own teams, through the PLUS lens. Some conversations were affirming; some were uncomfortable. All of them were more grounded than if we’d tried to do this purely from opinion.