If you've read my previous posts about my journey into TeamHive, you know a bit about the journey the Brave Insights team and I have been on over the years. But one question I still get asked quite a bit is: Why did we decide to build our own model and diagnostic? Why PLUS, and why TeamHive 360?
The short answer is that when we looked around for tools in our own team effectiveness work with senior leadership teams, we couldn't find anything that suited what we were actually seeing in the real world with high-performing teams.
There just weren't many team tools available. Most were not 360s with stakeholder feedback. And most were focussed on classifying team "styles" or "types", rather than collective functioning.
Team Development is about the collective
We had also seen adaptation of individual or leadership tools that focus heavily on individual characteristics and personality styles to a team setting. But what we had seen in our work with high-performing teams was that individual characteristics actually didn't matter all that much. If a team created a true collective way of working—a sort of shared, collective consciousness—they could navigate just about any individual personality style.
So, rather than measuring who was in the team, we wanted to focus intensely on what the team was doing. What are the actual group processes—the collective behavioural processes—occurring in the team? Because if you can identify the exact behaviours that enable effectiveness and drive performance, other teams can replicate them. It gives a group a very specific lens: what are the effective behaviours we need to engage in right now?
We wanted to look at things the team has actual control over. We knew from decades of leadership and culture work that if you focus team development purely at the individual level, you can waste an enormous amount of time for a 5% difference. We wanted to find the 20% effort that would have an 80% effect on performance.
That’s where PLUS came from. The PLUS stands for Purpose, Learning, Unity, and Shared leadership. We started our research with a hypothesis of five behavioural groupings. But when the data came back from our joint research project with the University of Newcastle, it told a slightly different story. Looking at the correlations—both as non-overlapping factors and their direct correlation to team effectiveness—the research clearly pointed to four dimensions. To be totally honest, I really struggled with that at first because I felt like our fifth category was super important. But I am so glad we landed where we did. Our ultimate goal was always to identify the few things a team can do that make the biggest difference. Having four clear dimensions surface from the empirical research was a blessing in disguise. And, we identified twelve sub-dimensions (three for each dimension), allowing even more granularity than the originally envisaged five categories.
Most tools just aggregate individual behaviours or personality styles up to a group level. They completely miss that collective consciousness level. We wanted TeamHive to remain ruthlessly focused on its intended purpose: testing collective behavioural processes, and having the evidence to back up that it does exactly what it says it will do.
Teams need feedback, too
The other major piece of the puzzle was the stakeholder feedback. True 360s for teams are almost non-existent! We knew we had to build an external perspective into TeamHive and make it a 360, because that is where the real "oh, crap" moments happen. It is incredibly common for a team to sit there and say, "We think we're super high on X, Y, and Z," only to realise their stakeholders don't experience them that way at all.
We worked with a team recently that is a perfect example of this. On their first diagnostic, their self-scores and their stakeholder scores were miles apart. But because the tool gave them that awareness, they could actually address the gap. When they re-tested, their own self-scores had lowered to better match the reality of their stakeholders' experience. They had completely recalibrated. Now that they have a shared reality, I would hazard a guess that by their third test, we will see genuine, tangible improvements.
We didn't set out to build a tech product just for the sake of it. We built TeamHive 360 and the PLUS framework because we needed a way to give teams the actual data and evidence-based roadmap they needed to co-develop and accelerate. It’s been a massive learning curve, but seeing teams finally get a clear picture of their collective behaviours makes the whole journey worth it.
