Most teams are a $1+ million-a-year investment. Add on-costs and overheads, and the real figure is even higher. Then add the opportunity costs of what else the team could be doing, which can be staggeringly high in high growth or capital constrained businesses.
The team is put together and funded and tasked under the assumption they will be greater than the sum of their parts.
In my career as a leader in weather, data and renewables industries, I tried to measure many things, physical and human, and we tried to improve it. I tried to improve teams, but always on vibes rather than measurements.
We measure everything important, except teams
Look at what a typical organisation measures. Individuals get performance reviews. Leaders get 360s and psychometrics. The organisation gets an engagement survey regularly. Output gets measured constantly: revenue, delivery dates, KPIs.
The team sits between all of them. It's the unit doing most of the work, and it usually gets a team day, perhaps once a year, and the hope that it helped. We've written about how half the leadership in organisations usually isn't measured. The team is the larger blind spot. Some executive teams receive team coaching, often done on vibes without measurement, and the rest of the teams get nothing.
Each of those measures tells you something real. None tells you how the team works. An engagement survey describes how people feel about the organisation. A 360 describes one person. Output is a lagging indicator: it tells you something went wrong, months after it started. And output cannot tell you what higher level of performance may be easily within reach via the proven pathway of team effectiveness.
What it looks like before it shows in the numbers
Teams rarely fail loudly. They drift, and the cost sits quietly inside the salary bill. The early signs are familiar to anyone who has been in a team that wasn't working:
Everyone is busy, and nobody is sure they're busy on the same things. That's usually a Purpose problem.
The same three names turn up in every escalation, because decisions only move when they're in the room. Leadership isn't shared.
Nobody disagrees in meetings. It looks like alignment. More often people have stopped saying what they think, and that unseen voice has a cost.
Mistakes get fixed quietly instead of talked about, so the team makes them again. It isn't learning together.
Every one of these costs money: rework, slow decisions, good people leaving. None of them appears on a dashboard until long after it started.
Teams can be measured
When I first looked over Kimberly's shoulder at the work that became TeamHive, this is what struck me. There were thousands of consultants and dozens of survey providers, and almost all of them measured leaders, culture or engagement. Very few measured the team as the unit of performance, and fewer still measured team collective functioning and measured using stakeholders as well as team members.
Team dynamics can be measured, and they matter. A large body of research shows teamwork predicts performance. Google spent two years trying to prove that the right mix of people explained its best teams, and found that how the team worked mattered more. In our validation work with the University of Newcastle, the four factors of the PLUS model – Purpose, Learning, Unity and Shared Leadership – explained most of the variance in team effectiveness.
The team can be measured. Most organisations just don't have a tool pointed at it.
What measuring it would change
Three things.
A baseline. You would know which teams are working well and which are drifting, before the results tell you.
A focus. Instead of a generic team day, the team works on the one or two things its own data points to.
A second measure. Run it again after the work, and you can see what moved.
The third matters most to me, because it's the part every data system I've built depended on. Team development works: research on controlled teamwork interventions finds real gains in both teamwork and team performance, and the format makes the difference. But not every team day is team development, and with no measure before or after, you can't tell whether yours was.
If you fund team days, measure before and after
You don't need to measure every team at once. Start with the team that costs the most, or the one you're least sure about. Measure before the team day and use the results to set its agenda. Then measure again a few months later.
That's what the TeamHive 360 is built for. Team members and stakeholders each answer a 20-minute survey, and the team sees where it agrees with the people it serves and where it doesn't. A Pulse re-measure shows what changed.
And if you'd like a first look at one team you know, there's a free version. It takes about ten minutes.
