Are You Measuring Team Building Ability?

Groups and teams are basic structures for getting work completed, and organizations are made up of dozens to thousands of teams. Most organizations see teamwork and collaboration as critical to success, and they are frequently listed as key corporate values. Yet companies are completely in the dark when it comes to determining who can and cannot build teams. This is a problem given the ubiquitousness of teams and the desire for effective teamwork.

Defining Leadership. LinkedIn might be one way to understand what people are thinking about leadership, as posts about the most important leader attributes, characteristics, or behaviors appear in daily feeds. These posts typically share three common characteristics:

1.???? Most lists of attributes are recipes for being well-liked. Being seen as kind, considerate, empathetic, and authentic is all well and good, but unless someone is competing to be the next Class President there is more to leadership than just being popular.

2.???? Leadership is a team sport, and effective leaders know how to assemble the right people and get them working towards the accomplishment of common goals. Most posts fail to mention anything about building teams.

3.???? Effective leaders focus on winning and achieving superior results. Is achieving results listed as an important leader attribute? If not, then organizations run the risk of promoting those who are well-liked over those who get things done.

We define effective leadership as the ability: (a) select, develop, and engage staff; (b) build teams; and (c) achieve sustained superior results. Leaders need to demonstrate all three of these characteristics to be effective; those who are less impactful believe being well-liked is more important than being effective and/or struggle with one or more of these components.

Assessing Leadership. Most organizations use some version of the following to assess leaders:

1.???? Resume reviews

2.???? Structured interviews

3.???? Personality and work values inventories

4.???? Cognitive ability tests

5.???? 360-degree feedback (for internal candidates)

6.???? Business simulations

7.???? Performance reviews

Many of the techniques used to determine who should be selected, promoted, or seen as high potentials were in use back in the 1980s. Artificial intelligence may change this, but for now organizations are using some version of these techniques to assess leaders. The good news is they do help organizations make better decisions on who should get hired or promoted. Their predictive power seems to be in the R = .40-.60 range, which means that firms will have a decent idea on who will or will not be effective. Yet these predictions are far from perfect, as somewhere between 64-84 percent in the variability in leader performance remains unexplained using traditional assessment techniques. Whether this unexplained variance is due to statistical or measurement artifacts or something missing from leadership assessment batteries has yet to be determined, but we believe some of it is due to the latter.

?Measuring Team Building Ability. Although a critical aspect of leadership effectiveness is the ability to build teams, none of the assessment techniques listed above measure this characteristic. Resume reviews, structured interviews, personality measures, or business simulations provide little insight into whether candidates can build teams, as they were designed to measure individual rather than team-level phenomena. For example, well-designed personality or 360-degree feedback assessments can provide insights into candidates’ resiliency, work ethic, ambition, strategic thinking, or customer orientation but say little on whether the teams they lead have a clear purpose and measurable goals, team member roles and rules are well-defined, teams are optimally sized and structured, meetings are well run, everyone is committed to team success, trust and psychological safety have been established, and teams are achieving their goals and improving over time. The best way to gather this information is to have direct and indirect reports rate team dynamics and performance, yet they are rarely asked.

?There is a relatively easy way to fill this gap. The Team Assessment Survey (TAS) has been completed by 3,500 global teams and provides benchmarking feedback on team dynamics and performance as well as leaders’ team building ability. We believe adding TASs to leadership assessment batteries provides decision makers with important information about who can and can’t build teams, and this should be part of the calculus when making succession planning or high-potential selection decisions. This information may also improve the predictive power of leadership assessment batteries and account for additional variability in leadership effectiveness.?

?Figure 1 shows the results for a group of high potential candidates in a financial services firm and is an example of the benchmarking feedback from a TAS. The TAS was built to measure the eight components of the Rocket Model, and listed are the percentile scores for each of the components as well as an overall score (TQ, or Team Effectiveness Quotient). Norm groups are used to calculate percentile scores and, in this case, scores were compared against teams from across the globe. Percentile scores range from 0 to 100, with lower scores being worse than, scores around 50 being on par with, and higher scores being better than other teams in the norm group. TQ scores indicate the overall health or performance of a team as well as a leader’s team building ability.

As seen in Figure 1, some leaders have good team building skills (e.g., TQ scores > 60) some are on par (e.g., TQ scores around 50), and many are not good at building teams (e.g., TQ scores < 40). These results are not atypical for many organizations. Because organizations do not assess team building ability, they have no idea which leaders can and cannot build teams. It’s only when they measure team building ability that they discover that their best and brightest may not be all they thought they’d be. ?

Organizations may not be currently measuring team building ability, but every one of their leaders has a TQ score. Unlike personality, mental abilities, or work values, team building ability is amenable to change and can improve over time. But for that to happen, organizations need to systematically measure team building ability and equip leaders with the techniques and tools needed to build high performing teams.?

Is the ability to build teams an important characteristic for your leaders? If so, then what are you doing to assess and develop team building ability??

?

Gordon Curphy is an Industrial & Organizational psychologist specializing in C-suite succession planning, executive coaching, top team facilitation, scaling effective teamwork, and leadership development. He has developed several successful commercially published leadership and team assessments; coached 200 C-suite executives; worked with over 600 top teams; collected data on 3,500 teams, trained 20,000 leaders; and sold over 100,000 books, chapters, and articles on leadership and teams. You can find more about Gordon’s leadership books and consulting services at: www.curphyleadershipsolutions.com and www.rocketmodelforteams.com .

?