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    Interactive assessment

    Five Team Performance Traps

    Diagnose your team's health across five critical barriers to team effectiveness, and identify the specific interventions that will have the most impact.

    Research into team effectiveness consistently identifies five interrelated barriers that hold teams back: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Each builds on the one beneath it. This assessment measures team health across all five dimensions, giving your team a clear picture of where you are strong and where you most need to invest.

    Questions or items
    15 questions or items
    Completion time
    Around 8 minutes
    Dimensions
    Team Trust, Constructive Conflict, Shared Commitment, Peer Accountability, Collective Results
    What you receive
    Personalised results with configured interpretation bands, section scores and development guidance.

    What it covers

    • Team Trust
    • Constructive Conflict
    • Shared Commitment
    • Peer Accountability
    • Collective Results

    Rate each statement from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). Answer based on how your team actually operates, not how you would like it to. For the most useful results, have the whole team complete this and compare scores.

    Results: Personalised results with configured interpretation bands, section scores and development guidance.

    How this interactive diagnostic works

    This page provides the documented overview before the interactive experience is loaded. It lets you read the purpose, the material covered and the way the result is presented without entering answers or sending a request. When you choose to continue, the interactive version uses the same material shown here. It records your selections while you work and only calculates its result when its required items are complete.

    Analytics consent is required before the interactive experience is mounted. Declining consent does not start the diagnostic or its tracking. If you continue, the existing experience remains responsible for its own input, score and lead-capture step. Where the route requests a first name and work email, its existing form handles validation and submission. This overview does not replace those steps or submit a lead.

    Statements in this diagnostic

    The interactive version groups the statements below by section. Read them in relation to the situation named in the instructions, then use the response scale shown by the diagnostic. The section descriptions are part of the existing configuration and explain the aspect each group is intended to examine.

    Team Trust

    The degree to which team members feel safe being vulnerable, admitting mistakes, acknowledging weaknesses, and asking for help.

    1. Team members admit their mistakes and weaknesses to each other without fear of judgement or embarrassment
    2. We ask for help and support from each other freely, no one needs to appear to have all the answers
    3. We are confident that our teammates have good intentions and are working toward the same goals

    Constructive Conflict

    Whether the team engages in genuine, productive debate about ideas, rather than artificial harmony or destructive interpersonal conflict.

    1. We have open, honest debates about ideas and strategy, including difficult topics, without it becoming personal
    2. Team members speak up directly when they disagree, rather than staying silent and complaining afterwards
    3. Our meetings produce real decisions rather than artificial consensus or recycled conversations

    Shared Commitment

    The extent to which all team members are genuinely aligned and committed to collective decisions, even when they initially disagreed.

    1. Once a decision is made, the whole team commits to it, even those who disagreed during the discussion
    2. We leave meetings with clear agreements about who will do what and by when
    3. Team members are aligned on the team's priorities and direction, not pursuing separate agendas

    Peer Accountability

    Whether team members hold each other to account for performance and behaviour, not just relying on the leader to do it.

    1. We call each other out when someone doesn't deliver what they committed to, respectfully but directly
    2. We hold each other to the same high standards of performance and behaviour that we hold ourselves to
    3. There is no 'teflon' behaviour on our team, we all feel responsible for maintaining our collective standards

    Collective Results

    Whether the team prioritises collective success over individual status, ego, or departmental agendas.

    1. Team members genuinely celebrate each other's successes, because they see them as team wins
    2. We prioritise team goals over individual visibility, recognition, or departmental objectives
    3. When the team falls short of its goals, we take collective responsibility rather than attributing blame

    How the result is read

    The interactive diagnostic totals the selected item scores by section and across the whole assessment. It then matches those totals to the configured interpretation bands and shows the section-level results alongside the overall result.

    • Significant Dysfunctions, 15 to 33: Multiple serious dysfunction patterns are limiting your team's effectiveness. The lowest-scoring dimension is the foundation to address first — these five barriers are interconnected, and trust failures make all other dysfunctions worse. Structured team development with external facilitation is likely to be the most effective intervention.
    • Some Dysfunctions, 34 to 51: Your team has real strengths but significant vulnerabilities. The risk is that the strong dimensions mask how much the weak ones are costing you. Prioritise your lowest-scoring dimension, it is likely the bottleneck that limits the whole team.
    • Mostly Healthy, 52 to 65: A largely healthy team with some clear development areas. The opportunity is to move from mostly healthy to consistently excellent, particularly in the areas where you scored lowest, and to build the habits that make high performance sustainable.
    • High-Performing Team, 66 to 75: A genuinely high-performing team across all five dimensions. You have the foundations of an exceptional team. The focus now is maintaining this standard through changes in membership, pressure, and complexity, and helping other teams reach the same level.

    Sources named in this diagnostic

    • Edmondson, A.C. (2018) The Fearless Organization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
    • Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) The Wisdom of Teams. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
    • Lencioni, P. (2002) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
    • Google (2015) re:Work, Guide: Understand team effectiveness. Mountain View, CA: Google LLC.

    Where to take the next step

    Our team programmes build genuine trust, accountability and sustained high performance.

    Explore Team Effectiveness Workshops

    Frequently asked questions

    What does the Five Team Performance Traps measure?

    Research into team effectiveness consistently identifies five interrelated barriers that hold teams back: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Each builds on the one beneath it. This assessment measures team health across all five dimensions, giving your team a clear picture of where you are strong and where you most need to invest.

    How many questions are in the Five Team Performance Traps?

    It contains 15 questions grouped into 5 dimensions: Team Trust, Constructive Conflict, Shared Commitment, Peer Accountability, Collective Results.

    How is the Five Team Performance Traps scored?

    Responses are scored within each section and totalled across the diagnostic. The total is compared with the configured interpretation bands.

    What happens after I complete the Five Team Performance Traps?

    After the required items are answered, the existing first-name and email gate is shown before the results are displayed. The result includes an overall interpretation, section scores and development guidance.

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