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 result 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 result bands, section scores and development guidance.
How this interactive diagnostic works
Read what it covers here first. Nothing is saved or sent until you continue. Your result is calculated once every required item is answered.
If it asks for your first name and work email, you enter them in the diagnostic itself. This page sends nothing.
Statements in this diagnostic
Statements are grouped by section. Answer each one for the situation named in the instructions, using the scale shown.
Team Trust
The degree to which team members feel safe being vulnerable, admitting mistakes, acknowledging weaknesses, and asking for help.
- Team members admit their mistakes and weaknesses to each other without fear of judgement or embarrassment
- We ask for help and support from each other freely, no one needs to appear to have all the answers
- 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.
- We have open, honest debates about ideas and strategy, including difficult topics, without it becoming personal
- Team members speak up directly when they disagree, rather than staying silent and complaining afterwards
- 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.
- Once a decision is made, the whole team commits to it, even those who disagreed during the discussion
- We leave meetings with clear agreements about who will do what and by when
- 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.
- We call each other out when someone doesn't deliver what they committed to, respectfully but directly
- We hold each other to the same high standards of performance and behaviour that we hold ourselves to
- 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.
- Team members genuinely celebrate each other's successes, because they see them as team wins
- We prioritise team goals over individual visibility, recognition, or departmental objectives
- When the team falls short of its goals, we take collective responsibility rather than attributing blame
How the result is read
Your answers are totalled for each section and overall. Each total falls into one of the bands below.
- 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 WorkshopsFrequently 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 totalled within each section and across the diagnostic, and each total falls into a result band.
What happens after I complete the Five Team Performance Traps?
Once the required items are answered, you enter your first name and email to see your results: an overall interpretation, section scores and development guidance.