Team dynamics assessment for business Improvement

When Mark first called me to talk about his leadership team it was clear how frustrated he was.

Mark is the Managing Director, and owner, of a small (around 150 people) design and manufacturing company. Over a few years he’d assembled a team of experienced leaders in their disciplines with strong track records. I had some knowledge of them having been responsible for hiring the most recent appointment to this team, the Sales & Marketing Director. The business had a great senior leadership team on paper: experienced, knowledgeable, and driven. But something wasn’t clicking: board meetings dragged on without clear decisions, siloed thinking resulted in competition among departments (as well as for resources and investment), and despite individual brilliance, collective, and business, performance lagged.

“They’re all talented people,” Mark said to me in his call, “but together, they’re less than the sum of their parts.”

This is something I see and hear all too often. There are countless groups of willing and able people that fail to deliver while other less experienced and talented teams succeed. The answer often lies in how those people work together, or don’t. This is the fascinating world of team dynamics.

Team dynamics brings together the psychological and behavioural forces that influence how a group functions. Most organisations have well-established, if not always effective, processes in place to measure individual performance. But team dynamics are more complex, and much less obvious unless things are going wrong. They tend to operate beneath the surface, shaping everything from decision-making processes to communication patterns and levels of trust among the individuals in the team.

These dynamics aren’t static. They evolve as teams progress through developmental stages. Famously, Bruce Tuckman’s Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model is widely quoted as a way that new teams move through stages of effectiveness. Steve Kozlowski’s process model of team development is a more comprehensive and dynamic framework expanding on Tuckman by incorporating task dynamics, leadership functions each presenting unique challenges and opportunities.

What makes team dynamics particularly fascinating for me is the huge impact they can have on organisational and business outcomes. McKinsey research found that teams with strong dynamics are not only more aligned on goals but also create environments where members feel empowered to take risks and innovate. However, poor team dynamics can cost businesses dearly through reduced productivity, higher staff turnover, and missed opportunities.

In my twenty plus years of consulting with leadership teams, certain patterns consistently emerge when dynamics are problematic:

• Communication breakdowns: information gets trapped in silos, with team members operating with different agendas
• Unhealthy conflict patterns: either excessive conflict that becomes personal or, more commonly, artificial harmony where real issues go undiscussed
• Decision paralysis: meetings end without clear outcomes, or decisions made don’t translate into coordinated action
• Lack of psychological safety: team members withhold their best thinking for fear of judgement or repercussions
• Unclear roles and responsibilities: overlapping accountabilities create confusion and territorial behaviour

Following the initial assessment of Mark’s board of directors, it was clear that they exhibited several of these warning signs. Their meetings featured polite, but superficial, discussions. Two strong personalities dominated conversations while others disengaged. Cross-functional initiatives consistently stalled due to unclear ownership.

“We’re not dysfunctional,” the Finance Director told me during our assessment interviews. “We’re just… not fully functional yet.”

Understanding team dynamics requires more than observation or intuition. A structured assessment approach brings scientific rigour to what can otherwise be guess work and speculation.

Our team dynamics assessment combines multiple methodologies to create a comprehensive picture:

Objective psychometric profiling

Each team member completes carefully selected psychometric instruments that measure personality dimensions, thinking styles, values, and behavioural preferences. Unlike one-size-fits-all team profiling tools, we partner with leading occupational psychology publishers such as Saville Assessment, Hogrefe, and Hogan to select instruments that provide rich, nuanced data

• Personality questionnaires that reveal work styles and behavioural preferences
• Leadership and/or situational judgment tests that show decision-making approaches
• Critical thinking tests that illuminate problem-solving abilities
• 360° interviews and assessments to gain a broad perspective of individuals and the team

Qualitative interviews

While psychometrics offers valuable data points, they can’t possibly capture the full complexity of an individual’s behaviours and team interactions. So, we recommend including 360° feedback through face to face, telephone, or Teams call interviews, with colleagues and stakeholder rather than standardised questionnaires. This approach yields richer contextual information about strengths and weaknesses, and how the team and each individual functions in relation to the broader organisation

Observational assessment

Watching teams in action provides another crucial data source. Where we can, we observe board or team meetings, noting communication patterns, decision-making processes, and power dynamics. Who speaks? Who listens? How are disagreements handled? These observations complement the self-reported data from psychometrics, sometimes revealing disconnects between how team members perceive themselves and how they actually interact with others.

Individual feedback and leadership profiles

A crucial part of the process is a face-to-face feedback session with each participant. This gives the chance to sense-check the results of the assessments by providing context, looking for behavioural examples and discussing any areas of disagreement and questions relating to the profiles.

We identify both strengths to leverage and potential blind spots. Our philosophy is that weaknesses are things to be aware of – they are a problem if they impede performance. This feedback session builds self-awareness through an honest and frank discussion.

Ideas around potential development areas can be raised and discussed here. The aim is to gain agreement on the key findings and any learning needs and opportunities.

Each team member will then receive a personalised leadership profile summarising their assessment results and suggestions for further development.

After analysing the data from these multiple assessments channels, we create a comprehensive team dynamics profile. This isn’t simply a data dump but a considered narrative that highlights patterns and their implications.

Depending on the assessments used and the brief for the project, the profile typically includes:

• Team composition analysis: How diverse thinking styles, personalities, and approaches create both strengths and potential blind spots
• Communication patterns: How information flows (or doesn’t) among team members
• Decision-making tendencies: The team’s approach to evaluating options and reaching conclusions
• Trust and psychological safety levels: The degree to which team members feel comfortable being vulnerable and taking interpersonal risks
• Conflict management styles: How disagreements are addressed and resolved
• Role clarity: How well responsibilities are defined and understood

For Mark’s leadership team, the profile highlighted the more dominant, controlling, approach from two of the members and the lack of assertive from others. This resulted in a more guarded approach to discussion and debate from some. Furthermore, the team lacked a focus on delivery and action with all but the Managing Director having a much lower results-orientation than most leaders.

It also emerged that Mark’s leadership style was problematic with the team. The assessment showed that he leaned towards a control and micromanagement style. This further inhibited discussion and debate in board meetings.

A team dynamics assessment is valuable only if it leads to meaningful change. We share findings through both individual feedback sessions and a facilitated team workshop.

The team workshop brings members together to explore collective patterns and implications. Rather than presenting the assessment as a diagnosis to be accepted passively, we use it as a starting point for dialogue and shared meaning-making.

Through structured exercises, the team examines questions like:

• What patterns do we see in our interactions?
• How do these patterns help or hinder our effectiveness?
• What changes would enable us to work together more productively?
• How can we make the most of our styles and different approaches?

For Mark’s team, the workshop sparked several breakthrough conversations. The operations director acknowledged feeling rushed in decision-making discussions, while the sales director recognised her tendency to dominate conversations. Mark accepted his control-freakery and frustrations.

Together, we identified and agreed several specific issues to really think about and to work on collectively and individually to improve communication and to bring about more action-focus to board meeting and decision making.

While the assessment process and workshop create powerful momentum, lasting change requires ongoing attention and reinforcement. We typically recommend:

Regular check-ins: brief discussions about team dynamics during regular team meetings

Process reviews: periodic reflection on how the team is working together

Individual coaching: targeted support for team members working on specific development areas

Further bespoke team workshops: we will design and facilitate workshop based on key identified themes

Follow-up assessment: A lighter-touch reassessment after 9-12 months to measure progress

Six months after their initial assessment, Mark’s team had implemented several significant changes. They restructured their meeting agenda to separate strategic discussions from operational updates. They adopted a decision-making framework that clarified when consensus was needed versus when the accountable executive could decide, and crucially, a process of agreeing on actions, follow-up, and review. Most importantly, they developed a shared language for discussing team dynamics based on their shared team and self-awareness.

“The biggest change,” Mark told me, “is that we now talk about how we’re working together, not just what we’re working on. That’s made all the difference.”

While improved team experience is valuable in itself, the business can be substantial. Our experience consistently shows that teams with healthy dynamics outperform their peers in several key areas:

• Greater innovation: teams with psychological safety generate more ideas and implement them more effectively
• Better communication: understanding of different styles improves collaboration and communication
• Faster execution: teams with clear decision processes make and implement decisions faster
• Improved retention: Teams with positive dynamics experience lower turnover of high-performing members
• Higher productivity: Well-functioning teams complete projects faster with fewer resources

Understanding and improving team dynamics isn’t a luxury. It should be a strategic imperative for organisations seeking to maximize their human capital and commercial advantage. As work becomes increasingly collaborative and interdependent, the quality of team interactions often determines the difference between mediocre and exceptional performance.

While it is not an insignificant investment, either in time or money, this pales in comparison to the costs of dysfunction: missed opportunities, wasted time, talent drain, and suboptimal decisions.

As one client put it: “We spent years investing in individual development without addressing how people work together. It was like tuning each instrument separately but never rehearsing the orchestra.”

In tough commercial times, the idea of likening a business to a well-tuned orchestra matters more than ever. By making team dynamics visible and actionable, organisations can realise the full potential of their collective talent, changing groups of skilled individuals into exceptional teams.

Find our more about how bfpeople can assess your team by contacting John Hamilton