This tool is designed to help new team leaders build relationships with team members. It accelerates team productivity by clarifying expectations and setting up norms that support effective communication and an open exchange of information.

Effective leadership is critical to the overall performance and success of a team. Effective team leaders provide their teams with the direction, support, resources, and guidance they need to maximize cooperation and collaboration in order to achieve their individual and collective goals and objectives. This Team Leader Self-Assessment allows a team leader to get insights into his or her team leadership strengths and weaknesses, and identify actions for improvement. 

Research indicates that team leader behavior has the strongest and most direct effect on team member motivation and engagement. Research also indicates that the best leaders are skilled at using several leadership styles, and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances dictate. The problem, however, is that many leaders tend to use only one or just a few of the possible leadership styles available. Further, many team leaders don’t always use these styles at the right time. Thus, they are sub optimizing their effectiveness.

This self-assessment tool is intended to highlight the six leadership styles that top performers use to enhance team motivation, engagement, and performance. Further, this tool is intended to help team leaders assess which styles they tend to use most often, and which styles they need to demonstrate more often to maximize the performance of their team members. The more styles a team leader can master and use with precision as the conditions dictate, the better.

Research shows that one of the most useful roles of a team leader is that of coach. Team members need a leader who cares enough to listen to their concerns and who focuses on helping them make decisions that will improve their performance and productivity. Coaching is different than “instructing”. Focus should be on helping to facilitate performance, learning, and the development of a person.

This tool presents a simple, but highly effective coaching method that any team leader can easily adopt.

The growing trend in fast-paced competitive organizations is toward building empowered employees and teams. Research shows that employee and team empowerment speeds up decision-making and innovation, improves agility and flexibility, and increases team member engagement. When Proctor & Gamble empowered their product development teams, they increased the speed with which new products were brought to market.

This tool presents an overview of empowerment. It also presents a method for sharing decision-making and leadership responsibilities among the team.

Because human behavior is not predominantly rational, effective leadership and teamwork require emotional and social Intelligence (E&SI), a form of intelligence that combines both cognitive and emotional abilities.

This tool includes a quick self-assessment for determining one’s current level of Emotional & Social Intelligence.

The High Performing Teams Overview is a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the importance of organizations investing the time, money, and resources necessary to build high performing teams. In addition, this overview highlights Legacy Team’s key research-based insights: the tactics top performing teams use to build and sustain high levels of trust, cooperation and performance.

A team charter is a document that formally authorizes the existence of a team and communicates a project’s scope, objectives, and overall approach to key stakeholders. A team leader or project manager can use the team charter to initiate, plan, execute, control, and assess their team’s progress. This is a powerful tool for ensuring that the team’s work is aligned with the business.  It also ensures that everyone fully understands What they need to accomplish, and How they are going to work together as a team.

Developing an inspiring vision can help align team members, increase motivation, and build commitment. Developing the vision as a team can be a powerful activity when launching a new team or when reenergizing and refocusing a seasoned team. This tool helps teams to craft a compelling vision for their projects, departments or organization.

A SWOT analysis enables a team to develop practical, high-impact strategic actions it can take to increase the likelihood of reaching its goals and objectives. It is a process that allows a team to brainstorm and discuss the trends, factors, events, and forces, both inside and outside of the team, that might help or hinder its progress. This allows the team to proactively take actions to:

• Build on its Strengths
• Minimize or Eliminate its Weaknesses
• Seize Opportunities
• Counteract Threats

Research indicates that the best teams have a relentless concern with aligning team goals and objectives with those of the business. Research also shows that goals are moving targets. Higher performance is achieved when teams periodically update and align their goals and objectives. This tool helps teams align on what they need to accomplish and the actions required to get there. It provides a structured format that gives clarification of what both core and ad hoc members need to focus on to deliver expected results.

Once the team’s charter is finalized (See Legacy Tool: Team Chartering) and most or all team members have joined the team, the team leader should organize a launch or kick-off meeting to introduce team members to one another and to the team’s task or project. The sample agenda is intended to stimulate thinking about how to organize such a launch or kick-off meeting. Use the ideas as a starting point. Every kick-off meeting differs depending on a team’s task and circumstances

To create high levels of team trust and collaboration, it is critical for team members to fully understand their role and the roles of other members.  It is also helpful to identify points of interdependencies across the team. This tool allows a team to achieve role clarity and maintain accountability for deliverables.

RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is a responsibility charting tool that can be used to help team members document key processes as well as clarify roles and responsibilities. It can also help teams and their key stakeholders clarify accountabilities and interdependencies so that team members know what tasks and actions they are responsible for, as well as who specifically inside and/or outside  the team they need to work with to get things done.

The highest performing teams are comprised of members who support one another’s goal achievement. This activity is designed to help team members: (1) share what they have agreed to accomplish for the year, or for a phase of the team’s project, (2) highlight any challenges or opportunities they foresee that could help or hinder their progress, and (3) specify the type of support they would like to receive from others on the team.

All teams need operating norms (sometimes called “ground rules” or “operating principles”) that define the rules or codes of conduct to which team members will agree to adhere. Clear and explicit norms reduce unnecessary disagreements, eliminate the need for trial and error to define team member expectations, and, enable team members to work effectively together without having to constantly clarify expectations.

This tool helps teams discuss and decide upon a set of team norms, including ideas for teams who are operating globally.

Research indicates that top performing teams make decisions in a timely manner and act decisively to address current and future challenges. This tool helps teams anticipate and make high quality decisions in a timely manner.

Team meetings provide a venue for team members to share information, solve issues, make decisions, and manage deliverables. This comprehensive set of meeting management tools helps teams effectively and diligently prepare for, conduct, evaluate, and document their team actions and decisions.

Virtual teamwork provides many benefits but creates challenges for team members and team leaders who are not used to working and leading virtually. Research shows that virtual teams can outperform “co-located” teams if team members make the effort to build good working relationships and if team leaders recognize the extra effort required to keep all team members informed and connected. To that end, this tool provides two categories of information pertinent to effective virtual teaming: (1) setting up a virtual team for success, and (2) communicating effectively on virtual teams.

A team communications plan will assist a team in building an effective communication strategy that enables them to efficiently communicate with key stakeholders. This tool helps teams develop a plan to generate, collect, and disseminate vital information and important messages to its key stakeholder and senior leaders.

Assimilating a new person onto a team in the middle of a project, or once a team is up and running can be very challenging. There is often a lot of information about the science or technology that one needs to absorb. A new member must also spend time learning about the project, the team leader’s expectations, the other members on the team, the team’s ad hoc members, and the team’s key stakeholders. That is a lot of learning to absorb!

This tool provides teams and team leaders with some guidance to help assimilate new team members. It is intended to reduce their learning curves, and increase their speed to productivity and high performance.

Clear communication is the glue that keeps teams together. This simple tool is designed to capture important contact information about team members, helping the team communicate more effectively.

Research indicates that members of top performing teams have a strong desire and motivation to build relationships. However, this admirable goal is not always easy due to fundamental differences we each have in personality, style, skills, roles, life experiences, and so on. There can be richness in diversity if individuals learn how to view personal differences in a positive light as something to understand, value, and leverage to enhance business results.

This tool can be used in scenarios when conflict and tensions negatively impact effective work habits. The key ingredient is to take a sincere interest in bettering the work relationship. The expected outcomes will be stronger collaborations, better alignment, and mutual accountability between members.

Research on team effectiveness emphasizes the link between understanding team member preferences and behavior, and team performance. One way of doing this is through the use of personality or work style inventories. These are helpful in building team member self-awareness and in identifying similarities and differences among team members. They provide labels that help team members better understand inter-team tensions.

This tool highlights various personality and work style tools we recommend that teams can choose from in order to gain team member insights and build relationships.

Research shows that top performing teams spend time getting to know one another to learn about each other’s work and educational background, interests, needs, concerns, values, cultural biases, strengths, weaknesses, hot buttons, teamwork preferences, and more. This is particularly important in virtual teams, especially those whose members are from diverse cultures or background. This tool helps deepen members’ understanding of one another building a foundation of trust, which supports open debate, productive conflict, and cooperation.

Research indicates that members of top performing teams have a strong desire and motivation to build relationships. The Legacy Tool: Getting to Know One Another gives some ideas on how to start a team off in their early stages of forming. Team icebreakers can be used as a fun way to keep members motivated throughout the lifecycle of their team and can provide a break during long meetings that involve heavy details.

Research indicates that team members who spend time getting to know one another – their goals, challenges, work preferences, strengths, weaknesses – work more effectively together. This tool provides a structured discussion format that helps team members define what they need from each other to get their jobs done effectively. This helps members become more reliable and synergistic. It builds mutual understanding, which increases and enhances team cooperation, collaboration and performance.

Giving and receiving feedback helps team members understand how their behaviors or attitudes are positively and negatively impacting the effectiveness of the team and their relationships with other team members. Feedback that is skillfully delivered builds trust, opens channels of communication, and can enhance performance. This tool provides tips to help team members give and receive feedback effectively.

Research shows that trust is more common in teams in which members demonstrate support, care, and respect for each other. The challenge is that people define support and respect in different ways and differ in the ways they like to be treated. Team members need to learn that not everyone likes to be treated the way they do. The purpose of this tool is to (1) provide a format that enables a team to discuss and define the ways support, care, and respect can be demonstrated in this team, and (2) to encourage supportive, respectful behaviors that (3) build relationships and increase trust.

In the past, conflicts on teams were viewed as disruptive. Teams were told to avoid it. However, current research indicates that team conflicts are normal and can be beneficial and productive. In fact, teams today are often staffed with members from heterogeneous backgrounds. The hope is that these teams can benefit from different ideas, opinions, and experiences that members bring to discussions, debates, and decisions. Differences that can fuel innovation, big new ideas, and, yes… Conflict!

This tool contains three activities that can be used to help a team develop a customized conflict management plan and one activity that will help them assess how they are doing.

Businesses cannot succeed in the global economy if members of their cross-cultural teams do not understand or appreciate each other’s cultural differences and expectations.  Successful global teams build and maintain clear expectations for behavior in the team. It is of great importance that these expectations honor cultural differences and do not assume that any one culture’s norms should dominate.

The Cultural Values and Expectations Tool provides a list of cultural norms in three different countries: Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The list makes implicit norms explicit so that they can be discussed. There is space to add norms. Other countries can also be added following the three that are highlighted.

High performing teams periodically stop to reflect upon and learn from their successes and shortcomings as part of continuous improvement. These discussions and this tool helps a team:

• Celebrate successes
• Identify small or large changes that can help the team more effectively meet its goals
• Learn from the past and plan for the future
• Share learning with other teams

Research shows that high performing teams have a strong bias toward addressing problems, obstacles, and conflicts in a proactive and decisive manner. This is one reason they can maintain optimism during challenging times. When challenges emerge, they turn to their well-rehearsed strategies for ways to overcome them.

This tool helps teams become proactive problem solvers by anticipating potential problems in the future and addressing current problems efficiently and decisively.

Team meetings are important and an essential part of building a team and achieving the team’s objectives. Effective team meetings foster open conversations that draw upon each members’ knowledge, skills, and perspectives to solve problems, make decisions and support one another in achieving the team’s collective goals.

The three meeting assessment options described in this tool can help improve your team’s meeting effectiveness. Further, assessing how your team is operating and making improvements is one of the nine Team Emotional Intelligence norms.

It is imperative that team members are skilled at the behaviors that matter most to team performance. Ideally, team members are skilled enough to enact these behaviors in any environment. However, sometimes a team’s structure, norms or habits can hinder the demonstration of effective behavior. This tool includes a self-assessment that serves two purposes. It educates team members about the behaviors that facilitate high performance, and fosters a discussion about helpful and unhelpful team behaviors. It also generates actions to improve team member behavior.

Every human interaction triggers emotion, making emotion a pervasive influence in all teams. In fact, teams have been labeled, “hot beds” of emotion. On the positive side, emotions don’t lie. They provide information, so team members can obtain important insights into team member perceptions about the team and its work processes.

This tool helps build emotional awareness of the circumstances that trigger emotion in oneself and others. It is also useful for starting a discussion about “hot” or controversial issues and for helping the team uncover (often un-discussable) challenges and opportunities.

Research indicates that top performing teams work hard to gain a thorough understanding of the needs and concerns of their stakeholders. They also work to gain stakeholder’s support and involvement. Further, members of high performing teams refuse to feel powerless when it comes to getting information and feedback from their stakeholders. They take charge by seeking out stakeholders, asking them questions, and attending to priorities.

This stakeholder analysis tool can help you identify, manage, and effectively influence your team’s key stakeholders.

The style of doing business today is increasingly cross-functional and team-based. Critical decisions are often made outside of the traditional hierarchy. In this environment, many critical decisions are made through influence, not directive commands.

This tool provides a model and process for influencing others.  (1) Building rapport and trust, (2) Exploring needs, wants, and concerns (3) Successfully presenting your ideas and solutions, and (4) managing resistance and objections.

To create high levels of cooperation and collaboration across teams, it is critical for each team to understand its role and the role of the other team in the work that needs to get done. This tool helps teams clarify their roles and maintain accountability for deliverables. It should be reviewed and updated as often as necessary.