Most team development is an offsite with a facilitator and a whiteboard. Ours starts with data on the key behaviors that differentiate extraordinary teams, benchmarks your team against a global database, and ends with a plan the team builds together. A team either has the behaviors or it doesn’t — that’s measurable.
The team leader and every team member complete the assessment. Results come back as a dynamic team report showing how the team stacks up against top-performing teams in our global database — collective strengths, key gaps, and the highest-impact opportunities. Then the work happens together, in the room.
Built for team leaders and members who need to understand the dynamics of trust inside their team and do something about it. The Team Trust Assessment measures the level of trust across the three Trifecta elements — expertise and good judgment, consistency, and building relationships — and measures employee engagement alongside it, which makes the cost of low trust visible rather than theoretical.
Team Trust Assessment + half-day development session. For teams where the bottleneck is trust, not capability.
The measurement on its own. Run The Extraordinary Team assessment across one team or many, and get the data — effectiveness, collective strengths, gaps, member commitment, benchmarked against top-performing teams globally — without committing to the full development experience up front.
For diagnosis first: deciding which teams need investment, or building a baseline across a division.
| If your situation is… | Start with | Format |
|---|---|---|
| A team underperforms and nobody can say precisely why | The Extraordinary Team™ | Assessment + leader coaching + half-day session |
| People are competent but guarded — information doesn’t flow | Team Trust™ | Team Trust Assessment + half-day session |
| A newly formed or newly merged team needs to gel fast | The Extraordinary Team™ | Baseline early, re-measure in six months |
| The team is fine; the team leader is the constraint | The Extraordinary Leader™ | 360 assessment + development experience |
| Individual members need to grow, not the group dynamic | Extraordinary You™ | 2.5 hrs, self-paced, online |
▸Definition
Team development programs are the process of improving how a group of people work together — their effectiveness, trust, accountability and collaboration — using measurement rather than intuition. Effective team development assesses the team as a unit, identifies the specific behaviors holding it back, and builds a shared plan the whole team owns.
A team isn’t the sum of its individuals. You can staff a team entirely with strong performers and still get a group that relitigates decisions, withholds information, and misses commitments — which is why individual development alone never fixes a struggling team.
Our research identified 15 team behaviors that separate extraordinary teams from average ones. Teams improve fastest when they amplify one powerful strength and resolve one critical weakness — the same strengths-based principle behind our leadership work, applied to the group rather than the individual.
Assess effectiveness, strengths and gaps against a global database of top-performing teams.
When the bottleneck isn’t skill, it’s whether team members trust each other.
A team assessment on its own, when you need the diagnosis before starting a program.
HIGHER EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
GREATER CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
LOWER EMPLOYEE TURNOVER
ENGAGEMENT LIFT FROM HIGH TEAM TRUST
These aren’t soft outcomes. The most effective teams in our database generate four times the employee engagement, 40% greater customer satisfaction and 20% lower turnover than average ones. And where trust is the constraint, the effect is just as measurable: teams with high trust show a 71% increase in engagement, 51% more discretionary effort and 62% less turnover.
Based on Zenger Folkman’s global team assessment database and trust research across 110,000+ leaders.
Leader and members each complete the assessment. You're measuring the team's collective behavior — not averaging individual performance, which is what most tools quietly do.
The team leader gets 1:1 coaching to interpret the results and diagnose priorities before the team sees them. Leaders who walk into the session cold tend to get defensive in front of the people they lead.
Teams improve fastest by amplifying a single powerful strength and resolving a single critical weakness. A list of twelve improvement areas produces no improvement at all.
The half-day intact team session is where behaviors get named, agreed and committed to — with everyone present. That's the part a survey alone can never deliver.
Specific, owned by the team rather than the leader, and tied to accountability and collaboration behaviors that show up in daily work.
Run the assessment again to show movement against the same global benchmark — the honest test of whether the team actually changed.
A team development program measures how a team currently works together, identifies the specific behaviors limiting it, and builds a shared plan to change them. What separates it from team building is the output: team building aims at rapport, team development aims at measurable behavior change against a benchmark. Ours assesses the team against 15 behaviors that differentiate extraordinary teams from average ones.
Team building creates a shared experience; team development changes how a team operates on an ordinary Tuesday. Activities can be genuinely useful for rapport, especially in new or remote teams, but they produce no diagnosis and no plan — which is why the effect fades. If your team gets along fine and still misses commitments, the problem isn’t rapport.
The core experience is an assessment, a 1:1 coaching debrief for the team leader, and a half-day session with the intact team — deliverable in person or live online. Behavior change across the team takes three to six months, which is why we recommend re-measuring against the same benchmark rather than declaring success at the end of the session.
The team’s overall effectiveness, its collective strengths and weaknesses, and current member commitment — scored against 15 differentiating behaviors and benchmarked against top-performing teams in our global database. Team Trust adds a separate measure of trust across the three Trifecta elements, plus employee engagement, which shows the business cost of low trust directly.
Yes. The assessment can be run on its own when you need the diagnosis first — deciding which teams warrant investment, or establishing a baseline across a division before committing budget. Most organizations that start this way end up running the development session on the teams where the data shows the biggest gap.
Yes, and that’s deliberate. The assessment measures the team as a unit, so partial participation produces a partial picture — and the half-day session works because the behaviors get agreed with everyone in the room. A plan made by half a team is a plan the other half didn’t consent to.
Tell us what the team keeps struggling with — missed commitments, guarded conversations, decisions that won’t stick — and we’ll tell you whether it’s a trust problem, an effectiveness problem, or a leader problem.
