Team Progress

Understanding the Growth Continuum

Question: What is a team and how do we measure team progress?

Answer: A team is any group utilizing the concepts of teamwork.

(yeah yeah … so now what is teamwork?)

The Teamwork Continuum

The four indicators of how far along a team is in this continuum are outlined as


but that is just my shortlist for assessing the degree of high-performance.  Teamwork is more than just those four areas.

How to measure how far along in development a team is: 

The bigger view of teamwork involves a host of characteristics.


This suggests a great variance!

	Many concepts working
Very few concepts working		Many concepts working

The Team Growth Continuum

At the left end, we see a team that is no more a team than a random group of people, much like any group of people on an elevator at the same time.  Not really a team.  But what if the elevator got stuck?  Then these people would suddenly have a common objective. That would move them one notch to the right.

At the other end, to the right, we see the four indicators (as listed above) interacting flawlessly.  This is a high-performing team.

HUGE continuum ... long, wide, completely situational, and capable of a million different combinations.
And I rarely see a team all the way over to the right, so do not be discouraged.

My point in defining teams by referring to the concept of teamwork is this:

Understand that the continuum is truly a reflection of
how much the concepts of teamwork are incorporated.