The template

Trust

Whether people can admit fault in front of each other. Everything below this depends on it.

Members of this team admit their mistakes12345
People on this team are willing to say "I was wrong"12345
I can raise a weakness or a gap in my own work without it being used against me later12345

Conflict

Whether disagreement happens in the room or in the corridor afterwards.

Our meetings include real debate, not just reporting12345
People on this team raise disagreements directly rather than afterwards12345
When we disagree, it is about the work rather than about each other12345

Commitment

Whether people leave a decision actually bought in, or quietly carry on as before.

I leave our meetings clear on what was decided12345
People support decisions they argued against12345
We make decisions in reasonable time rather than revisiting them repeatedly12345

Accountability

Whether peers hold each other to standards, or wait for the manager to do it.

People on this team call out behaviour that is hurting the team12345
I would tell a peer directly if their work was letting us down12345
Standards here apply to everyone, including the most senior people12345

Results

Whether the team’s result beats individual or departmental wins.

People here put the team result ahead of their own12345
We are clear on what success looks like for this team12345
When the team misses something, we talk about it12345

What this one assumes

There is more than one way to run this. Here is what we assumed, so you can tell quickly whether it fits — and what to change if it does not.

A whole team answers it, including the leader, and everyone sees the aggregate result

Answers are anonymous — on these statements, attributed answers tend to be polite rather than true

It is run every quarter or so, because the value is the movement between runs rather than any single score

Nothing here is attached to anyone’s performance rating

What a team health check measures

An engagement survey tells you how people feel about working here. A team health check tells you something narrower and more actionable: whether this particular group of people can disagree, decide and hold each other to it.

That matters because most team problems that look like strategy problems are not. A team that cannot say "I was wrong" will not debate properly, so decisions get made in the corridor, so nobody commits, so nobody holds anyone to account.

Why it is built in five layers

The structure follows Patrick Lencioni's five behaviours of a cohesive team, and the order is the point — each layer only works if the one above it holds.

Trust here means vulnerability, not reliability. It is not whether people hit deadlines; it is whether they can admit they got something wrong in front of each other. If this scores low, treat every score below it as unreliable.

Conflict is about whether disagreement is happening where everyone can see it. A team that rates trust high and conflict low is usually being polite rather than aligned.

Commitment catches the decision that was never really made. The giveaway statement is "people support decisions they argued against" — if that is low, your meetings are producing the appearance of agreement.

Accountability is peer-to-peer, deliberately. Asking whether the manager holds people to account measures the manager. Asking whether peers do it measures the team.

Results asks whether the team's outcome actually beats individual wins. It goes last because a team that fails the first four will always fail this one.

How to read it

Do not average the fifteen. Read the five groups top to bottom and stop at the first one that is weak — that is where the work is, and improving anything below it is wasted effort until it is fixed.

The number that matters is the change between runs, not the absolute score. Teams rate themselves generously the first time and more honestly once they have seen that nothing bad happened.

What we would change, and when

For a leadership team, add a statement about whether people represent the team's decision to their own department or quietly distance themselves from it. That is where commitment usually breaks at that level, and it will not show up in these fifteen.

For a team that has just formed, run only the trust and conflict groups. The other three measure things that have not had time to happen yet, and a low score on them this early tells you nothing.

If you want this as a running signal rather than a quarterly event, cut it to one statement per layer — the first in each group above — and run it monthly.

Team health check survey