Team Leadership Inventory by Alexander Hiam Leader can make sure that the team manages and accomplishes correctly its collaborative work, as well as its individual duties.

This assessment is more about the leader's emphasis than any innate style. It's quite easy to change your emphasis. The behaviors are fairly plastic. So participants should not feel like their scores judge them in any way, rather they should take them as helpful in thinking about where to put efforts as a team leader.

The set of the seven team leadership components came out of studies on the needs of contemporary work teams, and you can assert that usually all seven are significant to a team's long term success. Also, generally these seven things fall through the cracks when the team leader doesn't pays attention to them.

In analyzing the scores, participants should talk to other about the teams and the teams' challenges, and try to relate these to their lower scores. For instance, if boundary management gets a low score, there are probably some performance issues related to this, such as the team getting drawn into problems or projects that ought not to really be its concern, or people on the team getting pulled away from it by other departments or leaders.

After analysis, pages 4 and 5 have notes about the seven factors. You can discuss these from the front room, have breakout groups or pairs work on them and present their thoughts about the domain to the rest of the class.

Starting on page 6, there is an extensive set of forms for action planning. I recommend bringing leaders of existing teams through this process. Note that they may not need to develop current action plans for all of the seven domains—if some are strong scoring, and not critical paths right now, then it's wiser to focus on the more critical ones. Focus adds strength to action plans after all.

It often goes better to do action planning in pairs, since discussing your team is an easy way to generate insights and ideas for improvement. Pairs can take turns helping each other with their action plans. If you try to have larger breakout groups help each other it can take a long time to get all around the tables and fatigue can set in before the last person does their action plan.

If you've used LeadStyle Analysis or any other model based on the old Ohio State Leadership Grid, section 7 (pages 14-15) can help you bridge the seven dimensions of team leadership to the grid model and its four styles of leadership. Basically, the models integrate in that you can implement on any one of the seven dimensions by using the most appropriate leadership style or sequence of styles. The content in the booklet is descriptive, but you can overview it, then ask participants to refine their action plans by selecting the best style(s) for each action item. This might get them thinking about the individuals on the team and their levels of readiness.

It would be a mistake for instance, to assume that each action item can be executed simply by delegating it to some team members!

Ideally, if you have time, you can have participants develop a fairly specific and careful take-away action plan, and then check in with you or each other at some future point to discuss progress.

Alexander Hiam