Let’s keep things really, really simple.

There are two scales that apply to your team, and you can use this grid to check your team health and decide very quickly how much medicine it needs:

Let me explain this grid for you.

Vertical Success Scale

Every team exists for a reason: To achieve something that individuals alone cannot. So every team has a goal and achieving that will constitute a measure of success. Whether your team is large or small, your goals many or few, simple or complex, you will appear somewhere on this vertical scale.

Horizontal Pain Scale

The experience of working together in your team with your team mates as you journey towards your goals has elements of pain and elements of pleasure. This is a slightly more complex and subjective scale, but you will all have an instant familiarity when you think of the team in which you work of this principle. How painful is it? Do you finish the day exhausted with issues and arguments still hanging in the air like gun smoke at the OK Coral? Or do you go home exhilarated and looking forward with excitement to the next interactions with your team? What is your morale like? How honest are you all? What’s the level of trust within the team? Answers to questions like these will help you decide where you sit.

The Red Zone

This is the danger zone, where the team is low on success but high on pain. This is a terrible place to be – draining, demotivating, and destructive. Morale is low to non-existent and people don’t want to be part of it.

Also, imagine that there is a magnet in the bottom left hand corner of the red box; the closer your team gets towards the magnet, the stronger the force is pulling you down. It’s like swimming close to a ship’s propeller – it drags you towards it, the closer you are. If you feel your team is somewhere in the red zone, you have to work quickly to actively push yourself out. This is not a comfortable or happy place to be.

The Yellow Zone

Some teams accept life in the yellow zone. In the first one on the right, everything is not that painful but you aren’t actually that successful. This sometimes comes about due to avoidance of issues within the team, or a lack of drive or ambition. But do you truly want to be here? Don’t we all want greater success, whatever the measure? Your choice – if you decide you are OK to exist here, so be it. But aren’t you missing out?

In the top left yellow zone, success comes at a price. If you sit here, you’re probably a highly driven team where success is the only thing that matters to the exclusion of all else. You are willing to look at the sickness and pain in your team as acceptable collateral damage, if you think it’s OK to be here. But a sick team needs nursing back to health. And how much more successful could you be if the team was functioning at an optimal level of health?

The Green Zone

It’s obvious that this is where you really want to be. Low pain, high success. A state of flow. Clarity. Happiness. High morale. And dare I say it, fun! And much like the red zone, there’s another magnet but this time, in the top right hand corner. There’s a level of momentum here where the more you improve the health of your team on it’s journey, the more success you will breed.

Think of sports teams with a track record of success. A run of victories. Their heads are up and they expect more victories. And yet, when the whistle goes for the next game, it’s just a bunch of people facing another bunch of people on a pitch. What’s gone before shouldn’t matter, should it? But it does. Experience, history, momentum… the more you work at living in the green zone, the more the magnet will pull you towards a highly successful, pain free future. Success breeds success. Pleasure breeds pleasure. But it demands a lot of conscious effort, care and attention to be a team as good as this.

Where Does YOUR Team Sit?

Now that you know how it works, let me give you an imaginary little sticker, and I am going to ask you to stick it where you think your team sits on the grid. Green zone? Yellow? Red? Are you happy with where it sits?

What about if you gave everyone on your team their own sticker, would they stick it in the same place as you? How does it feel if I suggest that you have a conversation with your team about where they would stick their stickers?

This should be the first indication of how healthy your team is on the horizontal scale. Does the thought of that conversation interest you and do you feel comfortable that it would be a positive discussion, or does the idea fill you with dread? Would such a discussion be driven by factions, politics, hidden agendas, argument, and lack of honesty, and would people shy away from even having it in the first place? Obviously if you feel this pain, then you need to stick the sticker somewhere on the left, but if the thought of tyhis conversation appeals, you should be sticking it to the right.

What Next?

I don’t know any team that honestly can put their sticker in the very top right hand corner. I have only ever heard of one person in the history of the world – John Eales, former captain of the World Cup winning Australian rugby team, whose nickname was ‘Nobody’. Because nobody is perfect. Every team can be better. Some  – inhabitants of the red zone – need urgent surgery or die. Others just need a little tweak and change of direction. But wherever your sticker is, you now have a frame of reference to quickly take the pulse of your team and decide if it’s time to sit back and celebrate or break the glass on the emergency defibrillator!