High-Impact Tools for Teams summary

Planning and assessment: both are crucial to any project's success. Planning involves laying out the mission, setting goals, assigning roles, and getting people on board. Assessment is equally important; it involves checking in, tracking potential problems, making adjustments, and sustaining morale.

The Team Alignment Map aims to help with both of these areas. It’s a simple chart that keeps everyone on the same page and gives everyone a voice.

Now that you’ve established your Mission and Joint Objectives, everyone should have a good idea of the project’s purpose and how you intend to reach that goal. In the next column, Joint Commitments, you can start to break things down further by figuring out who will do what. 

The key message here is: The TAM empowers team members and tracks potential problems.

Let’s take a minute to run a scenario and see the TAM in action. In this example, we’ll look at what’s known as the forward pass, which is getting from the heading to the Joint Risks. Then we’ll see what’s known as the backward pass, which is when the final two columns inspire a reconsideration of the objectives and commitments.

The key message here is: Using the TAM can help you catch problems before they occur.

As we mentioned up front, the TAM isn’t just an effective planning tool. It’s also great for conducting assessments. 

Assessments are key to keeping projects on track. Too often, there isn’t a system for checking in, and members can spend too long going in the wrong direction; they think they have the right idea but are actually veering far off track. The TAM offers a way to perform rapid assessments while largely avoiding the need for long, ponderous meetings.

Meetings can be dreadful wastes of time. But they don’t have to be. And here, too, the TAM can help.

Even if you’ve had disappointing results with meetings in the past, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of meeting and discussing things face-to-face. It remains one of the most impactful collaboration tools we have at our disposal. Problems tend to occur when meetings are unstructured and chaotic – when they leave too many questions unanswered. Fortunately, these are problems that can be easily fixed.

Putting together a team means mixing together different personality types and people who have different expectations about communication and relationships. As any experienced team leader will attest, this can result in some big-time conflicts. So why not try to nip those conflicts in the bud by creating a team contract?

The key message here is: A team contract will discourage conflict and encourage a safe environment.