Team Building
Whether you are building a new team from scratch, helping an existing team enhance collaboration, or adding a new employee to a team, our assessments reveal groundbreaking insights.
They illuminate the collective strengths of a team, how skills and behaviors match up to the work that needs to be done, the best approach for working together, barriers to synergy, potential challenges, and gaps that need to be addressed for the team to function optimally. TTI assessments become the starting point for a heightened level of mutual understanding and collaboration.
A team assessment measures a group's collective working styles, motivators, and capabilities so patterns become visible that individual conversations miss. It is a different exercise from a team building activity: an escape room creates a shared experience, while a team assessment produces a map you can still use six months later. This page covers the four types, how individual results aggregate into a team view, and which one fits the problem you actually have.
Key Takeaways
- Team assessments come in four types. Behavior and communication style, motivators and values, dysfunction and trust, and strengths or roles.
- Most frameworks skip motivators entirely. That omission is why teams who fully understand each other's styles still argue about the same thing every quarter.
- The output is a map, not an event. Individual results aggregate into a team view showing clustering, gaps, and where friction is structural rather than personal.
- Match the instrument to the symptom. Recurring conflict, low engagement, and a newly formed team each call for different measurements.
- A team assessment diagnoses; it does not fix. Ipsative instruments describe preference, so they should never be used to rank teammates against each other.
What Is a Team Assessment?
A team assessment is a structured measurement of a group's collective behaviors, motivators, or capabilities, built by aggregating individual results into a single view of the team. It shows where a team clusters, where it has gaps, and where friction comes from structure rather than personality.
The distinction worth holding onto is between a team building activity and a team assessment. Activities build rapport, which is genuinely useful and often the right call. An assessment produces data: a documented picture of how this specific group is composed, which stays valid when the away day is over and can be revisited when a new person joins.
Both have a place. A team that has never socialised needs the activity. A team that gets along fine and still cannot make a decision needs the assessment.
The Four Types of Team Assessment
Team assessments measure one of four things: behavior and communication style, motivators and values, dysfunction and trust, or strengths and roles. Most organizations use one and assume it covers the field.
| Type | What it measures | Question it answers | What it misses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Behavior and communication | How each member naturally operates and how they adapt under pressure | Why do these two keep talking past each other? | Why anyone cares about the outcome |
| Motivators and values | What drives each member's engagement and effort | Why does this disagreement keep coming back? | Whether they have the skills to deliver |
| Dysfunction and trust | Vulnerability-based trust, conflict handling, commitment, accountability | Is this team safe enough to disagree in? | The individual differences underneath the symptom |
| Strengths and roles | Collective capability and where it is concentrated | What can this team actually do? | How they will get along doing it |
The second row is the one usually left out. Most published guides to team assessment list behavior, trust, and strengths, then stop. That gap has a practical cost: two people can understand each other's communication styles perfectly and still deadlock, because the disagreement is about what matters rather than how it is said. Measuring motivators is what surfaces that, and it is what 12 Driving Forces was built to do.
How Individual Results Become a Team View
Each member completes the assessment individually, and the results are plotted together on a single team map. Clustering shows where the team shares a tendency, spread shows where it is diverse, and empty areas show what the team does not naturally cover.
Reading that map is where the value sits. A team where every member clusters in the same behavioral quadrant will move fast and agree quickly, and will also share the same blind spot. A team spread evenly across quadrants will consider every angle and take three meetings to decide anything. Neither is a defect; both are facts a leader can plan around once they can see them.
What a team debrief actually involves
- Everyone completes their own assessment. Individual reports go to the individual first, not to the manager.
- Results are aggregated into a team view. Clustering, spread, and gaps become visible in one place.
- The team reads the map together. The point is shared language, not a verdict on anyone.
- Specific friction gets named. Recurring disagreements are traced to style, motivator, or structure.
- The team agrees on working practices. Concrete changes to how decisions and communication happen.
- The map is revisited when membership changes. One new person can shift the composition materially.
Which Team Assessment Fits Your Problem
Start from the symptom. Communication breakdown, recurring conflict, low engagement, and a newly formed team each point to a different measurement.
| What you are seeing | What to measure | Why |
|---|---|---|
| People talk past each other | Behavioral style, natural and adapted | The message is landing differently than it was sent |
| The same argument every quarter | Motivators and values | The disagreement is about priorities, not process |
| Capable people disengaging | Motivators, plus emotional intelligence | What the roles offer may not match what drives them |
| A newly formed team | Behavior and motivators together | Establishes shared language before habits set |
| Conflict that turns personal | Emotional intelligence, plus behavior | Self-regulation and empathy are the levers here |
| Work quality is uneven | Personal skills by development level | Distinguishes a skills gap from a motivation problem |
TTI covers these through DISC for behavior, 12 Driving Forces for motivators, EQ for emotional intelligence, DNA for 25 personal skills, and Acumen for how people perceive situations. They can be combined into a single multi-science report, which matters for teams specifically: style and motivator data read together explain far more friction than either does alone.
How the Common Team Frameworks Compare
DISC, MBTI, the Five Dysfunctions model, and strengths inventories each measure something different. They are not competing answers to one question; they answer separate questions.
| Framework | Measures | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| DISC | Observable behavior across Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance, in natural and adapted form | Communication and day-to-day working style |
| MBTI | Preference sorted into sixteen types across four dichotomies | Shared vocabulary for cognitive preference |
| Five Dysfunctions of a Team | Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, results at the group level | Diagnosing team-level health rather than individuals |
| Strengths inventories | Where individual talent is concentrated | Assigning work to natural capability |
| Motivators instruments | What drives engagement, on continua rather than types | Explaining persistent disagreement and disengagement |
A note on the adapted-versus-natural distinction, since it matters more for teams than for individuals: DISC reports both how a person naturally operates and how they are currently adapting to their environment. A large gap between the two across several team members is usually telling you something about the environment rather than about the people.
What a Team Assessment Cannot Do
A team assessment describes composition. It does not resolve conflict, and it should not be used to rank teammates or make personnel decisions.
TTI's behavioral and motivators instruments are ipsative, which means they rank a person's preferences against their own other preferences rather than against a population. That makes them well suited to explaining how a team is composed and poorly suited to comparing two people on a single scale. Using them to decide who to promote or remove is both technically wrong and unfair to the person being ranked.
The other honest limit is that a map is not a remedy. Naming that two people clash because one is task-driven and the other relationship-driven changes nothing on its own. What changes things is the agreement the team makes afterwards about how decisions get run. The assessment makes that conversation possible; it does not have it for you.
Beyond the team session itself, the same results carry into communication, workplace culture, professional development, and succession planning. Supporting research on TTI's instruments is published at the TTI research portal, and the professional standard behind assessment practice is maintained by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Team Assessment FAQs
What is a team assessment?
A team assessment is a structured measurement of a group's collective behaviors, motivators, or capabilities, produced by aggregating individual results into one team view. It differs from a team building activity in that it generates data rather than an experience, and that data stays useful long after the session ends.
How do you assess team dynamics?
Each member completes an individual assessment, and results are plotted together to show clustering, spread, and gaps. The team then reads the map together, traces specific recurring friction to style or motivator differences, and agrees concrete changes to how decisions and communication happen. Measuring behavior and motivators together explains substantially more friction than either does alone.
What is the difference between DISC and MBTI for teams?
DISC measures observable behavior across four factors and reports both natural and adapted style, which makes it practical for day-to-day communication. MBTI sorts preference into sixteen types across four dichotomies, which gives teams a shared vocabulary for cognitive preference. They measure different things, so choosing between them depends on whether you want to change how people communicate this week or build common language over time.
Can a team assessment be used to evaluate individual performance?
No, and this matters. TTI's behavioral and motivators instruments are ipsative, meaning they rank a person's preferences against their own rather than against a population norm. They describe how someone prefers to work, not how well they work. Using them to rank teammates, decide promotions, or justify removals is technically invalid and unfair to the person assessed.
How often should a team be reassessed?
Reassess when the team composition changes rather than on a fixed calendar. One new member can shift a team's clustering materially, and a map built for a group that no longer exists describes nothing. A restructure, a merger of two teams, or a change of leader are all reasons to revisit. Individual behavioral style is relatively stable, so re-testing the same unchanged team annually rarely reveals much.
See what your team's map actually looks like
Book a 20-minute consultation and we will walk through the friction you are seeing, what a team report for your group would show, and which combination of assessments answers it. Consultants and coaches: ask about delivering TTI team sessions with your own clients.
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