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Teams can benefit from conducting self-assessments on a regular basis.  Meetingworks offers a perfect opportunity to get full participation, candid input, and action plans to improve team behavior.

There are many self-assessment tools for teams (e.g., Blanchard's "Characteristics for High-Performing Teams").  One way to do an assessment is to place a list of team characteristics in Evaluate and have each participant rate them for how well the team exhibits the characteristics.  Comments are encouraged for each item on the list.  When reviewing the rated team characteristics and their comments, it becomes clear which items need improvement.  Using File Editor, reduce the list from the top (i.e., keep the lowest scored items), and feed the areas that need improvement into a multiple-topic Generate for gathering ideas to improve the behavior. 

In Organize, discuss each of the "solutions" and from the original list create a simple list of solutions.  An effective way of doing this is opening a new window in Organize and tiling the windows.  In the new window place ideas that make sense to the group.  Save the simple list and use either Evaluate or Cross Impact (with criteria generated by the group) to prioritize the list of solutions.  Again use File Editor but this time select a few of the top solution ideas.  Make action plans for the top solution ideas.  These are sometimes called "promises" everyone on the team agrees to try these top suggestions for improving the team effectiveness.  It works best if the list is quite short.

After an agreed upon time frame (e.g., one month), meet again to evaluate progress on the actions.  The group may also want to brainstorm solutions for the next group of characteristics on their original list and repeat the process.