Individual and Team Assessments

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Using a structured tool, like a survey or profile, to surface team strengths and friction points.

When to use it

Use it at team formation to understand what the group actually has to work with, or when a team is visibly struggling and it isn't clear whether the cause is a skills gap, a working-style mismatch, or something else — an instrument can separate those explanations faster than guessing.

When to avoid it

Not every instrument on the market is worth the time it takes: some working-style and personality assessments are backed by solid, replicated evidence, and some are closer to astrology-with-a-report-format — plausible-sounding, memorable, and not actually predictive of anything. Don't pick one because it's popular or fun to discuss; check what it's actually validated to measure before you use its output to make a real staffing or coaching decision. And don't run one just to have run one — an assessment with no follow-up action wastes the team's time and teaches them the exercise doesn't matter.

Steps

1. Decide what you're actually trying to learn — skill gaps, working-style friction, or team dynamics — since different instruments measure different things and a mismatch wastes the exercise.
2. Check the instrument's actual evidence base rather than its marketing; a skills inventory scored against real task history is on firmer ground than a proprietary personality typology with no published validity data.
3. Run it with the team's understanding of why, and how the results will and won't be used — an assessment that feels like covert evaluation gets guarded, unreliable answers.
4. Turn at least one result into a concrete action — a training plan, a changed pairing, an adjusted role — or the assessment was theater.

What it produces

• A clearer, evidence-grounded picture of the team's skills, working styles, or points of friction
• At least one concrete change made because of what the assessment showed

Common pitfalls

• Treating an unvalidated personality typology as if it were diagnostic, and making real staffing decisions off a report that doesn't actually predict on-the-job behavior.
• Running the assessment and filing the results without acting on them, which teaches the team the exercise was performative.
• Using a team-level survey result to single out one person publicly, which turns a diagnostic tool into a punishment and guarantees dishonest answers on the next one.

Worked example

A small veterinary-software startup forms a five-person team for a new client-portal project, three of whom have never worked together. The PM runs a lightweight skills inventory scored against each person's actual prior project history rather than a generic personality quiz, finds that nobody on the team has shipped an accessibility-compliant interface before, and schedules targeted training (see above) before that gap becomes a launch-week discovery.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §9.4.2.7

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.