You probably don't hear this often; "to think of a team as a group of individuals". We do hear that there is no "I" in team and it is true that to make a real impact, you need the whole team to work together and to be aligned. In fact, if you think about a time when your company achieved the best results, it's most likely because you had everyone on the same purpose. But you do need to look at the 'individuals' who make up the group.
If you only assess the performance of your team as "one", you will miss seeing the real contributors, those who are willing but need some extra support, ones that are going for the ride, and worse - those that are just pretending to help and making it tough for everyone else.
From TEAMS Magazine - Think of a team as a group of individuals "It goes without saying that working on improving a team will pay back rewards. However, a team consists of individuals, so it is clear that if you improve an individual the whole team will improve."
In addition, if you do not know the potential of your team – meaning every individual on it – and you are mostly guessing at what would be good for the team by looking at a few very noticeable individuals, then your attempt to improve the team could be highly ineffective. When you invest money and time into something, preparation is always a good idea. By using an evaluation that tells you what each person really needs, the effects are a thousand times better. You do not have to deal later with half of the team being dissatisfied with the content of the training. Instead you will end up with a much more motivated team. Moreover, in yearly evaluation interviews, the value of the process increases if you have unbiased information about which strong and weak characteristics the person in front of you has. From that you can then take advantage of those strong characteristics to create a plan for how the person can be more successful and efficient, as well as how to eliminate what tends to complicate their job. So, if you are using personality testing for your existing team, then it is very important to give each individual high-quality feedback (that is why it is a good idea to get well trained for it). This is a very personal area, and the employee who receives valuable feedback is going to be much more willing to change than the one who gets nothing. Do something special with this, something they will consider a bonus for themselves, and in this way help your team to be faster, better, more efficient and a bit more proud of themselves. Although personality can appear to be a somewhat "complicated subject", it can definitely be grasped. And it is a great idea to understand it more thoroughly, as cooperation with employees then generally gets a lot simpler.
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