Team Health Monitor

As the meeting facilitator, book 90 minutes with your team to run this Play. Send a brief description of the Play and review the attributes. Prepare the meeting based on your setup:

• Remote setup: Copy our template and invite your team.

• In-person setup: Gather writing materials (butcher paper, whiteboard), red, yellow, and green markers, and notepads

The facilitator is also responsible for running the Play. It’s optional to assign a notetaker or let the facilitator be that as well.

At the start of the meeting, reiterate the purpose of the Health Monitor is to assess how well your team is working together and identify next steps to improve.

Next, you’ll want to share the workshop agenda and rules of the road.

Each of your participants will be asked to vote how well they think the team is doing against attributes with:

• “thumbs up” (green)

• “thumbs sideways (yellow)

• “thumbs down” (red).

Your team's perspective on red, yellow, and green will be unique. Use your intuition, and don't worry about establishing standardized criteria for each color—that only distracts from the discussion.

Explain to your team that when an attribute is being considered, the team will be asked to add their vote through a thumbs up, sideways, or down.

In the case of an in-person meeting, a notetaker should record the votes on a piece of butcher paper or whiteboard that all can see.

Now it’s time for the facilitator to follow these instructions to run the health monitor assessment:

• Read the attribute. As a facilitator, use the list above or our template to read each attribute and the description.

• Ask the team to reflect on how they will vote on each attribute. It’s best to hold off on voting until everyone is ready so that you avoid groupthink and bias.

• As a group, vote at the same time. If you are in-person, do a countdown before voting with thumbs. If you’re remote, try to cast your vote without being influenced by others.

• While thoughts are fresh, ask the team to take 1-2 minutes to capture their thoughts or feedback. Try to encourage everyone to capture “why” they voted the way they did and whatever comes top of mind. This helps us capture feedback as we go, especially since it’s unlikely the team will cover all attributes.

• Quick 2-3 minutes to discuss top-of-mind thoughts. This will help tease out any nuances to the voting, or be an opportunity for everyone to understand the “temperature” of the result to help with voting on the next step.

• Once some thoughts are captured, move on to the next attribute. Plan on spending 5 minutes on each attribute.

Review all the votes and feedback, pick 1-3 areas that the team would like to actively work on and improve.

These could be obvious areas that had red or yellow scores, or they could be areas that the team all assumed were green, but have some red votes.

Next, divide the team into three groups— one to brainstorm solutions for each priority attribute. Give each group 15- 20 mins to discuss solutions, document and share them. Here are a few questions to answer in the brainstorm session:

• What is the problem?

• What does success look like in six months?

• What actions could we take to reach that outcome?

• What action will we take NOW?

Share action items, assign owners, and define the next steps. To keep the momentum going, schedule routine check-ins to track progress. Facilitators should thank the team for their efforts. High-performing teams thrive on collective effort, just like in a Health Monitor Play.

Set a regular cadence for Health Monitor checkpoints. Are your reds and yellows moving toward green? Have any of your greens slipped into the red? Celebrate your wins and address your challenges. Regular checks help keep momentum high and catch problem areas before they become too damaging.