Team health checks

What is a Team Health Check?

Team health checks are structured assessments that measure how your teams are actually functioning — not how you hope they're functioning. Unlike your typical OKR reviews or sprint retrospectives, health checks focus on the human systems that make or break your delivery capability.

Team health checks typically use visual indicators (green/amber/red or numerical scales) across key dimensions like mission clarity, decision quality, psychological safety, and technical practices. The best health checks cut through corporate BS to surface what's really happening with your people.

Here's a simplified version of how this health check may look like:

This is just an example. Below, you will find a table with 20 dimensions you can pick.

You let your team look at this table and vote on each dimension. Then, you discuss it and think about how to push each non-green dimension to green. It's as simple as that.

I've seen teams using this simple framework have more honest conversations in 30 minutes than they'd had in the previous six months of traditional meetings. The magic is in the visualization — when you see three teams all showing red on "Mission Clarity," you can't ignore the organizational problem anymore.

And no, an annual engagement survey doesn't count. That's like trying to drive by looking in the rearview mirror once a year.

When and Why Should You Adopt Team Health Checks?

I remember walking the floor of a promising startup last year, listening to the CTO explain their brilliant technical strategy while watching engineers grimly staring at screens. The health checks we ran that afternoon were a bloodbath of reds: mission clarity was non-existent, team dependencies paralyzing progress, and middle managers actively blocking improvement efforts. No wonder their best people were updating their resumes.

Look, your teams aren't fine just because nobody's complaining loudly. Silence isn't health — it's often fear.

Here's why team health checks are important:

1. They expose the elephants in the room — A well-designed health check creates space for people to safely name what everyone's thinking, but nobody's saying. In one client, a simple red card on "mission clarity" finally exposed that the entire team had lost faith in the product strategy. Now, that's a discussion to have.
2. They provide actionable data, not just feelings — Health checks give you quantifiable metrics on team dynamics that matter more than your velocity charts. When teams consistently rate "decision-making" as amber or red across multiple departments, your organizational immune system tells you something is fundamentally broken.
3. They prevent the "sudden" departures that weren't sudden at all — Your best people don't quit overnight. Their disengagement was visible in health checks for months while you were busy looking at burndown charts.
4. They create ownership beyond management — Health checks put improvement in the hands of the whole team, not just managers. I've seen junior engineers lead incredible transformations after health checks revealed systemic issues that leadership was blind to.
5. They track improvement trajectories, not just states — Running health checks every so often shows you whether your interventions are working. At one tech company I advised, we watched their "technical health" score move from red to amber over six months as they systematically addressed technical debt through Hack days ❌ and dedicated improvement sprints. Without the health checks, they would have had no way to demonstrate this progress to stakeholders who couldn't see the technical changes directly.