From grimoire
Administers a structured, periodic team health assessment across trust, clarity, collaboration, workload, and psychological safety dimensions, surfacing problems before they cause attrition or missed delivery.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/grimoire:run-team-health-checkThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
Administer a periodic structured assessment of team health across key dimensions — trust, clarity, workload, collaboration, and inclusion — to surface problems early through data rather than waiting for attrition, conflict, or missed goals to reveal them.
Administer a periodic structured assessment of team health across key dimensions — trust, clarity, workload, collaboration, and inclusion — to surface problems early through data rather than waiting for attrition, conflict, or missed goals to reveal them.
Adopted by: Spotify's Squad Health Check Model (2014) is the most widely replicated team health assessment in the technology industry, adopted by Zalando, ING, Autodesk, and hundreds of engineering organizations; Google's Project Aristotle (2016) established five team effectiveness dimensions that became the basis for Google's own team health assessment tools; Lencioni's "Five Dysfunctions" assessment has been administered to hundreds of thousands of teams globally and is one of the most widely used team diagnostics in business; the US Army's Command Climate Survey is the military equivalent — mandatory at all echelons above company level Impact: Spotify's internal data on health check adoption found that teams running quarterly health checks identified and resolved team dysfunction 60% faster than teams relying on manager observation alone (Kniberg retrospective, 2015); Google Project Aristotle found that psychological safety — one health dimension — explained more variance in team performance than any other single factor; McKinsey's Organizational Health Index (45,000+ organizations assessed) found that companies in the top quartile of organizational health generate 3× total return to shareholders compared to bottom-quartile companies Why best: Manager observation is a lagging indicator — by the time a manager observes a team health problem, it has usually been present for weeks or months; team members who are experiencing a problem are often reluctant to raise it to their manager (especially if the manager is part of the problem); a structured, anonymous health check creates a direct channel for team health data that bypasses the social dynamics that suppress candid manager feedback
Sources: Kniberg & Oskarsson "Spotify Squad Health Check Model" (2014, engineering.atspotify.com); Google Project Aristotle (rework.withgoogle.com, 2016); Lencioni "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" (Jossey-Bass, 2002); McKinsey Organizational Health Index (mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance)
Base the health check on dimensions relevant to team performance in your context. Six core dimensions applicable to most teams:
| Dimension | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Psychological safety | Do team members feel safe to speak up, admit mistakes, and disagree? |
| Clarity of goals | Does the team understand what it is working toward and why? |
| Workload sustainability | Is the current pace sustainable over the next 90 days? |
| Collaboration quality | Does the team work well together — internally and cross-functionally? |
| Feedback and growth | Do team members receive meaningful feedback and development support? |
| Trust and inclusion | Do all team members feel respected, heard, and treated fairly? |
Adapt these to your team's specific context. Engineering teams might add "technical health"; customer-facing teams might add "customer feedback responsiveness."
Format: a simple rating scale per dimension (3-point or 5-point works; avoid 10-point scales that produce false precision)
Use a 3-option health indicator (adapted from Spotify's model):
Add one open-text field per dimension: "What's one thing that would improve this?" — this produces the actionable signal.
Anonymous: use a survey tool (Google Forms, Typeform, Culture Amp) with no identifying fields. If employees don't trust anonymity, they will not be candid. Announce the tool and explain that results are aggregated before you see them.
Fast: 6 dimensions × 1 rating + 1 optional text field = 10–12 minutes maximum. Longer assessments produce lower completion rates and lower quality answers (fatigue bias).
The first health check establishes the baseline — your reference point for all future comparison. Without it, you cannot distinguish improvement from decline.
Run the same assessment every quarter at the same point in the cycle (e.g., end of each quarter). Consistency enables trend analysis:
Do not change the assessment instrument between cycles unless a dimension is no longer relevant — changes break trend comparison.
The most common health check failure: the manager receives results and acts on them without sharing them with the team. This produces:
Share results in a team meeting within 1 week of collection:
"Here are this quarter's health check results. These are the aggregated
team responses — not individual. I want to walk through them with you
and hear your perspective on what they mean and what we should do about them."
One dimension per 10 minutes: show the ratings distribution, share the text comments (aggregated and anonymized), and open discussion.
If the health check surfaces 4 dimensions in the yellow or red range, the team cannot address all 4 effectively in one quarter. Attempting to fix everything produces thin, ineffective interventions across all dimensions.
Pick the 1–2 dimensions with the highest team pain + highest manager influence:
Prioritization criteria:
For each priority dimension, define 1–2 specific behavioral actions. The action must be: specific enough to observe, owned by someone, due in the next 90 days.
As with retrospectives: accountability closes the loop. Every health check session opens with:
"Last quarter, we committed to [actions]. Here's what happened:
- [Action A]: completed / not completed. Why?
- [Action B]: completed / not completed. Why?
This prevents the survey from becoming performative. If 3 consecutive rounds of actions produce no change on a dimension, the problem is structural and requires a different intervention than behavioral commitments — escalate to leadership, change the team's structure, or acknowledge that this dimension requires organizational change beyond the team's control.
build-psychological-safety), then run assessments.resolve-team-conflict, run-difficult-conversation) rather than waiting for a quarterly assessment to surface it through survey data.npx claudepluginhub jeffreytse/grimoire --plugin grimoireConduct team health assessments to identify morale, skill, process, and engagement issues before they become crises. Use quarterly or when noticing team friction.
Runs structured team health assessments across delivery, culture, process, and cross-functional dimensions. Use for surveys, retrospectives, or facilitation guides.
Assesses and improves team psychological safety using Edmondson's 7-item survey and evidence-based leader behaviors. For team leads wanting to increase speaking up, admitting mistakes, and productive disagreement.