The Collaboration Questionnaire: Understanding What Really Drives Team Performance

How does a team know how well it is really working together?

Most teams will have a view. They will know what they believe they do well, where they experience challenges and, in many cases, the areas they think need improvement. But those perceptions do not always tell the whole story.

An area of performance can appear to be working perfectly well, yet feedback from across the team may reveal that it warrants greater attention. Equally, a team may invest significant time and resource in developing its collaborative performance, but without a clear understanding of where it started and how it has developed, it can be difficult to demonstrate what has changed.

This is one of the reasons Acorn developed its Collaboration Questionnaire.

Based on the cumulative learning gained through working with and developing high-performing teams across a range of industry sectors, the Questionnaire provides a structured way of exploring how effectively a team is collaborating. It gives both the team and Acorn an informed view of where the team is performing well, where there may be opportunities for improvement and where perceptions of performance may not tell the complete story.

The Questionnaire is not intended to be a standalone assessment. It forms part of Acorn’s wider approach to team development, helping to identify where attention may be most valuable and providing a reference point as the team’s development progresses.

A framework for understanding collaboration

The Questionnaire considers ten behaviours that Acorn has identified as having an important influence on collaborative team performance:

1. Creation of Common Goals
2. Planning
3. Climate
4. Diagnosis of Group Problems
5. Systems and Procedures
6. Roles and Responsibilities
7. Team Leadership
8. Information Exchange and Communication
9. Integration
10. Responsiveness

These behaviours are closely interconnected.

How a team establishes common goals can influence planning and decision-making; clarity around roles and responsibilities can affect communication and responsiveness; while the climate within a team can determine how willing people are to share information, raise concerns or challenge established thinking.

Considering these behaviours together provides a broader perspective on team effectiveness and can reveal relationships between different aspects of performance that might otherwise remain unnoticed.

Challenging perceptions of performance

The Questionnaire is often introduced during the early stages of Acorn’s involvement with a project team, helping to establish an initial understanding of how the team perceives its collaborative performance and informing the focus of the development programme. However, its value extends well beyond establishing a baseline.

One of its real strengths is its ability to challenge assumptions – an area may be generally regarded by the team as being “fine”, only for the feedback to suggest that it warrants further attention. Conversely, useful evidence of what is working well can be identified and should be maintained and built upon.

This makes the Questionnaire more than a measure of satisfaction or a simple temperature check. It provides a structured opportunity to look beneath the surface of team performance and identify where perceptions, behaviours and experience may not necessarily align.

The findings inform conversations and the development activity that follows, allowing Acorn to focus its work on the areas where it can have the greatest value, rather than applying a predetermined solution.

The value of honest feedback

The structured responses provide an important part of the picture, but we frequently see that the free-text comments can be equally – sometimes more – insightful.

Participants can expand on their responses and provide additional observations. Often prompted by one or more of the ten areas explored, these comments bring context and specificity to the feedback and can highlight issues, experiences or patterns that might otherwise remain hidden.

The Questionnaire is confidential and completed in anonymity, and this gives participants the freedom to provide candid feedback without concern that individual responses or comments will be attributed to them or adversely acted upon.

For a diagnostic to be useful, it needs to reflect what people are genuinely experiencing. Creating the right conditions for people to express that experience honestly and openly is therefore an important part of the process.

Particularly valuable on complex projects

The Collaboration Questionnaire can be especially valuable where a project team extends beyond the boundaries of a single organisation.

Large and complex projects often bring together multiple contractors, consultants and other stakeholders, each with their own responsibilities, priorities and ways of working. Successful delivery nevertheless depends on how effectively these different parties integrate their knowledge, communicate and respond to one another.

In these circumstances, understanding the effectiveness of the wider team – rather than simply the performance of individual organisations – becomes particularly important.

Using the Questionnaire across such a team can highlight common strengths as well as differences in operational culture, perceptions, expectations or ways of working. It can also help identify issues at the interfaces between organisations where challenges can otherwise be difficult to see or attribute.

A diagnostic that evolves with the team

Acorn’s involvement with a team can extend from several months to a number of years, depending on the organisation, the project and objectives. During a longer engagement, the Questionnaire can therefore be deployed at appropriate strategic points in time rather than simply at the outset.

This recognises that teams and projects change – people join and leave, project phases bring different pressures, and priorities shift. An area requiring attention at one stage may become less significant, while others may emerge as circumstances develop.

Re-deploying the Questionnaire provides an opportunity to understand the team’s current experience and consider how its collaborative behaviours are evolving. It can confirm areas where progress has been made while also identifying where further focus may be needed.

For organisations investing in team development, this provides a tangible evidence base alongside Acorn’s ongoing observation and engagement with the team. It can help demonstrate not simply that development activity has taken place, but that it is contributing to meaningful changes in how the team is working together.

Supporting better team performance

The Collaboration Questionnaire is unique to Acorn and has evolved from the learning gained over 30 years of working with high-performing teams across different industry sectors and complex project environments.

Its purpose is not to produce a score for its own sake, but to help teams understand how they are working together and provide insight that can inform meaningful development. It confirms what is working, challenges assumptions about what is “fine”, and highlights where greater focus could make a difference.

For Acorn, it is just one – albeit significant – element of a broader development process.

For the team, it provides an opportunity to reflect on its collective performance and have conversations that might otherwise remain unexplored. And for the organisation, it provides a clearer basis for understanding where investment in team development can have the greatest impact.

Ultimately effective collaboration is not simply about having the right people in a room. It is about how those people work together, particularly when the environment is complex and the stakes are high. The Collaboration Questionnaire helps make those behaviours more visible, providing a stronger foundation for teams to develop and perform effectively.