# TeamLiftr best practices
A few tips for how to get the most out of TeamLiftr:
# Using TeamLiftr to decide team responsibilities
TeamLiftr is a powerful decision-making support tool that teams can use to more effectively and transparently decide who should take ownership of a given task, responsibility, or improvement initiative.
By breaking down overall team performance into organized, symmetrically-categorized arrays of individual topics, TeamLiftr can empower teams to better discuss performance issues, identify priorities, and decide who should take ownership of a given project — with significantly more clarity and transparency than would otherwise be possible.
TeamLiftr's decision support function also applies to individuals in leadership roles: TeamLiftr has successfully been used with CTOs to help them to better decide which tasks they should manage directly and which should be delegated to others.
# Defining routines for your team's use of TeamLiftr
Your improvement efforts are more likely to succeed if you structure them around a set of defined routines. Planning to complete one assessment per-month or setting a weekly team meeting to review the progress of your improvement projects are just two routine events that can add value to your efforts.
There is no “one size fits all” approach to building routines around TeamLiftr: Your team’s routines should consist of whatever events and processes are convenient to fit into its existing workflow. Structuring the team’s improvement efforts around explicit routines will make those efforts more impactful and increase the team’s ability to generate sustained performance improvement.
# Getting the most out of post-assessment discussions
The discussions that your team has about the TeamLiftr framework are just as important as the assessments themselves, and provide an opportunity for team members to review results, share insights, and develop a plan of action. When used to their full potential, these post-assessment discussions can collectively act as an invaluable shared record of the team’s overall performance improvement efforts.
# Identify potential improvement projects
Identifying which areas of your team’s performance should be prioritized can be challenging; however, the TeamLiftr framework makes this process far more straightforward. By breaking down your team’s performance into 12 discrete categories, with six topics per-category, TeamLiftr offers an organized, easy-to-discuss snapshot of team performance. The framework can’t tell your team what its specific goals should be, but it can provide the structure necessary for teams to develop that answer themselves.
# Inspire meaningful discussions
TeamLiftr’s post-assessment discussions are an opportunity for individual team members to highlight issues they feel strongly about. Each topic in the Framework is a potential “jumping off” point that team members can use to highlight an issue they feel deserves more awareness within the team.
It can be difficult to direct a group’s attention to issues that they don’t view as important — post-assessment discussions ensure that all team members have the agency to prevent key issues from being overlooked.
# Facilitate knowledge sharing
Group discussion of assessment results should encourage the exchange of perspectives between team members and provide opportunities for team members to build a shared understanding of a topic. Knowledge sharing during discussions is an improvement activity unto itself — one that can help teams to recognize when improving their knowledge of a specific topic area should become a formal improvement initiative in its own right.
# Create topic breakdowns
TeamLiftr deals with performance at a relatively high-level. To fully discuss a topic from the framework, it will often be necessary to consider the various factors that affect your team’s performance in that area. This topic breakdown process is important when planning your improvement projects: The ability to target specific performance variables is a crucial part of goal setting.
# Reinforce existing achievements
For teams that routinely update their TeamLiftr assessments, post-assessment discussions are a valuable knowledge management activity. For example, team discussions about changes in assessment results are an effective way to identify if refresher training is necessary, or if there has been a breakdown in skill transfer somewhere. Being able to identify these issues is crucial to ensure that your team’s hard-won performance improvements will be retained long-term.