Is your team on the same page?

Alignment is a necessary foundation for success.

Successful partnerships are based on everyone involved working together toward common goals.

This is what happens when people aren’t clear and aligned on what matters:

  • Lack of understanding and empathy, causing suspicion and mistrust
  • Competing definitions of success and value, leading to conflicting priorities, confusion, friction and disagreements
  • Rifts between leadership and the front line, due to unclear or unworkable strategic direction
  • Slower and less effective decision-making, reflected in a loss of agility and missed opportunities
  • Waste, inefficiency and compromised outcomes – even relationship breakdown

However, misalignment is often not noticed until it emerges in the form of serious problems, by which point it can be too late.

👇 Get Started with Your Free Diagnostic

Quickly gauge your team‘s alignment

Developed by the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) in conjunction with New Information Paradigms (NIP), the Team Capability and Alignment Diagnostic is a crucial step towards collaboration excellence:

  • Invite your team – Include yourself and up to 6 colleagues
  • Gather and capture perspectives – Engage people by evaluating some key things that matter
  • Get your custom report – Responses are anonymized and compiled into an accessible report
  • See your team’s alignment (and misalignment) – Identify group agreement, divergence, and blind spots
  • Discover your Strengths & Weaknesses – Share best practice and get support where needed
  • Get guidance on using this insight – Improve collaboration and decision-making

This powerful yet easy-to-complete diagnostic is not a survey – it’s a structured and straightforward way to quickly and easily identify where your capability and alignment are strong, where attention is needed, and what actions can drive the biggest improvements

Diagnose Issues

spot potential issues before they turn in to serious problems

Gauge Alignment

identify where there is and isn’t convergence of opinion

Share Strengths

capture and share best practice to improve outcomes and motivation

👇 Get Started with Your Free Diagnostic

Trusted by Alliance Leaders

“It helped us prioritize where to take action by identifying elements of partnering best practices that need the most attention”
Leona Kral
Alliance Manager, Mobile Computing Partnerships
Verizon
“It served as a valuable catalyst for alliance management groups across AstraZeneca and Medimmune to convene and discuss how we partner more broadly across the enterprise.”
Steve Twait
VP Alliance & Integration Management
AstraZeneca
“To understand reality, we needed to understand the perceptions first. It allowed us to capture perceptions efficiently so we could begin to investigate reality.”
Bernie Hannon
Senior Director, Strategic Alliances
Citrix

How to set up and run your diagnostic

You will be asked:

This is needed in order to:

  • identify you as the central point of contact
  • give you access to your response and the compiled report once all responses are submitted
  • inform participants who has invited them

This will be displayed to participants and in the individual and team reports. It is usually your organization’s name, but it could instead be a specific team, department, location or portfolio name.

We will ask you to enter a name and email address for each person you want to invite to participate.

We need this information so that we can email each participant their unique link to respond – so they can securely access (and save and return to) their response, and so they can access a short report of their individual response after they’ve submitted it.

You’ll also need this information in order to notify those people in advance of the invitation actually being sent.

It’s important for you to notify participants before we send their invitation email, to:

  • Help them understand why you’re running the diagnostic.
  • Ensure they look out for their invitation email and don’t mistake it for spam.
  • Increase participation rates by setting expectations in advance.
  • Encourage them to take the diagnostic seriously and provide insightful comments.

After you’ve set up your diagnostic, we’ll tell you when the invitations will be sent out. We deliberately build in a delay of at least one working day in order to give you time to notify participants in advance of them receiving their invitation email. Please ensure that you contact participants in advance of them receiving the invitation email, for all the reasons listed above.

Hi,

I plan to invite you and 5 others to join me in participating in a Capability and Alignment Diagnostic – designed to help us understand how aligned we are.

It should take less than 30 minutes, and your responses will be anonymous.

You will be invited to log in to a secure environment in order for you to access and submit your response (and to access a short report of your response).

You’ll then be guided to select one of five evaluation statements for each of 20 partnering-related attributes.

You will also have the option to add comments, which can add significant value. I’d really appreciate it if you could take a few extra moments to add comments to:

– indicate specific areas where you think support is needed.
– share any examples of best practice or guidance.
– capture any other insight not covered by the evaluation statement.

Look out for an email with the Subject “Your invitation to a Team Capability & Alignment diagnostic” from “Value Management Team”.

We’ll have 3 weeks to respond but the sooner we do, the sooner we’ll get the anonymized report that compiles all our responses together.

Let me know if you have any questions, or if you won’t be able to participate!

🔗 Learn More About the Diagnostic

Kind Regards,

The invitation email will include a short ‘personal message’ from you, together with your name and email address, along with standard instructions on how to access the diagnostic.

This is to ensure that participants are clear about who invited them and why.

The message (which you can edit) will look like this:

[Your Name (Your Email Address)] has added the following context for this invitation:
“I’m inviting you and 5 others to join me in responding to this diagnostic as I value your perspective on where we’re at with partnering. It shouldn’t take you more than half an hour, and will help us clarify our strengths and weaknesses, including how aligned we are. Thanks!”

We’ll show you a preview of the full invitation email during the set up process (before they’re sent).

Start Your Free Team Diagnostic Now

🚀 See how aligned your team really is

📅 Offer available until April 30, 2025

👥 Perfect for alliance leaders and their teams

👉 Start Your Free Diagnostic

Use the Discount code emailed to you by ASAP

⚠ Offer expires soon. Secure your assessment today!

Frequently Asked Questions

For Administrators:

That’s fine.

We totally understand that you might not want to sign your colleagues up without being clearer what’s involved and what the diagnostic covers.

Just go ahead with the sign-up, but don’t add any other names and email addresses when prompted: you’ll then be able to look through the diagnostic and decide if it’s for you and your team or not.

Don’t then fill anything in, though, as there’s no way of transferring that data to any team diagnostic you go back to sign up for.

You can complete it individually – see “What if I want to have a look at it before inviting colleagues?” above but the most valuable insights come from doing it as a group, where differences in perspectives help surface hidden issues.

For Participants:

Alignment is a necessary foundation for success.

But it is very difficult to achieve and very difficult to know how far away you are from achieving it.

The Team Capability and Alignment Diagnostic will give you an idea of where things really are, and establish a benchmark which you can return to later, to track change and evaluate the effectiveness of actions taken.

If everything is looking good, and if everyone agrees, then the diagnostic will substantiate this.

More likely, though, you’ll uncover areas of opportunity, where the diagnostic and report will:

  • Provide a constructive outlet to surface concerns regarding some key things that matter, and prepare to reorient around solutions
  • Encourage and support individuals that want to take a lead in understanding and making progress in developing alliancing capability
  • Clarify where to focus, which may include discussing and resolving different perspectives

True alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when teams see their differences, discuss them openly, and take action together.

Absolutely not.

We understand that people often have “survey fatigue”, but beyond some superficial similarities, the purpose, nature and outcomes of a diagnostic are entirely different to a survey:

The Team Capability and Alignment Diagnostic is a structured diagnostic tool for synthesizing, comparing and highlighting differences in perspectives.

It will not only reveal misalignments you wouldn’t otherwise see, but it will clarify them through the specific detail of the focused attributes you will be evaluating (Value Codes in the table above).

You’ll fill out a short form to set up the diagnostic and tell us who should be invited to take part.

Everything else (invitations, response reports and collation of responses into reports) is then handled by the automated online diagnostic system – users will just be asked to set a password to keep responses secure (nothing will be shared with any third parties).

Here’s a short video overview of how respondents access and submit their response:

Most participants complete it in under 30 minutes, and immediately after submitting their response, they each receive a personalized report that presents back and highlights aspects of what they have said. 

When all participants have submitted responses, a more detailed report is generated that synthesizes and analyzes all the data to identify:

  • Overall trends.
  • Specific areas that seem agreed to be of concern (and areas that seem to be going well).
  • Areas with a diverse spread of opinion, suggesting division or perception gaps to resolve.
  • Patterns amongst what has been surfaced.
  • Frequent terms used, which can be the beginnings of a shared language.
  • Recommended next steps.

Here’s a quick video overview of what you get from the Team Report:

Absolutely. Your responses are 100% confidential, and results, not attributed to a named person, are only shared within your participating team.

Start Your Free Diagnostic Now

🚀 See how aligned your team really is

📅 Offer available until April 30, 2025

👥 Perfect for alliance leaders & teams

Get Started

Use the Discount code emailed to you by ASAP

⚠ Offer expires soon. Secure your assessment today!

Trusted by Alliance Leaders

"It helped us prioritize where to take action by identifying elements of partnering best practices that need the most attention"
Leona Kral
Alliance Manager, Mobile Computing Partnerships, Verizon
"It served as a valuable catalyst for alliance management groups across AstraZeneca and Medimmune to convene and discuss how we partner more broadly across the enterprise."
Steve Twait
VP Alliance & Integration Management, AstraZeneca
"To understand reality, we needed to understand the perceptions first. It allowed us to capture perceptions efficiently so we could begin to investigate reality."
Bernie Hannon
Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, Citrix