Intro

4D-Assessment
This is a summary on how to do a 4D Assessment in order to measure the team's alignment and quality of management.

The 4D Modell is the foundation of the scale up coaching framework. Through 40 questions it analyses the main entrepreneurial challenges: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. More info on the framework can be found on the page "Superior method".

Either you do the 4D-Assessment on your own in order to improve and challenge your self reflection skills, or you do it with your complete management team. We recommend doing it with the management team, because only this way you can uncover communication- and cultural (or strategic) misalignments.

The assessment consists out of 40 questions, 10 per topic. Every participant of the survey will answer the questions on his own. It takes around 10 minutes to answer all questions.

Afterwards you will get a 4D-Score as result. It's a metric between 0 and 100 - with 100 meaning: "Everything perfect, no growth-blocker in sight". By the way: The team members won't be able to see the score or what the answers of other team members. This approach is supposed to encourage the participants to give honest and open answers.

If your team decides to invite a scale up Coach, only she/he will get detailed insights on the answers of the team in order to moderate suitable solutions for the teams' current challenges.

Example: A founder answered the question "Would you hire every employee again?" with a big "No!", while his cofounder answers the same question with a big "Yes!" - the coach would look into this situation and start a discussion around the topic:

"How is it possible, that the founders / managing directors have such a different view on a very elementary question?"

Coming next the coach would evaluate, if this is an communication issue or a cultural misalignment - e.g.:

  1. "Are work-results shared / reported correctly?"
  2. "Are there personal conflicts between the founders which slows down the team?"
  3. "Is there a personal conflict between one founder and an employee?"
  4. "Does the onboarding process for new employees work correctly?"
  5. "Does the employee know what the founders expect from him/her?"
  6. "Are there scorecards and transparency regarding the role of the employee?"

Tutorial

Step by step
  • 1 Create an user account First of all we need to know who you are. Otherwise we couldn't connect the answers to your person, which is necessary to generate the reports. You can easily create a new user account by using the LinkedIn-OAuth functionality (just takes 2 clicks), but you can also use the classic signup form and enter the data by hand. LinkedIn Classic Signup
  • 2 Create new team The next step is to create a team. This is a digital working group for your company, where you can invite team members lateron. All team members can participate in the 4D-Assessment. By the way: You can create as many teams as you want.
  • 3 Start 4D-Assessment After you created a team you will see the dashboard of this team. Because you are the owner of this team, you can invite additional team members to join you. But you can also start the 4D-Assessment on your own right away and invite other team members lateron.
  • 4 Add team members You can invite as many team members as you want by using the "invite team member" functionality. Just enter their email addresses and each invitee will receive a personalized invitation mail. Every team member can participate in the 4D-assessments, no matter if it was started before invitation or after.
    Team owners can remove team members at any time.
    For teams who are new to the scale up Framework we recommend to do the 4D-Assessment only with the general management and maybe the management level below (only managers).

    Please note:     If you've skipped step 3 and invited team members straight away, please remember that you have to start the 4D-Assessment. This can be done with the big orange button at the top of team dashboard. Only after this is done, the other team members will the 4D-Assessment and get the chance to answer the questions. To clarify: Only team owners and coaches can start and end 4D-Assessments.
  • ! Continuous monitoring A 4D-Assessment is not a one time thing! It's a quantitative evaluation of the companies' management quality. Thats why we recommend to run a 4D-Assessment every quarter / half-year. This way you can measure improvements or detect drawbacks (like lost-alignment through employee fluctuations). The team dashboard helps to collect historical data and visualize changes.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions regarding the 4D-Assessment
Is it possible to change the owner of a team?

Yes, the current owner can select another team member and promote her/him to be new owner. Click on the link "Edit team" on the teams dashboard. If the current owner is not part of your team anymore and you not able to change these settings, please get in touch with our support - we will handle that for you.

Who can see the answers of the participants?

By default only the scale up admins and the developers of the scale up website. By the time you add a scale up coach to your team, he will get access to your 4D results. The whole team of scale up is aware of the responsibility, and we are dealing with your data with the highest confidentiality.

Your team members and even the team owner will not have access to the answers. By answering the 4D questions in "private", we want to achieve true honesty and clarity throughout the team.

The team owner will only see the final 4D-Score, which is an anonymised and aggregated result, which can be used to measure improvements over time.

Can I delete my results?

Sure, according to the GDPR laws we will delete all the data when the team owner files a request at our support team.

What do you do with the collected data?

Actually: nothing. With the 4D-Assessment we want to provide a free tool, which measures the quality of management. In the end it's a marketing tool for us - because we invite managers to reflect themselves and maybe to book the professional scale up coaching, in order to take the right measures regarding the findings.
You don't need to be afraid, that we resell the answers / data from the 4D and give this data to any third party. This would be against our Core Values and would ruin our integrity (which is the basis for our business).