The Readiness Assessment and Mini-Guide
Competency, capacity, and workways — three essential factors that determine whether your team is ready to execute.
In high-stakes professions like firefighting, law enforcement, and the military, readiness isn’t an afterthought — it’s the starting point.
Before deploying a team or sending someone into a challenging situation, the question is always: are they ready? These fields demand a clear assessment of capability before action because lives are on the line.
Most business and organizational teams don’t face immediate physical danger, but that doesn’t make readiness any less important. When teams set ambitious goals without assessing their preparedness, they risk falling short — or pushing through at an unsustainable cost.
Readiness is exactly what it sounds like: the capability of a team or individual to accomplish their goals, complete their projects, and perform to standard.
It’s the foundation of successful execution, and when it’s ignored, teams are set up to fail in one of two ways:
They don’t achieve the goal — leading to frustration, missed deadlines, or unmet expectations.
They succeed, but only at an extraordinary cost — burnout, overextension, or resource depletion — that makes the victory feel more like survival than success.
Either way, the team fails. That failure was never the team’s fault. The responsibility lies with whomever set the goals without a clear idea of the team’s readiness level to achieve them.
By assessing readiness before committing to a goal, leaders ensure that the challenge matches the team’s actual ability to execute. Investing in readiness doesn’t mean giving up on big goals — it means ensuring the team has what it needs to rise to the challenge when the time is right.
The Missing Piece: Why Workways Matter
Readiness isn’t just about knowing how to do the work (competency) or having the time and resources to do it (capacity). A third, often-overlooked factor is the difference between a team that struggles and one that thrives: workways.
Think of readiness as a triangle.
Competency and capacity form the sides, but workways are the foundation. Without strong workways, even the most skilled and well-resourced teams can falter. That's probably the state of affairs for most teams: high competency, high capacity. But how do they get the stuff done together? Workways. That’s the missing piece.
Competency: The Know-How to Get Things Done
Competency encompasses the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to perform at a high level. For individuals, it might mean technical expertise or creative proficiency. For teams, competency is about ensuring each member has the expertise required for their role, as well as the ability to work together effectively.
Competency is not static, it’s built over time. Individuals and teams must continually grow and refine their skills to take on more ambitious goals. If competency is low, the solution may involve upskilling, coaching, or narrowing the scope of work to better align with what’s achievable. But even teams with high competency can struggle if they don’t have the systems in place to apply their skills effectively.
Capacity: It’s Not Just About Time
Capacity isn’t just about how many blocks of time are on the calendar. It’s about the energy, attention, and resources required to execute work well. Without sufficient capacity, teams hit bottlenecks, burn out, or sacrifice quality in an effort to keep up.
In a team setting, capacity also includes headcount. But adding more people isn’t a guaranteed solution. Without strong workways to guide collaboration, more people can create more confusion — who’s on first? — leading to misalignment, missed handoffs, and wasted effort.
Capacity without workways is chaos. It’s not about having more; it’s about ensuring that what’s available is focused, aligned, and ready to support the team’s goals.
Workways: The Foundation for Everything
Workways include a team’s habits, systems, and processes that ensure the team can apply their skills and resources effectively. They dictate how work flows, how decisions are made, and how setbacks are handled.
A team can have all the skills and resources in the world, but without strong workways — clear communication, adaptability, and aligned workflows — they’ll struggle to execute. In fact, improving workways often has a more immediate impact on readiness than increasing competency or capacity. Fixing a broken process, refining a habit, or strengthening communication can unlock capacity and free up resources almost instantly.
Workways don’t just make work more efficient; they create alignment, build trust, and help teams sustain success.
Workways may not often get the spotlight, but they’re the key to turning potential into progress. If competency and capacity are the what of readiness, workways are the how. They’re what make big goals both possible and sustainable.
Levels of Readiness, Levels of Execution, and Their Relationship
With competency, capacity, and workways in mind, let’s next focus on:
Levels of Readiness,
Levels of Execution, and
How these two relate
Then I’ll discuss how you can assess team readiness before you and your team tackle your next big objective or project.
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