Team summaries

A team summary rolls up performance across all of your direct reports for a defined period. Where an individual summary is about one person, a team summary is about your team as a unit — its themes, its distribution of strengths and opportunities, its attribute coverage, and the status of every objective in flight.

Team summaries are read by you, your skip-level manager, and (with appropriate permissions) your org admin. They are the artifact that connects individual performance to organizational outcomes.

When to use a team summary

The most common patterns:

• Cycle close-out — at the end of each summary cycle, after individual summaries are submitted, write a team summary that synthesizes themes across them.
• Quarterly review with your manager — most skip-level reviews work best when grounded in a recent team summary.
• Org-wide reporting — when an org admin asks for a snapshot of how teams are performing, a recent team summary is the right input.
• Team transitions — when you take over a team or hand one off, a team summary captures the state of play in a single document.

Team summaries are not a substitute for individual summaries. They synthesize what is already in individual summaries; they do not stand alone.

What a team summary includes

Every team summary is organized into the following sections:

Themes

The dominant patterns across the team. Themes are not a list of every employee's strengths — they are the strengths and opportunities that show up across multiple people, or that define the team's character in this period.

Examples of themes:

• "Strong execution velocity, with three of five reports shipping major scope ahead of plan."
• "Cross-team collaboration is a consistent gap — most observations cite friction at handoff points with the platform team."
• "The team has matured in technical decision-making but is still building muscle in stakeholder communication."

Distribution of strengths and opportunities

A high-level breakdown of how strengths and opportunities are distributed:

• Total strengths and opportunities authored across the team.
• The strength-to-opportunity ratio (healthy is roughly 2:1 to 3:1).
• The split by employee — at a glance, who has had a heavy strength period, who has had a heavy opportunity period, and who has had thin coverage.

This section is mostly numerical; it is meant to anchor the qualitative themes in data your reader can audit.

Attribute coverage

Which competencies the team has been observed against, and how often. Attribute coverage shows:

• The most-tagged attributes across the team.
• Attributes that are notably absent — areas where you have not been observing.
• Imbalances by employee — for example, one report with deep coverage on technical attributes but no observations against collaboration attributes.

Attribute coverage gaps are coaching opportunities for you, not just for the team. If "decision-making" is rarely tagged across your team, that is a signal to start observing for it deliberately.

Objective status

A roll-up of objective health across all your direct reports:

• On-track / at-risk / off-track counts.
• Objectives that span the team, with the status of each.
• Objectives that have shifted in scope or been deferred.

This section connects the team summary to the broader objective tracking covered in Managing objectives.

Risks and watchlist

A short list of things you are watching going into the next period — open headcount risks, employees in stretch roles, projects that are on the bubble. Use this section sparingly; it is not a place for every minor concern.

Creating a team summary

You can create a team summary from:

1. Summaries page — click New team summary in the page header.
2. Henry panel — ask Henry to "draft a team summary" (Agentic plan).

The team summary editor loads with the five sections pre-laid-out and the period defaulted to the current cycle.

Step-by-step

1. Confirm the period. Defaults to the current cycle. Most team summaries cover the same period as the individual summaries they synthesize.
2. Confirm the team. Defaults to your direct reports as of the period end date. You can include or exclude individuals — for example, exclude a report who joined too late in the period to have meaningful coverage.
3. Review the inputs panel. The right-hand panel surfaces individual summaries, observation counts by employee, attribute coverage, and objective status — all for the period.
4. Write each section. Synthesize, don't list. The reader can drill into any individual summary themselves; the team summary is your interpretation across them.
5. Save. Autosaves apply, and you can leave and return freely.

Manual vs Henry-assisted

With Henry: On the Agentic plan, the start-team-summary flow drafts a first version of every section based on your team's individual summaries, observation history, attribute coverage, and objective status.

To use the Henry-assisted flow:

1. Open Henry and ask "draft a team summary."
2. Confirm the period and team.
3. Henry runs the flow:
   • Reads each direct report's individual summary for the period.
   • Aggregates observation counts and attribute coverage.
   • Pulls objective status from each report.
   • Produces a draft of the five sections with evidence linked from individual summaries.
4. Review, edit, and save.

As with individual summary drafts, you are always starting with a draft, never a final. Pay particular attention to the Themes and Risks and watchlist sections — these are the most context-dependent and most likely to need your judgment.

Without Henry, the same flow is available manually: open the team summary editor, use the inputs panel to scan each input source, and write the synthesis yourself.

Sharing a team summary

Team summaries default to manager-only when first saved. To share, open the summary, click Share, and choose:

• My skip-level manager — your direct manager. They will see the full summary in their dashboard.
• Org admin — any org admin you select. Useful when an admin has asked for a snapshot.
• Co-owners — managers who own a portion of the team (for example, in a matrixed structure).

Sharing creates read-only access. The recipient can comment but not edit. To allow another manager to edit, transfer ownership (see Reassigning team ownership below).

Skip-level summaries

Plan availability: Skip-level summary aggregation is available on the Agentic plan. Team plan customers can upgrade in Settings → Billing.

If you manage other managers, you can roll up their team summaries into a skip-level summary. A skip-level summary aggregates across multiple teams — your reports' teams plus any non-managerial reports of your own.

The skip-level summary editor shows:

• Each direct-manager report's team summary as an input.
• Aggregate distributions across the larger group.
• Cross-team themes — patterns that appear in more than one team.
• Manager-level objectives that span multiple teams.

The structure mirrors a team summary but the inputs are team summaries rather than individual summaries. The Henry-assisted flow scales the same way: drafts a skip-level summary from your reports' team summaries.

Skip-level summaries are typically shared with your own skip-level manager and with any org admin who needs an org-wide view.

Reassigning team ownership

When a manager moves teams, takes leave, or transitions ownership of a direct report, you may need to reassign team summary ownership.

To reassign ownership of a team summary:

1. Open the team summary.
2. Click the overflow menu and choose Transfer ownership.
3. Pick the new owning manager.
4. Optionally include a handoff note.

The new owner can edit, share, and re-publish the summary. The original owner becomes a read-only viewer unless added back as a co-owner.

For broader team transitions (a whole team moving under a new manager), org admins handle the change in the org chart, and team summaries follow automatically. See the admin docs for the full team transition workflow.

Best practices

Aggregate, don't list

The most common mistake in a team summary is to write five mini-summaries — one paragraph per report — and call it done. The reader can read individual summaries themselves. Your job in the team summary is the synthesis: what patterns repeat, what is unique, what should change going forward.

Anchor every theme in evidence

A theme without a count of supporting observations or a list of contributing employees is an opinion. The Henry-assisted draft cites evidence by default; if you write manually, do the same. "Most reports cited cross-team friction" is not a theme; "four of five reports had at least one opportunity tagged with Collaboration in the past quarter, all citing friction with the platform team" is.

Surface coverage gaps explicitly

If you have an employee with thin observation coverage in the period, name it. Coverage gaps are about your management practice as much as about the employee, and skip-level managers want to see you noticing them.

Use the watchlist sparingly

If everything is on the watchlist, nothing is. Three to five items is a good ceiling. The watchlist is for things you would lose sleep over if you stopped paying attention; everything else belongs in the standard sections.

Write for the skip-level

The default audience for a team summary is your manager. Write so they can read it in five minutes and walk into your next 1:1 with two or three substantive questions. Avoid jargon they would not know, and lead each section with the conclusion before the supporting detail.

Privacy and access

• Team summaries are visible to you and to anyone you explicitly share with.
• Skip-level summaries are visible to you and to anyone you explicitly share with; they do not reveal individual employee evidence beyond what is in the underlying team summaries.
• Direct reports do not see your team summary. If you want them to see something specific from it (for example, a team-level theme), put it in their individual summary or share it in their conversation.
• Org admins can see team summaries shared with them. Admins can audit the existence and metadata of team summaries (count, date, owner) for organizational reporting; content access requires explicit sharing.

Troubleshooting

My inputs panel is empty

The inputs panel pulls from individual summaries and observation history scoped to your direct reports. If empty:

• Confirm the period dates.
• Confirm the team membership reflects your direct reports as of the period end.
• Confirm you have authored observations in the period.

Henry's draft missed an employee

The Henry-assisted draft uses individual summaries as primary input. If a direct report does not have an individual summary for the period, they will appear in the input panel but contribute less to the draft. Either write the missing individual summary first, or note the gap manually in the team summary.

A skip-level summary is not available

Skip-level summaries require the Agentic plan and at least one direct-manager report. If you don't see the option, check your plan and confirm you have at least one report who manages others.

What to read next

• Writing performance summaries — individual summaries are the input to team summaries.
• Managing objectives — team summaries roll up objective status across the team.
• Running 360 feedback cycles — 360 themes often surface in team summaries.