# How to Write the Teamwork and Collaboration Section of a Performance Review Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-teamwork-and-collaboration/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-teamwork-and-collaboration.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The teamwork and collaboration section of a performance review is scored on behavior, not attitude. Eight steps to write it with evidence your manager can verify. ## Key facts - Title: How to Write the Teamwork and Collaboration Section of a Performance Review - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Teamwork, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: performance review teamwork and collaboration - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-teamwork-and-collaboration/ ## What this page covers - The teamwork and collaboration section of a performance review is scored on behavior, not attitude. Eight steps to write it with evidence your manager can verify. - Practical guidance for performance review teamwork and collaboration - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The teamwork and collaboration section of a performance review is the one most people stall on: you know you worked well with the team, but collaboration rarely leaves a deliverable with your name on it. What that section actually scores is observable behavior, not attitude — how you shared information, coordinated with others, delivered what you committed to, and handled disagreement. You write it by reconstructing three or four specific collaboration moments and describing each as situation, action, and outcome. That is the short version, and it is not where people get stuck. The harder part sits earlier, in a step the phrase lists skip. ## How to write the teamwork and collaboration part of a performance review Search this topic and what you mostly get is wording. Status.net publishes a hundred collaboration phrases and another hundred for teamwork, JOP lists 115, hr-survey.com keeps separate banks for both, and BetterUp offers forty. There is no shortage of sentences. What is missing is the material to put in them, and that is what the eight steps below produce — in order, because each depends on what the last one left you with. ### 1. Read the competency definition before you write anything Get three things in front of you first: the exact wording of the competency on your form, the rating scale your manager will score you against, and the deadline. The wording matters more than it looks. The phrase libraries keep teamwork and collaboration as separate categories for a reason: teamwork tends to describe how you operate inside your own team — pulling your weight, being reliable, supporting the people you sit with — while collaboration describes how you work across teams and functions. If your form names only one, find out which behavior your manager is being asked to rate. Writing well about the other one earns you nothing. ### 2. Rebuild the record from where collaboration leaves traces Collaboration produces no artifact of its own, which is exactly why it feels impossible to evidence. It does leave traces, though, and they are already on your laptop: the meeting you called to unblock two teams, the thread where you answered someone else's question, the handover you wrote before leave, the notes from your one-on-ones. Work backwards through your calendar and sent mail month by month and write down instances, not qualities. Both Lattice and Exec make the same point about timing — keep the record as the year goes along rather than assembling it in review week — because recall is uneven. The last two months arrive in detail and the first six do not, so a version built from memory hands your manager an incomplete year and presents it as a full one. ### 3. Pick three or four instances, not a list of qualities You now have a list. Cut it down to three or four. The reason is credibility. CMOE and BetterUp arrive at the same point from different directions: naming a real project, a specific colleague interaction, or a concrete result is what separates your account from the sentence everybody writes, which is some version of "I am a team player." Choose instances that differ in kind rather than four versions of one thing. One where you gave something away — knowledge, credit, time. One where there was friction and you handled it. One where you carried a commitment other people were depending on. Covering the range of the competency beats going deep in one corner of it. ### 4. Write each one as situation, action, outcome For each instance: a clause of context, a sentence on what you did, a sentence on what changed because of it. BetterUp's own example entries run in exactly this shape — organizing recurring brainstorming sessions for a product launch team, then tying that to the rise in campaign ideas that followed. The structure works because the outcome is the only part your manager can independently verify. Everything before it is a claim. The outcome does not have to be a number: "the handover took two days instead of the usual two weeks" is an outcome. What fails is stopping at the action, because "collaborated closely with the design team" reads identically whether it went well or badly. ### 5. Check your account against what your manager already told you Before you finalize anything, reread the feedback from your last review and any notes you kept from one-on-ones. Lattice's review-preparation guidance is direct about this: look at what your manager praised last time, and show that you have developed the areas they said needed work. On this competency, that is where a mediocre rating gets reversed. If last cycle's note was that you worked too independently, the instance to write up is the one where that did not happen this time. You are not only describing your year — you are answering something specific. ### 6. Name one growth area, and attach a request to it BetterUp's guidance is to pair your examples with one honest area for growth. One, not three, and not a decorative weakness chosen because it is safe. This is the part people want to fudge, and fudging costs more than honesty does. The development box is the one place on the form where a real gap converts into something concrete: a cross-functional project, time with someone who does it well, a change in what you get looped into. Name the area, say what you have tried, and attach the specific thing you are asking for. Choosing the area is harder than writing it, because the collaboration gaps you can see are rarely the ones costing you most — that is close to the definition of a blind spot. If you are unsure which one is genuinely yours, it is worth [seeing which gap is real](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit one to paper. The Job Skills Test is free and scores you from the outside, the only angle from which a gap you are not already looking at becomes visible. ### 7. Submit inside the window, then prepare to talk rather than defend It helps to know the mechanics of what happens next. In a typical cycle — Florida Atlantic University's published HR timeline is a clear example — you complete the self-evaluation within a set window of roughly four weeks, after which the form routes to your supervisor, who writes their evaluation inside a comparable window. Read that sequence closely, because it changes what you are writing. Your account arrives before their rating is finalized, which makes it an input rather than a reply to a verdict. It is also read by one person with a stack of these to get through, so three well-evidenced instances beat eight thin ones. Then prepare for the meeting rather than the form. ClearCompany's case for structuring reviews as conversations is the practical point here: expect at least one place where their read of your collaboration differs from yours, and treat that as the part worth having. Ask what specifically they saw. ### 8. Start the next cycle's record on the way out This one takes five minutes and removes most of step 2 next time. Open a running note — a document, a recurring reminder, whatever you will actually use — and add collaboration instances as they happen, with the outcome attached while you still remember it. Nearly every source that touches preparation says some version of this, and it is the only advice here that compounds: next year the difference is between summarizing a record you already have and rebuilding one from your calendar the night before. ## Where a strong collaboration rating actually comes from Read back over those eight steps and notice how little of the work was writing. It was knowing what your manager is being asked to score, having behaved in ways that produced evidence in the first place, and judging your own contribution accurately enough that the honest parts read as credible. All of that is built long before review week — and it is built, not issued at birth. **Working with Your Manager** treats the performance review as a part of the relationship you can prepare for: influence the evaluation, keep it future-focused, ask for what you want instead of waiting to be offered it. The mechanism most people miss sits earlier, in the regular one-on-one — meeting every week or two, taking notes, making results visible while they are still fresh. Do that and the teamwork section stops being an archaeology project. It also explains why an honest account outperforms a polished one: the relationship runs as a partnership, and both sides can tell when it is being managed. **Teamwork** is the competency being scored, so it pays to know what it is made of: coordinating your work rather than protecting your patch, sharing knowledge freely, giving credit to the team, being reliable enough that your commitments are load-bearing for other people, disagreeing openly and then implementing the decision anyway, and telling a colleague directly when they have missed something rather than routing it upward. Those behaviors are what a rating is assembled from, which makes them the list to write your instances against. **Building Self-Awareness** does the thing the form asks of you directly: judging your own collaboration accurately, without underselling it and without claiming a version of yourself your manager never saw. It also covers the harder half, which is taking the feedback once it arrives — understand it first, add your own view second, reflect third, in that order. And ask for advice that is specific and future-facing, because "be more collaborative" is not something anyone can act on. That last one shows why the framework counts **twelve of these skills rather than two or three**: self-awareness is not itself a collaboration skill, and it still decides how well you can account for your collaboration. The Job Skills Test reads all twelve from the outside, free. If a collaboration rating has ever come back lower than you expected, that is the cheapest way to find out what the person rating you was seeing — worth [checking where your skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) while there is still a cycle left in which to change the answer. ## What this looks like by the next cycle Some of this may already be how you work — keeping a note of what you finished, or asking a colleague afterward what actually helped rather than assuming you knew. Small habits, and the ones that decide whether the teamwork box takes twenty minutes or an evening. Wherever the gaps sit right now, they are things not learned yet rather than limits on what you are capable of, and closing them does not ask you to become a different kind of colleague. It asks you to know which one to work on first — and that matters more as you go, because the further a career runs, the more of any evaluation rests on how you work with people rather than on tasks with your name attached. You have already done the part most people skip. You went looking for how to write this section properly, rather than pasting in one of the several hundred ready-made phrases that would have filled the box. ## Check your skills before the next review The one thing you cannot do from inside your own head is see yourself the way the person rating you does. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It scores you across all twelve — teamwork and the two skills above among them — and shows which are strongest today and which single one would repay attention next. That is the outside read your teamwork and collaboration section asks you to produce from the inside, and you can walk into the meeting already holding it. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The teamwork and collaboration section of a performance review is scored on behavior, not attitude. Eight steps to write it with evidence your manager can verify. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Teamwork, Building Self-Awareness. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-teamwork-and-collaboration/ Preferred summary: "The teamwork and collaboration section of a performance review is scored on behavior, not attitude. Eight steps to write it with evidence your manager can verify." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.