Know Thyself (and Thy Team)

How often do you think about your actual capabilities—not what you hope you're good at, but what you can reliably perform under pressure, in the field, when it counts? Now stretch that question: do you know what your team is good at? Do you know what they're not good at?

Imagine you discover a vulnerable access point: a drainage conduit that opens into a secure building’s basement, or a balcony entry that requires you to scale the second floor.

But then reality sets in—you or your teammate is terrified of heights, or lacks the upper body strength to safely execute the climb. What seemed like an elegant entry vector suddenly becomes a dead end. Not because the system was secure, but because you weren’t equipped to exploit it.

Why Skill Assessments Matter More When Your Team is Smaller

In large black teams, skill redundancy can often hide individual weaknesses. If one person can’t pick a lock, someone else probably can. But in smaller teams—especially two- or three-person field crews—every skill gap is a potential mission failure point. You don’t have the luxury of leaning on someone else’s ability. You are either capable, or you're not.

That’s where personal and team skill assessments come in.

The chart at the top of this post tells a familiar story: the yellow bars represent what someone thinks they’re good at. The red bars show what they actually are good at, based on real-world performance.

The discrepancies are where the trouble lies. For example, someone may think they're an 80 in planning, but if their actual ability is a 25, then your entire op plan may be based on overconfidence rather than capability.

How to Conduct a Skill Assessment

Whether you’re a team lead or a solo operator, conducting an honest assessment of your capabilities is essential. Here’s how to start:

1. Define Your Skill Categories

Break down your operational capabilities into concrete areas: lock picking, alarm systems, breaching techniques, reconnaissance, social engineering, building scaling, digital hacking, and planning. If your team has niche needs (drones, covert comms, etc.), include those.

2. Use Dual Ratings: “I THINK” vs “I AM”

Have each team member rate themselves for each skill, then perform training or exercises to test those skills but ensure that you record both scores. In my experience, the larger the difference between the skills someone thinks they have, and they actually have tends to bleed into mission planning more than anything else.

For example, if someone thinks they are a master lockpicker, but when tested cannot pick any lock under stress, paradoxically lock picking will often be something that person will include as part of their breaching plan simply because they believe they have those skills

• “I THINK” (a self-assessment based on perception)

• “I AM” (a reality-based score drawn from either tested drills, past ops, or validated simulations)

It will be up to the team lead to assess where the team is and what their current skill sets are.
This is also a great way to know where to increase or decrease practice and exercises.

3. Cross-Validate Within the Team

Let your teammates assess each other’s abilities. This adds another layer of objectivity and may highlight blind spots or underappreciated strengths.

If your team is large enough, you can ask your teammates to anonymously rate each other to get an idea of how the team as a whole view one another.

In my experience, this evaluation has been excellent at finding gaps in abilities under high stress situations that may not occur during training. For example, you have a teammate who is excellent at social engineering, even during training, but when on the job they forget how to talk to another human, which may only be apparent to the teammate who was there to witness it.

4. Assess At Various Stress Levels

When you are assessing someones skills realize that stress always plays a part in the testing. If someone is very good at lockpicking at their desk under a zero stress environment, but terrible when its in the middle of a heavily trafficked office when they could get caught, than you need to find a way to test both situations.

One is the basic competencies, while the second is a real world assessment. Also realize, that if your teammate has the skills to do something like lockpicking but cannot perform under pressure, than they likely need training in stress management more than they need extra lockpicking practice.

5. Practice and Improve

Once you have your skill assessment, it is vital that you create a training program that will help your team both improve the skills they lack, as well as keep the skills that they already possess.

Remember your team, and yourself, need to be trained both in low stress situations for the basic skills, but then also under high stress in a similar manner to how they will use those skills in the real world.

For example, decoding a keybox on your desk is simple, but doing it in the middle of the night outside in the rain and cold is very different. And no, I am not encouraging you to force your teammates to go out at 2am in the rain and decode a lock, but you should think of ways to simulate various high stress situations they will likely encounter.

Planning Based on Reality, Not Fantasy

If you're not strong in recon, maybe you're not the right lead for a covert surveillance op. If your only lockpicker has a 50% success rate under pressure, maybe it’s time to diversify that skill set. And if you think you're a master planner but keep watching ops crumble in execution, it’s time to recalibrate and get help.

Perhaps most importantly, understand the teams skill set will also help to improve your time management when on an engagement. For example, if nobody on your team is proficient at alarm bypassing, and you have observed a robust night time alarm system … than don’t waste your time on evening mission planning and alarm bypassing and focus on other avenues of approach.

Final Thoughts

Every black team op is a balance between opportunity and limitation. You can’t control every variable, but you can control how well you understand your people. As the team shrinks, the consequences of these blind spots grow exponentially. So, take the time. Run the assessment. Learn what you’re good at—and what you only think you are.

The entry is there. The question is: can you actually take it?