Improving Team Performance by the Numbers
Paul Edelman, PhD, PCC
Executive Coach | Facilitator | Family Business and Wealth Consultant
When individuals don’t speak up in meetings, CEOs can feel frustrated. Perceptive CEOs know success requires people to participate actively, contribute their best ideas, and work together as a team to make good decisions and implement effective actions.
To address this frustration, here are three principles and a simple method CEOs and other senior leaders can use to improve team engagement, participation, and performance.
Principles of Engagement
- Members of the highest performing teams have a moderately high and relatively even level of dominance
- How often a particular team member speaks in meetings is a reasonably good measure of dominance
- Low participators may be feeling anxious, angry, or unprepared
Improvement by the Numbers
The COImpAct (Context, Outcomes, Implications, and Action) model, described in my last three posts, is useful in solving complex problems. Here is a method suggested by the model:
- Using a ten-point scale, rate how often each person on your team participates in meetings.
- Arrange the ratings in order. For example, Team A has five members with scores: 10, 7, 4, 2, 1. Team B has seven members with scores: 8, 7, 6, 6, 5. You may find it helpful to create a graph:
3. Examine your team’s numbers. Numbers can tell stories, paint pictures, or evoke feelings. Let your mind go. What comes to you?
4. To refine your thinking, consider your team in its context:
- What are the team’s goals?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- What are the goals, interests, and characteristics of each individual team member?
- How does your team prepare for meetings?
- How do you conduct the meetings?
- How well is the team functioning?
- Who might feel anxious, angry, unprepared? What would it take for them to feel more comfortable?
5. Consider the implications for you as a leader. Going forward, how can you generate ideas for shifting your action to improve the team’s outcomes?
Success Stories
The possibilities for process improvement are unlimited. Feel free to comment below to share what has worked in your context.
If you find this approach of interest, I would very much appreciate hearing your comments and suggestions.
Senior Functional Consultant @ Blue Crab Consulting | Mentoring for Expert Implementation Teams
5 年This article says "think about how much your team members talk, then do something about that." Super helpful.
Analytics and AI leader, advisor, and coach - ex-Apple, IBM & Goldman Sachs
5 年I think you have to distinguish between meetings with CEOs and other meetings. The former includes a whole bunch of other dynamics driven by personality and leadership culture that sets them apart from other meetings. These dynamics might influence other meetings through culture, but non-CEO meetings are typically much less fraught. In my team meetings, I rotate the chair so that everyone, even interns, gets a feel for running effective, inclusive meetings and gains confidence in speaking up at other meetings.
Helping event professionals create outstanding attendee experiences through expert agenda design, speaker curation, emceeing and LEGO?. Event design from C$7k, Emceeing from C$2k, LEGO?SERIOUS PLAY? from C$1.5k
5 年I use LEGO Serious Play. One of the strengths of this approach is that everyone on the team gets to have a say, to tell their story through the bricks. Of course you can’t use this for every meeting.
Chief-Reframer at Reframe.Work Inc. and Co-Author of Humans at Work and Humanizing Human Capital
5 年Love the simplicity of the model and its visual-ness (is that a word? :) Visualizing the distribution of airtime is also a great way to determine the sense of inclusion on the team. One other element I’d track in addition to the count of “speak-ups” is also the number of interruptions. Wait... but then I become too focused on counting vs the meeting outcome.. NM I talked myself out of counting interruptions. It might be a great conversation to have with Beth Porter who’s automated this exact process through her Riff Learning Inc solution. The two of you should chat!
AI Speaker and Builder | I help companies leverage AI so they don't get left behind | Singularity University Faculty | EY Tech Faculty
5 年This is great!? Thanks for posting!!