Maximizing Team Performance: Part 4 of 5

Make AND take time to Assess and Evaluate Team Performance. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the ‘day to day’ business and simply spending all of your time‘putting out fires.’ Before you know it, the day, the week, the year is gone and you don’t know whether or not you and your team is really making progress! Don’t fall into this trap! A healthy team takes time out, FREQUENTLY, to assess Team Performance.

Take a professional sports team for example, who continually assesses team performance on game day, weekly, monthly, yearly and multiple year basis! Why wouldn’t you do the same? For us, weekly may be overkill. Yet, waiting around for the ‘big quarterly’ reviews, in most cases, just doesn’t cut it!

Here’s three crucial areas that must always be continually assessed and measured on the Team PerformanceFront:

1)   Business Performance: What our ‘promise’ is to the business

a.    What did we set to achieve this quarter?

b.    What are our KPI (key performance indicators) that show whether we are winning or losing?

c.    What are we driving?

                                              i.     Efficiency gains?

                                            ii.    Revenue gains?

                                          iii.    Margin?

2)   Functional Performance: How strong/solid is our infrastructure/systems/processes to deliver on our promises?

a.    Are our core competencies fully leveraged and maximized?

b.    Are our processeses up to date?

c.    Are our capabilities being fully leveraged?

d.    Where are we improving? Where are we still broken?

3)   Leadership Performance: Are our relationships and leadership healthy?

a.    Are we as leaders modeling ideal ‘leadership behavior?’

b.    Is there ownership and buy-in within the team towards around our goals?

c.    Are we aligned among the team?

d.    Are we aligned with our stakeholders across the company?

e.    Is our Team brand Healthy?

The constant and continual evaluation of team progress and performance is critical on many fronts. It keeps communication at a peak. It puts accountability on the forefront. It allows teams to pivot and be agile when necessary. It fosters transparency. And most importantly, it fosters ownership and breeds the concept of ‘One Team.’

Rubi