Strategies for Evaluating the Team’s Progress and Results

Strategies for Evaluating the Team’s Progress and Results

Khai Minthang

Beaumont, TX

Introduction: The accountability cornerstone is a foundation for your team members to begin sharing in the team’s overall results while remaining responsible as individuals. Distributing the burdens and successes of the team’s work to everyone who is part of the team is your obligation as team manager. In nautical terms, although you may be the captain of the ship, every member of the crew shares responsibility for bringing the ship to its destination. So, as a manager, you need to install a shared sense of accountability by including the team when assessing its progress and evaluating its results. Each strategy can help your team focus on how it’s performing while work is in progress and assess how it has performed once the work is done.

Conducting status review meetings: Meetings are an exchange of ideas, information, or opinions by a group of people who play an active role to achieve specific results. At status review meeting, the team reviews the status of its work. For status meetings to be useful, they need to happen on a regular basis, depending on what the work dictates and what team members need. Some managers still only pull their employees aside for a talk when performance is poor. Then, the employee is on the defensive and expecting censure- not at all the right atmosphere for coaching and improving performance. A good status review meeting focuses on what people are getting done, not merely what they are working on. The spotlight is on results, not activities. For status review meetings to be useful, they need to happen on a regular basis.

Publishing Results through Company Newsletter: People outside the team, like management above you and groups affected by what your team does, may sometimes wonder, “Just what are you folks accomplishing?” Publishing a company newsletter can serve many purposes to get your name into the community and enhance your image with customers. Publishing a company newsletter can bring many benefits to your small or home-based business. Even if you are not good at writing or know nothing about publishing, you can either hire a freelance writer to do this for you or learn a few basics to get the job done.

Publishing a summary report: A summary report is a written progress review of your team’s work. The report is not only for the team’s use. It also is for broadcasting the team’s progress and results to those outside the team who want or need to know. Generally, you want to publish the team’s summary reports at reasonable intervals – once a month to once a quarter often works best. A good summary report gives those outside the team a picture of its progress. So stick to the highlights and avoid globs of detail.

Making a team presentation: The second useful strategy for spreading the wealth about your team’s progress is making presentations to management above you or to other groups that are interested in your team’s work. Presentations help other people, especially those in management, understand what your team is doing. Because the stakes are high, you want to make sure that your team looks good when it delivers a presentation.

Conducting regular customer surveys: Project teams need regular and meaningful feedback from their customers. Other aspects of a periodic survey can be specific to a recent project task or mini-project: Customer can provide timely and immediate feedback about recent team behaviors focused on client-desired outcomes. Teams need to dedicate time to reviewing the survey results, and to seeking additional information when any feedback is not clear. Further, teams need to act on feedback that exposes weaknesses in the team’s performance. Doing so has the doubly positive effect of improving the weak area and demonstrating to the clients that the feedback it provided was meaningful, and contributed to positive changes.

Evaluating team performance: Effective teams know what excellent performance is. Effective teams do more than simply understand when excellent performance occurs – they acknowledge and celebrate these instances. Your journey toward strong team performance and a sense of shared accountability continues. There are two ways to evaluating team performance:

1. Conducting postmortems: In medical jargon, a postmortem is an examination of a body after the person has died. For teams, death is not involved. A team postmortem is an evaluation of performance after a project or special event has concluded. The idea is to learn lesions from the past, the pluses and minuses, and then to apply them to future performance. A project postmortem is most relevant when your team know it will take on similar projects in the future. Two ways work best for teams’ postmortem - Reviewing the past and planning the future.

2. Conducting a performance evaluation: A team performance evaluation is similar to a postmortem. It is an evaluation of the team’s overall performance at the end of a given cycle, generally at the end of a quarter or six-month period. It is a scheduled event, and the team is responsible for making it happen, evaluating results against established performance criteria that are selected in advance. This is not you evaluating the team but rather the team evaluating itself, including your input. With data in hand, your team is ready to start the evaluation meeting.

Review Lessons Learned: “Lesson Learned” reviews are self-critical processes that help teams consider performance-related and process-related information that is apparent to members of the group, but has not been synthesized as yet. It is a process of internal feedback from the team to the team. Although it is a self-critical exercise, the tone of this session needs to remain positive. The focus of this effort is on future improvement in processes that can achieve better results. Lessons Learned sessions require the members to demonstrate emotional intelligence, to understand that the point of having these meetings is team learning and team self-understanding, rather than individual performance evaluations. The attitudes of members during this process need to be non-defensive and self-examining, with an acceptance that team effectiveness is based on an accurate assessment of what it does well ---- and not so well. It is a unique opportunity to frame all assessments – positive and negative – in terms of the team, thus reinforcing team identity and the relationships of members to the team itself.

Retreats: Along the same vein effective teams understand that there is a great deal of value in conducting intermittent retreats that bring members together in a external context to review team values, goals, norms, processes, and any other aspect of team view. Some retreats are focused on planning for the future, but even these types of retreats benefit from exercises that reinforce team identity. The future is largely contingent on what exists today.

Conclusion: Reflecting on past successes helps a team learn from what it has done well. Distributing the burdens and successes of the team’s work to everyone who is part of the team is your obligation as team manager. In nautical terms, although you may be the captain of the ship, every member of the crew shares responsibility for bringing the ship to its destination – and popping the cork to celebrate a successful voyage.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Bibliography:
1. Sandra Gurvis, Management Basics, A Practical Guide for Managers, Second Edition (Avon: F+W Publications, 2008)
2. Rose Halas, Essortment, “Do you need a company newsletter?” Articles – free online articles on Health, Science, Education, 2002 http://www.essortment.com/career/needcompanynew_twrp.htm (Accessed on January o8, 2010)
3. Stephen E. Kohn & Vincent D. O’Connell, 6 Habits of Highly Effective Teams (Franklin Lakes, The Career Press Inc., 2007)