How to Assess Your Team

 

Ben Kill, Chartered MCIPD

Assessing and developing critical skills within your team is essential for achieving high performance and ensuring continuous growth. In this text, we'll focus on two fundamental skills, communication and problem-solving, and provide some insights on how to evaluate and improve these skills for better team outcomes.

Effective communication is crucial in any high-performing team. This means you want every team member to be able to convey information clearly, both verbally and in writing. They should also excel at active listening, understanding, and validating others' points of view, and be able to adapt their communication styles to suit different audiences. If these behaviors are not being displayed, there are several ways to improve. You might practice summarizing others' points, which can enhance active listening skills, while online courses in public speaking and professional writing can improve overall communication abilities. Additionally, seeking feedback from peers on communication styles can provide valuable insights for improvement. Of course, the negative impact of not improving communication skills can be significant, leading to misunderstandings, errors, inefficiencies, and poor team morale.

Problem-solving is another essential skill for high-performing teams. Team members should be able to quickly identify issues and generate effective solutions, utilizing creative thinking to develop innovative solutions for even the most complex problems. They should also be able to analyze potential outcomes effectively to choose the best solutions. To improve their problem-solving skills, team members can participate in regular brainstorming sessions to foster creative thinking, or even engage in puzzles and games to sharpen their analytical skills. Finally, they should purposely seek diverse perspectives on problems so that they can broaden their approaches. Unfortunately, the consequences of not improving problem-solving skills include project delays, increased costs due to inefficient solutions, and reduced team effectiveness due to the growing number of unresolved issues.

Leaders should encourage team members to train and mentor each other in communication and problem-solving, and provide new opportunities and challenges to help them apply and further develop these skills. Additionally, managers should try to set clear objectives and create a structured development plan to ensure continuous skill enhancement. By focusing on these strategies, you can build a high-performing team that is motivated, engaged, and effective.

Continuing the assessment and development of critical skills within your team is essential for sustaining high performance and growth. In Part 2, we'll focuses on two additional fundamental skills: time management and leadership.

Effective time management is crucial for any high-performing team. Team members should be able to properly prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, thus ensuring that critical tasks are completed on time. Utilizing tools to manage time and stay organized is also key to maintaining productivity and meeting deadlines consistently without sacrificing quality. If these behaviors are not being displayed, team leaders can foster improvements by implementing new time management techniques like the Pomodoro Technique, using digital tools for tracking deadlines and tasks, and regularly adjusting priorities to respond to changing demands. Failing to foster good team management can lead to missed deadlines, poor productivity, and dependency on others due to poor workload management. Any leader can tell you that this can quickly alter team dynamics and cause a lot of unnecessary friction.

Leadership is another essential skill for high-performing teams. Effective leaders help inspire and motivate team members, fostering a positive and productive work environment. They also delegate tasks wisely, ensuring optimal workload distribution, and make decisions confidently. If these leadership behaviors are not being displayed, improvements can be made through mentorship from more experienced leaders, participating in leadership training programs, and seeking regular feedback from the team to refine leadership methods. Without good leadership, teams may suffer from a generalized lack of direction, leading to confusion, inefficiency, and poor decision-making, which can compromise project outcomes.

Whether you're the leader, a manager, or just team member, it's essential that you try to train and mentor one another in time management and leadership skills. You should also seek to provide new opportunities and challenges to help your teammates apply and further develop these skills.

Continuing the assessment and development of critical skills within your team is essential for sustaining high performance and growth. In Part 3, we'll take a closer look at two more fundamental skills: adaptability and teamwork.

Adaptability is crucial in today’s fast-paced work environment. Team members should be able to quickly adjust their approach in response to changing circumstances, embrace new technologies and processes readily, and maintain productivity and composure under stress. If these behaviors are not being displayed, leaders should try challenging team members with new and diverse projects, setting up cross-functional projects to gain experience with different perspectives, and offering feedback to help them understand new viewpoints. Failing to do so can lead to inflexibility that slows innovation and response to market changes, causes undue stress, and contributes to a sense of resistance to new ideas.

Teamwork is perhaps the most important and most obvious factor required for high-performing teams. Remember, just because people are working together, doesn't necessarily mean they are functioning as a team. Effective collaboration, open communication, and respect for diverse viewpoints are key components of strong teamwork. Each member should be able to contribute to group goals, help resolve conflicts amicably, and communicate openly. If these behaviors are not being displayed, it may be time to start engaging in team-building activities to strengthen bonds. It's also a good idea to try and instill empathy by having them consider others’ perspectives or create collaborative projects to improve team dynamics. If a team can't function as one, it can lead to project failures and missed goals.

Leveraging and supporting these critical skills is crucial for sustained success. Leaders should consider encouraging team members to train and mentor each other in both of these disciplines, and provide new opportunities and challenges to help them apply and further develop these skills. By focusing on these strategies, you can build a high-performing team that is motivated, engaged, and effective in achieving its goals.

https://tinyurl.com/yh4wc8m4

Шесть основных трендов в управлении эффективностью персонала

 

Белов Александр, ТопФактор

Согласно данным глобального исследования «11 трендов, о которых говорят HR-директора», проведенного CEB в 2016 г., только 4% HR-директоров в полной мере удовлетворены системами управления эффективностью (performance management - PM) в своих организациях. Кроме того, 85% намереваются в ближайшее время упрощать соответствующие подходы и методики, 66% – чаще проводить формальные мероприятия по оценке персонала, а 78% – чаще обсуждать результаты и эффективность работы с сотрудниками. Из этого можно сделать вывод, что управление эффективностью остается одним из наиболее значимых направлений для HR-службы.

Российский бизнес на несколько лет отстает от мировых трендов в этой области. В некоторых российских компаниях по прежнему идет дискуссия о том, стоит ли использовать «западный опыт» в области performance management, который строится на методе целевого управления с использованием ключевых показателей деятельности - KPI. При этом, в профессиональной среде обсуждается не столько применимость такого опыта, сколько конкурентоспособность PM-моделей. Большинство экспертов отмечает, что система оценки персонала должна соответствовать потребностям бизнеса, учитывать этап его развития и масштаб. Внедрение инструментов performance management может стать сильным конкурентным преимуществом, что особенно важно в текущих экономических условиях. Наглядный пример – компания Microsoft, которая потеряла рыночные позиции в отдельных областях за последние 5-7 лет, в том числе из-за несправедливой системы оценки результатов деятельности с использованием рейтингов. Применение такой системы негативно влияло на результаты команд, на качество создаваемых продуктов и на результаты бизнеса. Нужно отметить, что Microsoftс 2014 года все же изменила свою систему оценки персонала, перестроив ее в соответствии с современными трендами.

Среди российских менеджеров распространено заблуждение, что KPI-управление сводится к расчету премии и стимулированию персонала. В мировой HR-практике инструменты performance management используют для повышения вовлеченности сотрудников и управления талантами: это тот базис, на основании которого формируется кадровый резерв организации, происходит выявление карьерных амбиций, определяются задачи профессионального роста для сотрудника. Оплата за результат – это важный элемент в performance management, но ошибочно было бы все сводить только к премированию. Неверная расстановка акцентов во время обсуждения результатов работы за прошедший период (performance review) может привести к тому, что внимание руководителя и сотрудника на таких сессиях будет сосредоточено только на оценке прошлых результатов (ретроспективный фокус), и на том, в каком размере будет начислена премия. При этом более высокую эффективность (согласно отдельным исследованиям) демонстрируют те компании, в которых во время performance review руководители уделяют больше внимания способам улучшения результатовв будущем (фокус на перспективе). В ходе таких встреч руководитель с сотрудником определяют,что необходимо предпринять для повышения эффективности, а не заняты поиском виновных за полученные результаты.

В крупных компаниях, оценка персонала, как правило, уже реализуется посредством ежегодных встреч с руководителями для подведения итогов, предоставления обратной связи сотрудникам, постановки целей на новый год. Уместен вопрос – «насколько остаются адекватными годовые цели, когда бизнес вынужден существовать в условиях постоянной турбулентности?». За год может произойти очень многое: измениться ситуация на рынке, появиться новые приоритеты и исключительные возможности,реализоваться серьезные риски, на которые предприятие должно немедленно реагировать. Обратная связь, которую получает сотрудник от руководителя раз в год – зачастую оказывается запоздалой и не несет мотивирующей составляющей. Годовой цикл постановки целей и оценки результатов постепенно приобретает черты формальной процедуры, мало имеющей общего с реальной жизнью. Многие крупные компании стараются переходить на «скользящую оценку», увеличивают частоту встреч менеджеров со своими сотрудниками в течение года. А процедура оценки приобретает менее формальный характер и, строится,при этом, по определенному сценарию: подведение итогов за период, анализ причин успехов и неудач, совместное планирование будущих результатов.

Те компании, которые уже используют годовую оценку персонала, худо-бедно научились управлять этим процессом на бумаге: собирать и согласовывать раз в полгода/год соглашение о целях, заполнять оценочные листы, рассчитывать итоговый бонус и т.п. Но сокращение цикла с года до квартала, или с квартала до месяца – многократно увеличивает затраты на его администрирование. В этой ситуации без автоматизированной поддержки полноценно управлять этим процессом становится невозможно. И чем крупнее бизнес, тем сложнее задача: необходимо не только стандартизировать такой процесс, но и обеспечить вовлеченность всех сотрудников предприятия, на каждой территории присутствия, в каждом филиале и подразделении. Вместе с этим, при автоматизации рутинных процессов целевого управления, у сотрудников HR-служб меняется характер выполняемых ими функций. Вместо учетно-административных задач, появляется возможность заняться непосредственно вопросами связанными с развитием и обучением персонала, управлением талантами, формированием кадрового резерва.

Последнее время у руководителей появилось понимание, что эффективность предприятия определяется не столько индивидуальными результатами отдельных сотрудников, сколько коллективными результатами и эффективностью команд. Вместо оценки индивидуальных результатов сотрудника (по иерархии «сверху-вниз»), большую популярность приобретают оценкаэффективности команды. Очевидно, что добиться индивидуальной результативности на порядок легче, чем добиться эффективности работы коллектива. Необходимо обучать руководителей среднего звена управлять не только своими результатами, но обеспечивать сотрудничество (collaboration) внутри команды для достижения общего результата.  Без автоматизации добиться этого тяжело, в том числе по той причине, что постановка целей, отслеживание и их выполнения должны производиться на уровне каждого отдельного подразделения, каждого отдельного сотрудника, а не только на уровневсей организации. Мониторинг промежуточных результатов лидерами команд, предоставление обратной связи, должны происходить значительно чаще, чем принято для циклов итоговой оценки.

Интерактивность процесса оценки и обратной связи, прозрачность и доступность данных по KPI– следующий важный тренд в performance management. Раньше часто приходилось сталкиваться с тем, что учет исполнения KPI и расчет вознаграждения носили закрытый характер, а рядовые сотрудники даже не всегда понимали – как и на основании чего рассчитывается их бонус. Сейчас присутствует консенсус в понимании того, что регулярная обратная связь, которую получает сотрудник (на основании как объективных данных, так и субъективных оценок), является сама по себе ценностью и непосредственно влияет на мотивацию. Для проведения регулярных оценочных процедур также требуется автоматизированная поддержка: необходимо собирать опросные листы от руководителей и внутренних экспертовна каждом организационном уровне. Кроме того, HR-служба и высший менеджмент должны иметь постоянный доступ к информации о результативности каждого отдельного сотрудника, чтобы, с одной стороны обеспечить единообразие процедуры контроля результатов, а с другой стороны исключить искажения и субъективизм, которые могут иметь место (например, манипуляции с данными, несправедливые оценки и т.п.). Предоставление каждому сотруднику доступа к информации по выполнению количественных показателей, имеющихся задачах, полученных оценках и рассчитанному вознаграждению, позволяет добиться роста вовлеченности такого сотрудника, а также способствует построению индивидуальной стратегии достижения результата с использованием доступных ресурсов. Для этого сотрудник в удобное время может подключиться к личному кабинету в корпоративной системе, либо сделать это дистанционно – через интернет, к «облачному» решению. Иногда компании устанавливают в цехах (офисах) информационные киоски, через которые сотрудники могут получить доступ к своему личному кабинету. Таким образом, автоматизированная система становится площадкой, посредством которой организовано взаимодействие между руководителем и сотрудниками для постановки и контроля достижения целей. HR-служба выполняет роль администратора такой системы, а высший менеджмент имеет доступ к результатам для контроля и мониторинга бизнес-результатов по компании и подразделениям.

Между управлением эффективностью в целом и процедурой оценки эффективности персонала ошибочно ставить знак равенства. Управление эффективностью предприятия (Enterprise Performance Management - EPM) охватывает гораздо больший круг задач, при этом оценка персонала на основании достигнутых результатов – это только один из этапов цикла, в который также входит постановка стратегических целей, их декомпозиция по организационной иерархии, обеспечение сбора объективных данных о достигнутых результатах и т.п. Кстати, последняя задача оказывается одной из самых трудоемких и затратных для большинства российских компаний при реализации внедрения проектов performance management.

Адекватность и жизнеспособность системы KPI-управления во многом определяется тем, насколько корректные данные используются для расчета значений KPI. Учетные системы, в которых накапливаются первичные данныечасто оказываются не приспособленными к тому, чтобы с необходимойаналитикойи динамикой предоставлять информацию по ключевым показателям деятельности. Как следствие, проекты внедрения KPI-управления вслед за собой требуют запуска проектов внедрения отдельных автоматизированных систем: CRM, SCM, ERP и т.п., а также выделения бюджетов на интеграцию ИТ-систем и консолидацию данных по KPI. Этим ИТ-составляющая проектов Performance Managementне заканчивается. В конечном счете, такие проекты носят кросс-функциональный характер, поскольку для сбора фактических данных по KPIтребуется глубокое погружение в каждую предметную область (маркетинг, продажи, управление производством, цепочками поставок, финансами и т.п.). В рамках концепции Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) развиваются автоматизированные системы, которые поддерживают весь цикл управления эффективностью работы предприятия, включая проведение бизнес-анализа с целью поиска неявных способов повышения эффективности, использования предсказательных аналитик и т.п.

Рисунок 1.Основные тренды в развитии систем performance management

  Чтобы начать проект внедрения performance management и автоматизировать одноименные процессы, требуется известная смелость и политическая воля первых лиц предприятия. В отличии от автоматизации других функциональных бизнес-процессов (продажи, производство, дистрибуция), для успешного завершения проекта часто необходимо проведение полномасштабного управления изменениями, поскольку в таких проектах в первую очередь необходимо работать с людьми, с их ожиданиями, как явными, так и неявными. Несмотря на это, все больше руководителей понимают, что инвестиции в задачи performance management позволят предприятию получить значительную отдачу в короткой перспективе. Рост вовлеченности и эффективности персонала в текущей экономической ситуации – это действенный рычаг, который может оказать положительное влияние на эффективность бизнеса в целом.

https://tinyurl.com/4v289b8z

5 Components Of Performance Management System

In today's dynamic and competitive business world, empowering employees is no longer a mere corporate catchphrase; it's a strategic imperative. Engaged and motivated employees are the backbone of any successful organization. To achieve this, modern businesses are leveraging technology to enhance performance management processes. Here, we will explore the significance of a performance management app in empowering employees, improving productivity, and fostering a culture of continuous growth.

The Importance Of Empowering Employees

Empowering employees means granting them the autonomy, tools, and resources they need to succeed. When employees feel empowered, they are more likely to take ownership of their roles, become proactive problem-solvers, and contribute to the organization's overall success. Moreover, empowered employees are more engaged, satisfied, and committed to their work.

The Role Of Performance Management

Performance management is a systematic approach to ensure that employees' efforts align with organizational goals and values. Traditional performance evaluations, with annual reviews, are becoming obsolete as businesses seek real-time feedback and data-driven insights into employee performance. This is where performance management apps come into play.

https://tinyurl.com/mr2eve73

Key Performance Indicators

 

Sustaining New Directions

 A sequel to a Balancing Act about how to implement and sustain a balanced scorecard.

By Howard Rohm & Larry Halbach

https://tinyurl.com/3yd7dkyb

Six Steps To Create a Simple Framework for a Complex Business Turnaround

 

By Tony Uphoff

Regardless of the age or size of your company, your model, or the market you serve, at some point, you will be faced with the need to execute a turnaround. While the need for business turnarounds is common, they are remarkably challenging to do successfully. Boston Consulting Group research shows that only 20% of business turnarounds are successful today, down from 30% in the year 2000.

Having helped lead the transformation and successful turnarounds of several businesses, I can personally attest that turning around a declining business is incredibly difficult. Reducing it to a simple checklist runs the risk of over-simplifying a complex, challenging endeavor. At the same time, there are frameworks to help you focus on the main drivers of a successful turnaround. One last upfront point: Turning around a declining company is not for the faint of heart. It takes remarkable energy, fortitude, and emotional resilience. Ok…now on to the framework

1) Demand, Capability, and Margin

A primary reason that business turnarounds have such a low success rate is that some businesses are beyond saving. I always start with three core questions:

1. Is there a clear demand for the product or service the company offers?
2. Does the company have sustainable differentiation?
3. Can the company do so at a reasonable margin?

In my experience, you have to be able to answer yes to two out of three of these questions or a turnaround simply isn’t possible. It’s also my experience that if the answer to the first question is no, then there really isn’t a business to turn around.

2) Resources

Do a deep dive into how the current resources of the business are being allocated. Inevitably, struggling businesses have a disproportionate amount of resources tied up in the declining, unprofitable parts of the business, which starves potential growth areas. Certainly, understanding access to capital is a critical assessment to be made in a business turnaround. Access to capital can be a detriment in a turnaround, however, allowing managers to ignore the underlying problems.

Most successful business turnarounds involve the reallocation of resources, not the addition of new ones. Start by determining where you can shift resources and redeploy them for a better return as opposed to trying to add resources to an existing business that is failing.

3) People

Simply put, your job as a business leader is to recruit, retain, and develop the best people you can and continually put them in the best positions for success. Do a careful review of the organization.

Does the business have the right people, in the right positions, with the proper systems to enable them to be successful? Where are the talent gaps? Is the business organized properly? In many struggling businesses, organizational planning has been forgotten, resulting in a dysfunctional structure that is sub-optimal.

4) Product

A core reason businesses fail is a poor or nonexistent product strategy. Buyer personas and simplistic buyer journey models no longer work. Today, a more rigorous understanding of your buyers’ “jobs-to-be-done” is required. This process, pioneered by Harvard Professor and author Clayton Christensen, is now being used extensively in product design and development. By starting with your customers’ jobs-to-be-done, you will develop a deeper understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve that will serve as a guide for delivering a product that meets their needs.

5) Process

In knowledge work, creating, refining, and managing process is the key to generating scale. In analyzing failed companies, poor or sub-scale processes are often one of the main reasons for failure. The process can be tricky to isolate and analyze, too.

Process management needs to be a core competency in any successful turnaround. The best way to analyze process improvement is to look at your customer’s experience from interest-to-invoice. As you do so, you will find bottlenecks, duplicative processes, inefficiencies, and processes that can be eliminated, automated, or improved. Companies that have been in a sustained state of decline become slaves to a series of internal processes that have become irrelevant to customer value.

Let me restate this to be clear: Any internal process that doesn’t ultimately benefit customers should be re-examined and cut out if possible. You will find that in turnaround situations, it is in the process details where culture may rear its head. You may hear: “This is the way we’ve always done it” or “Our customers expect us to do it this way.” One of my personal favorites is: “We tried doing it differently but it didn’t work.”

In my experience, one of the quickest paths to business performance improvement is through process improvement.

6) Performance

Performance is a trailing indicator of the success of your people, product, and process efforts. Measure your success in these areas first. Then, measure and manage your performance.

One of the biggest challenges in declining businesses is that management gets caught up in the painfully obvious. The business is declining as opposed to focusing on the leading indicators that will help answer the question of why and what can be done about it. Set clear, measurable, and achievable performance metrics.

Many business turnarounds fail before they start based on management setting unrealistic performance metrics that the team doesn’t buy into. My recommendation is to organize your turnaround performance metrics around three key measurements:

1. Performance against budget
2. Performance against the previous year
3. Performance against a goal, if relevant

Beware of getting caught up in vanity metrics. In struggling companies, in an effort to find something to celebrate, managers can get caught up in tracking metrics that really don’t matter. Focus myopically and only on metrics that matter, set them realistically, communicate them openly, and celebrate success milestones along the way.

Final Thoughts

Over the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in four successful turnarounds and learned some valuable lessons along the way. Most of them, I learned the hard way! Helping to lead a successful turnaround is an invaluable career experience and one that every C-level executive has had or will have to go through.

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Make Performance Improvement Strategic

 Have you ever wondered if your performance improvement interventions are aligned with corporate strategy?

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The Performance Cheat Sheet

 

The Performance Cheat Sheet.

To help you understand the Past.

Monitor the Present.

Target the Future.

☑️Here’s what the Performance Cheat Sheet includes:

🎯 5 Performance KPIs

🎯 12 Profitability KPIs

🎯 The Financial Performance Ratios

🎯 The DuPont Analysis

🎯 Project Profitability (NPV, IRR, PP, PI)

🎯 Gross Profit vs. Contribution Margin

🎯 EBITDA vs. EVA

🎯 5 Cash Flow Ratios

🎯 5 EBITDA Ratios

☑️ Use this Cheat Sheet to set up a Performance management framework that works for you and your organization.

It will help you make sense of past organization performance, manage the current one and strategize how to achieve your targets for the future.

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How to evaluate and improve your team’s goal performance

 

Hit or miss, once your team finishes a goal, you may feel compelled to rush to the next one. Don’t do it. Otherwise you could end up repeating a costly mistake next quarter — or realize, a year from now, that you got too comfortable with your “fail-safe” process, and other teams are passing yours by.

To guard against these kinds of painful (and potentially career-limiting) outcomes, you’ll need to continually hone your goal-setting process. Try pausing after each big goal to follow these tips:

1. Evaluate your team’s performance, including how much they learned and improved their process.

People tend to make win-or-lose evaluations of goals, but performance is rarely so absolute. For example, if you end up at 95 percent of a goal, is that the same as meeting only 50 percent? Would it have been worth the effort to push for those final five percentage points and burn everyone out in the process? Maybe. Maybe not.

Also be sure to consider less quantifiable yet critical factors, like whether your team learned, improved their process, and worked well together. Did they broaden their understanding of a new market, implement new time-saving software, or better leverage each other for problem solving? These kinds of things — more than whether they hit 95 percent versus 100 percent of a forecasted metric — will lead to future success.

So, how’d the team do on the goal? Factoring in all of your performance considerations, grade your team’s success — for example, on a scale of zero to one. Maybe your team earns a 0.9 if they hit their target metric but you think they could have collaborated more effectively, and a 0.6 if they fell well short but showed some improvement. You’re not always aiming for a one here — too many perfect scores could mean your goals are easy.

Then, walk through the full evaluation in a team debrief (see point No. 5). By including the team’s learning and improvement, you’ll be letting your team know that those things matter to you, and should matter to them, too.

2. Consider what you learned about your team’s dynamics and address areas that need improvement.

How your team worked together toward the goal is one of the best predictors of how they’ll work together in the future.

As part of assessing your team dynamic, consider the important informal roles that team members played during the goal process. Ask yourself:

• Who stood up for the values and mission of the team or company — for example, by trumpeting these things or by subtly modeling a value in their behavior?
• Who provided support when others needed it (technical, emotional, or both)?
• Who acted as an expert, and on what tasks (and did the rest of the team view them as expert)?

Depending on your answers, you may realize that some of these roles still need filling. Consider who on your team might fit the bill. Or, you may need to encourage a team member to embrace their informal role more fully, or gently suggest that someone tone it down (for example, by saying to an overzealous expert, “Wei knows a lot about this too, and I’d like to be sure she has a chance to share her expertise”).

3. Determine whether you or your team made undue sacrifices for the sake of reaching your goal.

Goals give you tunnel vision — great for helping you and your team focus on an objective, but potentially terrible for noticing what that focus may be costing you. So when reflecting on the goal process, check whether high expectations or stress have caused you or your team to:

• Skip out on regular obligations. Canceling 1-on-1s lately? Not making time to give advice or help other teams? Missing more dinners at home? It may be totally worthwhile to make these sacrifices once or twice, or for a short period. But have they become a destructive habit?
• Lose interest in the work itself. Sometimes as the pressure of meeting a goal number or deadline rises, the work you or team members once loved just doesn’t seem that fun anymore. Psychologists would call this a reduction in intrinsic (or internal) motivation. This trade-off tends to happen slowly and, over time, can hurt performance and even lead to burnout.
• Take shortcuts. Some types of shortcuts may be improvements, like reducing steps in a legacy process. But plenty of others, like signing low-quality customers or deliberately inflating cost estimates, are potentially dangerous. It’s easy to say, “That doesn’t happen on my team!” But one third of workers report observing misconduct on the job, according to global surveys by the Ethics & Compliance Initiative.

If any of these sound familiar, you’ll need to address the issue, either with individuals or through team feedback.

4. Assess your coaching and leadership performance.

Self-reflection is critical to improving as a manager. Think back to pivotal moments in the goal process: expectations you set (or didn’t set!) around the objectives, feedback you gave to both individuals and the team, tasks you delegated, coaching you delivered along the way. What were the results of your actions? For example, in the case of feedback you gave, did the team heed and implement it? If not, you might want to work on giving feedback and your persuasion skills.

You’ll get a fuller picture of your performance if you ask your team members for feedback. Ask them what you did that worked well and what didn’t, so you get specific results that aren’t all positive. For help navigating what can be a tricky ask, given the power dynamic, see the video below.

Experienced manager Grayson Morris explains how he “seeds” the conversation to get more honest feedback from direct reports. 

5. Conduct a debrief with your team.

Whatever you call it — a debrief, post-mortem, retrospective — schedule it soon, before you and the team are onto the next project or packing your bags for vacation. Your goal should be to walk out of the room knowing what the team’s going to do differently next time, and who’s responsible for making what happen.

This is often tougher than it sounds; teams tend to focus on dishing out recognition and possibly blame during a debrief — to the exclusion of what to do with this information. As these acknowledgments come up, you can incorporate the feedback you developed while evaluating yourself and your team, as well as ask, “What steps can we take to improve this next time? Who might be responsible for making this change?”

6. Resolve to implement at least one change that comes out of the debrief meeting.

Too often, teams go back to their desks after debriefs and forget what just happened, which means everyone just wasted their time. One debrief may not give you all the answers, but likely it will give you at least an idea or two to test, which will provide you with even more data to learn from.

You’re not looking to do some massive experiment that stakes the team’s reputation on the results. As experienced manager Michael “Zipp” Zippiroli explains, he prefers small, controlled tests: “I am uncomfortable with my team doing whatever they want,” he explains. “I am comfortable with them saying, ‘I have a hypothesis I’d like to test. My hypothesis is X, and I’d like to do five calls to try it.’”

Just make sure you’re measuring what you think should change (as well as important things you don’t expect to change, to check your assumptions). Also have a group doing it the old way, so you have a comparison for your test.

7. Communicate your results and plans beyond your own team, sharing what’s working and how the team intends to improve.

Once you have your team’s results, you’ll also have an audience — your manager and peers want to know how things went. And there may not be a better time to give your team’s ideas a voice. In addition to communicating how your team performed:

• Ask for additional input from your manager. Hopefully, you’ve been getting your manager’s feedback all along. But it’s worth asking for more now that results are in and everyone is thinking about what comes next.
• Ask peers how their teams fared, and solicit feedback. If your team is an outlier — performing really well or really poorly — it’ll be valuable to learn more about why. And if a bunch of other teams struggled, too, that may ease the pressure on your team.
• Consider getting feedback on any planned tests (point No. 6). Peers facing similar challenges could offer some great input, as could your manager. Or, you may need approval from your manager before doing a test, depending on your relationship and your organization’s culture.

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