How to Review Your Team's Performance

Author: Kathy McShea
Published: November, 2008

If you are charged with leading change in a large organization, one of your primary challenges will be to determine where you are today and where you are going in the future. It should come as no surprise that most of the time everyone you talk to has a different take on both ends of the question.

How you reconcile the different points of view will in large measure determine whether you succeed or fail. Your mission is to review your team's current performance. So where do you begin?

My favorite trick is to pull a page from a Canadian playbook. Several years back, their government put a focus on citizen service across all their agencies. In order to jump-start the effort, everyone was provided with a guide that walked them through the necessary steps to transform their organizations.

It started with a planning assessment exercise. The exercise involves filling out a grid, nine issues long and grading your organization on a one to three scale against each issue. One means you are low performing, two means you are in transition and three means you are high performing.

Nine Steps for Your Review

The nine steps happen to coincide with a roadmap to transition you from low performing to high performing. Your goal is to color yourself green – rated three – in all nine areas.

Internal Accessment: Identify the internal and external clients products, services, partners and stakeholders

Assess Current State: Establish a client feedback strategy; identify current levels of employee and client satisfaction, expectations and priorities

Desired Future state: Create future service and mission statements

Priorities for Improvement: Identify areas for potential improvement

Set standards and targets: Set improvement targets; set client driven service standards

Design Improvement Plan: develop an action plan to obtain improvements for each goal; identify responsibilities; defining a schedule; allocating resources and responsibilities

Implementation: Implement the improvement plan

Monitor: monitor and measure progress, ensure accountability for results

Recognition: Establish, monitor and maintain an employee recognition program

Instant Strategic Plan

What I find interesting about this tool is it allows you to get the issue of different points of view about the organization’s status out on the table. I like to use it as a vehicle for a discussion which aims to get everyone to agree on where the organization stands on each of the nine points after each participant has filled it out individually. A working meeting like this usually lasts about an hour and makes for a lively discussion as you discover how each individual grades the organization’s status.

When I perform my Web governance system audit, this planning assessment is part of the toolbox. If a meeting isn’t possible, it can be deployed as a survey with the results reported back to everyone.

Add up and average the individual scores. Then average scores across the group for a single number that tells you if you are low – in transition – or high performing. When you know where you stand, you can also see where you are headed. The nine steps become your roadmap to change and your mission to color yourself green and rated threes across the board.

Voila! An instant strategic plan.

LEARN MORE

Download the Assessment Review Grid(PDF)

Canada's How to Guide for Service Improvement Initiatives

 

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