If someone asked you how good your team is, what would you say? Let’s imagine you answered, “My team is great!” In that case I hope you would also be prepared to answer the question, “How do you know?”
It’s easy to feel over-confident about a group you are leading or of which you are a member. The danger in this is that the group becomes apathetic about its own effectiveness and slowly begins to decay. One day, the group finds itself to be a wreck, and nobody seems able to figure out how things became as bad as they did.
Your team doesn’t have to be perfect, but it ought to be continually working on improving performance. This process always starts with an honest assessment of the current state of affairs.
The team’s results can serve as one effectiveness indicator. On the other hand, using results can be misleading. Not achieving goals does suggest major problems with the team; however, the converse is not necessarily true. A team might hit its goals, but may have used up far more resources than necessary to achieve that result. Not only can this show up as an immediate productivity problem, but it may show up later in the form of serious morale problems on the team, resulting in the team’s inability to achieve some future goal.
To better understand some of the process concerns that a team has, you need to ask the team members. The problem is that they probably won’t tell the leader what they really think. No matter how strong the leader’s relationship is with each team member, people still hedge when talking with the boss about problems they are experiencing.
This is when an outside assessor can help find the issues that might be keeping a team from reaching its potential and suggest ways to turn things around. This first step need not be expensive nor time consuming. A simple online survey, compiled by a neutral party will provide the information you need to start building a team that’s great.
Want to give it a try? Click to learn more about The TeamCheck Assessment.
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