Is it time to assess your team?

If I were to come into your organization and perform a depersonalized assessment of your team, would the following be comments I gathered from your team members?

What are the major obstacles which either do prevent, or could prevent you from fulfilling your role as effectively as possible?
Managements failure to communicate, freedom to perform work and being able to decide which resources to employ, assess to leader, lack of communication, “hurry up and wait” – ineffectiveness, leaders inability to share knowledge with entire team vs. few, some members in loop and other left to figure it out by trial and error, getting past “this is the way we have always done this” attitude, micromanagement

One suggestion for the leader to increase their effectiveness as leaders:
Consider suggestions from unlikely sources, use staff meetings for “who, what, when, and where” vs. calendars, demonstrate concern for staff’s well being, more personal, open and consistent communication, more time “coaching” – less time “directing”, involve those being impacted in decision process, continual engagement in open discussion of performance plans & strategies, trust talent around for benefit of entire organization

If you were “THE BOSS” – what would be different?
Loosen up on “silly” policies (eg. time, old school); focus more on getting job done; allow team to be more creative; apply same creativity we apply to clients to our business; better communicate; improved meeting structure; play to “win” vs. setting up to “fail”

These are just a few examples of the types of questions I ask teams during the assessment phase of my team alignment process.  The answers shared in today’s post are actual client’s answers which tend to represent the norm.  And, as you might imagine, they are a bit eye opening for the leader and their team to see.

I also have the team do a self-assessment of how they are characterized as a team.  The criteria is weighted off a context of high performance that I share in overview.  The scale is in the range of 1 to 5 and most teams score in the 2.0 -2.5 range leaving plenty of opportunity for improvement.

This is only a glimpse into our Team Alignment process clients find extremely beneficial.  Most clients provide feedback along the lines of the following:

“Chris, you really helped us to open up and talk having some of the conversations we should have been having a long time ago. And, you really got us focused on where we’re headed all pulling together on the same rope.”

I’ve recently facilitated this process with teams ranging from small business/organization (eg. dry-cleaner, CPA, HVAC) to larger corporate teams.  It’s less about the type and size of the organization and more about the size of the team.  Ideally, the process always started from the top down in an organization and can be used to alignment multiple teams within an organization.

So, given all of this, let me ask you a question.  How do you know the health of your team?  If what you read above in today’s post represented your team, wouldn’t you like to know?

I’m standing by ready to talk about how best to assess.  It all starts with a phone call and I’d love to hear from you or anyone you feel may benefit from this process.