MEASURING TEAM PERFORMANCE
Maximising team performance 'bang' for your development 'buck'
“I don’t do the pink and fluffy stuff!” a senior manager once told me. He was referring to developing the teamwork aspects of his team.
It is easy to dismiss this comment as a lack of understanding or senior management arrogance.
But on further exploration, it turned out that what he was really saying was “I don’t want to invest in something where I can’t easily measure the impact." Or in training effectiveness terms, “How can I demonstrate benefits at Kirkpatrick levels 3 and 4?”
Teamwork is necessary: Yet the wrong culture can actively encourage individual behaviours that work contrary to successful teamwork.
Teamwork is a skill: You can’t just take a handful of talented people and expect them to work as a high performing team without working on it. (Check out any one of a handful of Premier League football teams for an illustration!)
Teamwork is complex: There are many elements to it and they do not work in isolation, making it difficult to measure the performance of the team with any meaningful granularity. Consequently, team development usually takes the form of a broad approach, covering many aspects with the whole team. It’s an approach that can be both financially expensive and operationally costly.
A more focused approach could deliver the same improvements in a more targeted and efficient way. But how do you know where to focus?
We use Performance Climate Survery© to gain a meaningful measure of the strengths and areas for development of the team. It explicitly explores the links between team climate (the way it is around here), team performance and leadership style; allowing leadership teams to benchmark teams of different sizes and composition to obtain a single measure of performance.
Working on the principle that small changes make a big difference, PCS helps your team highlight the areas where focused intervention and change can dramatically improve performance. In other words, how to get more team performance bang for your development buck.
By helping the team to understand the drivers of high performance themselves, they are able to share ownership of the performance and reduce the pressure on senior leaders.
Here is how Reuters used it to identify and address problem areas, enabling them to increase year on year performance over three years: https://www.performancefirst.com/pcs-case-study-1
So, if you want to challenge the view that teamwork is pink and fluffy, and develop your team based on tangible benchmark measures, then get in touch. We’ll make sure that you don’t just make a difference but measure the difference too.
Contact us at https://www.learningcircle.co.uk/contact-us