Evaluate the effectiveness of both team-based performance management and individual-based performance management. Suggest three pros and three cons of each type of management. Justify your response.
- Next, choose three of the best practices for addressing the facets of team-based performance management. Recommend a strategy for your current or past organization to incorporate the identified practices. Provide a rationale for your response.
Introduction
Welcome to Performance Management. In this lesson, we will be discussing managing team performance in complex settings and CEO performance management.
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Objectives
Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:
Evaluate performance management processes and best practices for teams within an organization.
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Supporting Topics
Specifically, we will discuss the following topics:
Defining a team;
The facets of team performance management; and,
21 best practices for addressing the facets of team performance management
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Team Defined
You are likely to already know what a team is and chances are you have been a team member several times in your career. It is “a distinguishable set of two or more people interacting toward a common goal with specific roles and boundaries on tasks that are independent and are completed within a larger organizational context.”
Teams are an everyday part of the twenty-first century workforce. One of the challenges for organizations is designing teams that measure the outputs of a combined effort of two or more people, while retaining individual accountability of each member of the team. If a team does not meet its desired outcomes, does the organization terminate every member of the team? This is why individual performance measurements are critical in creating, evaluating, motivating and sustaining teamwork in the workplace.
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Facets of Team Performance Management
One way to look at team effectiveness is through a team’s ability to utilize and cultivate four key capacities. They are:
Adaptive;
Leadership;
Management; and
Technical.
First, the adaptive capacity is a team’s ability to deal with external stimulus. This may be people outside the team, but within the organization, which include events happening inside the organization which do not directly affect the team, or even current events occurring outside the organization. If a team adapts well to the outside environment, chances are the team will stay on task to reach its goals and deadlines. Teams can cultivate this capacity through paying attention to assessments, collaborating, networking and planning.
Second is the team’s ability to set direction and guide activities towards the goal or goals, both by a formal or assigned leader and the team members themselves. This capacity can be nurtured through visioning, establishing goals, directing, motivating, making decisions and solving problems.
Third is the management capacity, or the team’s ability to administer its resources efficiently and effectively. This can be cultivated through careful development and coordination of resources, including people, money and facilities.
Fourth is the technical capacity, which is the team’s ability to design and operate products and services effectively and efficiently deliver services to customers. Cultivating technical capacity varies from team to team. It depends largely on the nature of the organization and the work the team is responsible for. It may include such things as operating software or machinery, or creating processes or procedures that equate to satisfied customers.
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Adaptive Capacity Best Practices
On the few slides are the best practices associated with each of the key capacities.
Let us start with the adaptive capacity. These six best practices allow an organization to capitalize on a team’s ability to handle outside influences that do not directly affect the team, yet, can disrupt or interrupt the team’s focus.
They are:
Build flexible and adaptable team players. Individual team members who posses the flexibility to change focus will lead the group to being able to do the same.
Build a big play book of task strategies. Every good sports coach has a playbook, or those actions or plays that will fit for a particular situation. If a team possesses the same type of playbook in the area of task strategies, teams will benefit by being able to choose from and employ strategies that fit particular situations best.
Create teams that know themselves and their work environment. Being able to adapt quickly means the team possesses a high level of awareness of environmental changes, its task demands, its ability to adapt.
Build teams that can tell when the usual answer isn’t the right answer. While standard processes often result in efficiencies, changes in the environment can result in complexities that teams need to reach outside the standard processes to solve. Being able to know when the standard is not feasible, is an adaptive capacity teams can learn through guided error training.
Develop self-learning teams means teams rely on themselves to learn from mistakes and successes. They then respond to these mistakes and successes with new cultural insights and tools.
Finally, build teams that take advantage of their resources. Effective teams take inventory of the transactive memory the team possesses. This is an inventory of who on the team knows what, whether it be task driven or organizational history, to name just two items.
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Leadership Capacity Best Practices
Next are the best practices for leadership capacity.
First, articulate and cultivate a shared vision. Aligning the team’s goals to the higher goals of the organization is motivating in seeing the team’s efforts tied to a larger goal.
Second, create goals that teams can grow with. Goals should be flexible for teams to make adjustments when called to do so. Goals should also be within reach of the team. Goals that are too easy for the team does not benefit the organization overall. Creating stretched goals, or those goals that will require effort to achieve, results in individual and team growth, which does benefit the organization.
Third, build motivation into the performance management process. Teams should make clear connections among their actions, evaluations, and outcomes. When teams take these steps, individuals tend to feel more motivated and satisfied with their team experience.
Fourth, team leaders must champion coordination, communication and cooperation. Without coordination, communication and cooperation, teams are not likely to succeed. A team leader must always be practicing, modeling and cultivating these behaviors in order for other team members to feel comfortable to do the same.
Lastly, teams must take the time to examine both failures and successes. It may be easy to justify skipping if other activities or tasks are seen as priorities. Yet, good leaders recognize taking the time to have these team conversations results in fruitful examination that can be used towards future success.
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Management Capacity Best Practices
Remember that team management involves effective use of human and material capital. In the area of management capacity, there are four best practices.
One, clearly define what to measure. Since teams are made up of individuals, it is important to measure outcomes from both a team and individual perspective.
Two, develop measures that are diagnostic of performance. Since performance management is concerned with optimal performance, it would follow that knowing how to reach optimal performance is critical for all teams. Measurements that help explain why something did or did not work, assists in diagnosing performance issues that can then be further investigated or solved.
Third, measure typical team performance continuously. An annual measure is only one snapshot of performance. Taking six or seven snapshots reduce any variance and gives a more inclusive picture of the team’s actual performance.
Lastly, include teamwork competencies in formal performance evaluations. Individuals need to know that teamwork is valued in the organization. One way to do this is to build teamwork competencies into the individual performance evaluation. This allows individuals to receive formal feedback and documentation of his or her ability to work with and on a team. This also paves the way for formal development plans, which may result in training in teamwork competencies that are missing or need to be further developed.
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Technical Capacity Best Practices
Technical capacity involves individual competencies in assigned tasks and individual’s ability to work in a team setting. This category has two best practices.
First, plan and execute the integration of new team members. New members will undoubtedly be added to the team. By having a workable plan to getting new members up-to-speed, time is not lost figuring things out when it happens.
Second, assess and foster shared mental models. A mental model is a explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. When applied to a team, a mental model is a group effort to explain how to do something. An example would be a document that outlines the tasks associated with getting a new team member onboard.
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Multi-team Membership Best Practices
Research indicates that workers are becoming more involved with teams in the workplace. Instead of being on just one team, today’s workplace is constructed such that individual contributions are crossing organizational departments as needed. It is becoming commonplace for workers to be on multiple teams at once. This led to the development of multi-team membership best practices.
The first best practice is to develop or select for individual personal discipline and organizational skills. For individuals to successfully juggle multi-team roles and responsibilities, individuals must possess not only expertise to complete the tasks, but also organizational and time management skills. Individuals without these skill sets can receive training to develop them.
The next best practice is to communicate the big picture of competing goals and deadlines for all teams is essential in individual awareness of how each team is affected by individual absences. When one or more members of a team must tend to activities on other teams, it can cause a ripple effect on several other teams. Flexibility of all other team members must be practiced in order to keep tasks on track. Back-up plans are also useful to have for such circumstances.
Next, recognize that a multi-team framework works best for mature projects. New projects tend to require team member’s full-time attention. When a project is up-and-running this may be the best time to capitalize on the multi-team approach.
Lastly, foster trust by cultivating a culture of information sharing stems from the asynchronous nature of multi-team membership. When working remotely, members need to trust that tasks are being done outside the absence of a formalized team gathering. The best way to foster trust is through a constant stream of communication to assure deadlines are met.
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Check Your Understanding
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Summary
We have now reached the end of this lesson. Let’s take a look at what we’ve covered.
We first discussed the definition of a team. A team is “A distinguishable set of two or more people interacting toward a common goal with specific roles and boundaries on tasks that are independent and that are completed within a larger organizational context.”
Then we looked at facets of team performance management. They are:
Adaptive;
Leadership;
Management; and
Technical.
This was followed by the 21 best practices of team performance management, including a fifth facet called multiple-team membership.
Let’s recap each of these best practices categorized by its facet of team performance management.
The best practices for the adaptive facet are:
One, build flexible and adaptable team players;
Two, build a big play book of task strategies;
Three, create teams that know themselves and their work environment;
Four, build teams that can tell when the usual answer isn’t the right answer;
Five, develop self-learning teams; and,
Six, build teams that take advantage of their resources.
There are five best practices in the area of leadership:
One, articulate and cultivate a shared vision;
Two, create goals the team can grow with;
Three, build motivation into the performance management process;
Four, team leaders must champion coordination, communication and cooperation; and,
Five, examine both failures and successes.
In the area of management, these were the four best practices that were discussed:
One, clearly define what to measure;
Two, develop measures that are diagnostic of performance;
Three, measure typical team performance continuously; and,
Four, include teamwork competencies in formal performance evaluations.
Next, we discussed two technical capacity best practices. They were:
One, plan and execute the integration of new team members;
Two, assess and foster shared mental model.
And lastly, the fifth category we discussed were the four best practices for multi-team membership best practices:
One, develop or select for individual personal discipline and organizational skills;
Two, communicate the “big picture”;
Three , recognize that a multi-team framework works best for mature projects; and,
Four, foster trust by cultivating a culture of information sharing.
This completes this lesson.
