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Leading a business to success depends on your ability to build an effective performance management strategy. Companies and team leaders need a solid approach, processes, and tools to excel, but making a switch from annual reviews to real-time reviews is a good place to start.
An effective performance management strategy involves a lot more than evaluation. It adds a human element to employee contribution, integrates employee engagement into daily operations to enhance growth, and transforms team leaders into coaches.
To establish a high-performance culture, you need to have a system for team performance management. In this article, we’ll explore performance management and what team leaders should know about it.
- What is Performance Management?
At an individual level, performance management is a strategic approach to monitoring and managing individual employee performance. When many team leaders and managers talk about performance management, they do it from the perspective of individual employee performance management.
However, performance management for team leaders focuses on the whole team and not individual members. This is well illustrated when setting team goals, monitoring the achievement of the set goals, sharing feedback, and evaluating team performance.
Just like individual performance management, team performance management should be a regular activity. It should be part of the team’s daily routine.
- Importance of Performance Management
As a team leader, there is no point in focusing on individual performance when most tasks in the modern landscape are done in teams. However, most organizations only review performance at the individual level.
The biggest downside of using individual reviews and rewards is that it creates competition among team members. Additionally, it depends on a dated, traditional performance management system rather than one that integrates continuous performance management.
As a result, recent years have seen a shift away from individual ranking and ratings towards a program that enhances continuous feedback and encourages coaching and mentoring for teams and individuals alike. McKinsey states that team performance management is key to ensuring teams get recognition for their work and helps the entire organization perform to its full potential.
- How to Manage and Improve Team Performance
Understanding how to effectively lead your team and capitalize on individual strengths is crucial for unlocking their potential and enhancing overall team performance. Here are some insights to guide you in fostering a successful team.
- Set Measurable Goals
High-performing teams share the same purpose and work towards achieving a common goal. It guides everyone’s efforts and keeps them focused on doing their best to benefit the team and organization.
87% of employees at a company with clear, connected goals say they are more prepared to meet customer expectations. In establishing objectives, it’s advisable to employ a performance management tool tailored specifically for your industry. This approach facilitates clear identification of your objectives and offers essential metrics for gauging progress toward your goals.
- Create a Supportive Team Culture
The best teams grow together and support each other. You need to create a company culture where everyone feels supported and psychologically safe to contribute ideas and take calculated risks to help them grow. This helps create stronger and more resilient teams.
- Provide Teams With the Necessary Tools
A study conducted by Asana showed that employees use an average of ten apps per day and lose 62% of their workday on repetitive, mundane tasks. The team may appear to be doing a lot but they lose productivity in the process. To avoid this, you need proper collaboration tools that can help save time by bringing information and communication together in one place.
- How to Assess Team Performance
You should note that you’re evaluating the performance of an entire team and not its individual members when assessing team performance. Furthermore, it’s essential to utilize a metric that aligns with the particular competency you aim to assess. Here are some suggestions for evaluating team performance.
- Invest in Continuous Performance Management
Continuous performance management is a modern approach to evaluating and enhancing team performance using regular feedback discussions between team members and the team leader.
Regular feedback conversations include retrospectives, team standups, and team project reviews. Regular team performance discussions allow you to identify the team’s strengths and weaknesses as well as potential issues.
- Track Metrics
The best way to evaluate the performance of a team is by monitoring the progress of the learning and development (L&D) metrics. L&D metrics often focus on individuals, but high-performing teams are often a result of managers who encourage team members to take part in the programs and adopt a growth and development mindset.
- Conduct Team Health Checks
Team health checks, when used to assess team performance, can help you understand what works and what you need to change. They also help identify how different teams across your organization stack up against one another.
Ideally, you need to benchmark the contributions, qualities, and achievements of the best-performing teams and see how you can use them to improve the performance of other teams.
Analyze how communication works within the team, the relations between different team members, psychological safety, and whether members feel safe sharing ideas or raising concerns.
The state of performance management is dynamic and will top the agendas of many business leaders for the foreseeable future. You need to adapt fast if you want to attract and retain top talent and to achieve business success continuously.
