16 Jun The Ultimate Annual Performance Review
How well did your team perform last year?
Mine did very well… I think… in fact, I am not sure I really know.
You see, I know how EACH individual on my team performed because I had an annual review with each of my direct reports and they did the same with their direct reports.
If I am honest though, I don’t know how each people’s individual performance COLLECTIVELY contributed to the team performance. I have my own opinion on that, for sure. Is it an undisputable truth though?
One thing that keeps me wondering is that we spend our time talking about how teamwork is important, how the team should be team number one – meaning it should be the single most important performing element that drives all the rest – everybody talks about the team. But then, we keep focusing on measuring the performance of individuals. We keep setting goals to individuals. We keep rewarding one individual over another although the rewarded individual’s behavior may not benefit the team at all.
When we do all of this, how is that supposed to help the team perform better?
My take is that our current processes for assessing performance are not contributing to creating high performance teams. They are not completely useless. At the same time, they fail to address critical components of how a team should perform: Shared values and behaviors, shared leadership, learning and supporting others to name a few.
A few ideas I’d like to throw to start the discussion on this include:
– Having each person on the team assess the other persons on a set of attributes (with specific examples) that are key to a high performing team
– Do the review as a team, within a safe space
– Do an annual 360 feedback (as a team) and discuss its results
– Align monetary rewards to the team performance
Arguably, this would be a tremendous change in how companies operate. Not to mention, in some cultures, it may prove harder to implement such a process.
In the end though, if what we care about in companies is how teams perform and deliver results, it’s high time we start measuring team performance instead of individual performance.
What are your thoughts on this? What else would you consider to assess team performance? What would you focus on? What are risks and challenges you are seeing?
I would also love to hear from people who have already implemented such processes and hear from your experience.
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