35: How to Evaluate Your Team’s Work

I’ve found that most teams don’t often enough pause to reflect on or evaluate the success of the work itself. There is so much to do, that we just keep pushing forward without pausing to ask how we’re doing and if we should keep going. In this episode, I outline four approaches to evaluating your teams’ work.   Get the free mini-guide to help you get started with evaluating your team’s work.    Join the Modern Manager community to get the full guide which includes questions to ask and more for all four approaches to evaluation.   Subscribe to my newsletter to get episodes, articles and mini-guides delivered to your inbox.    Key Takeaways: Evaluating your team’s work is different from evaluating individual or team performance. Evaluation meetings go by various names: retrospectives, post-mortums, after action reviews or plus/deltas. There are for approaches to measuring your team’s work: (1) Accountability - Did we do what we said we would do? (2) Impact - Did the result of our work make a difference and did it matter? (3) Learning - What did we learn by doing this work? (4) Cost-Benefit - Is the investment we made worth the return? Evaluating your teams work is critical to building trust, streamlining your processes, improving impact and allocating resources. By evaluating your team’s work across all four dimensions, you will be able to accurately determine if the work was successful, how to improve it, and whether to do it again. (1) Accountability. Ask questions like: Did we execute the project activities on time? If not, why?, Did we stay on budget? If not, why?, We we accomplish all the work? If not, why? (2) Impact. Ask questions like: What is the result of the work we accomplished?, What impact did the work achieve?, Did we achieve the outcome we expected? (3) Learning. Ask questions like: What might we do differently if we did a similar project again?, What surprised you - either in a good or disappointing way?, What worked really well ? Why?, What didn’t work so well? Why? (4) Cost-Benefit. Ask questions like: What was the full total of resources invested in or deployed for this work? (people, time, energy, finances, social or relational capital, physical resources), What other ways might we accomplish the same impact?, What didn’t we do because of the resources spent on this work?   Get it touch! Email me at [email protected]