Business and Marketing

Set up a performance monitoring project. Select an important performance area that is not currently tracked (e.g., response time to customers, shipping schedules, quality of service calls). Ask members to give you a rough estimate of their performance in this area, then challenge them to track their performance for one month. Teams often significantly overestimate their actual performance. Watching a trend line veer away from an overly optimistic performance estimate can be sobering experience.

Conduct a performance analysis. In this tactic the steps of a work process are outlined on a flowchart and the team then identifies performance steps that are prone to errors and bottlenecks or are overly complicated. One reason that performance analysis is a great motivator is that it opens up processes to review by and feedback from a broad cross section of your organization. As a team motivational tool, performance analysis is particularly useful when:
• Members are stuck at a performance plateau because of poorly designed or overly cumbersome processes.
• Members have difficulty identifying performance problems because they are too close to & process. They have stopped paying attention to the problems created by inefficiencies and have fallen into the habit of working around ineffective processes.
• Problems are partially hidden because they occur at cross-over points-points where work flows across the boundaries between your team and other groups. Each team assumes that the problem is the other’s responsibility.

One way to make sure that you provide an adequate amount of supervision is to use project schedule charts. You can develop these charts with your team prior to implementing any project and list ahead of time two types of interventions: (1) the dates on which you and your members will meet to conduct routine status reviews on the project, and (2) the types of performance problems that, should they occur, need to be brought to your attention immediately. Have the project schedule posted on a wall by your team’s work area so that you can quickly glance at it if you feel the need to make an unscheduled progress check.

Resist the tendency to tighten up. I’m sure that your manager has already given you a speech about the need for maintaining tight control over your team until your organization gets back on track. This sounds great, but the question is, control over what? Do you really need to inventory the number of paper clips or pencils used by your group each month?

Provide clear communications. Fight the urge to withdraw from your team and stay in your office. You are your team’s “door of visibility” to the rest of your organization. If the door is closed, your team will feel that it has been locked in the mushroom cellar without access to needed information or direction. Share any and all information you have on important changes now occurring in your company. Be honest about what is fact and what is rumor. Consider having selected team members accompany you to departmental meetings so that they can form their own opinions about impending changes.