Article - How Effective is Your Team Right Now?
READ: 5 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven
Some of the top questions we are being asked are around team effectiveness.
The questions go something like this…
During WFH (working from home) or DW (Distributed Workplace):
How can we manage and monitor the team’s performance?
How can we see if they are in the right headspace?
How can we measure or evaluate if we are doing the right things?
What questions should we be asking ourselves to make sure we are doing the right things?
Interestingly, these are the same questions we were being asked back in Lockdown #1. I guess they are still being asked because people don’t feel comfortable with the solutions they currently have. That is understandable. The whole culture piece is quite difficult to measure/quantify and yet we can see that our people’s behaviours (and therefore their attitude and their work quality) are being affected by events.
To get some answers to these questions, one of the things we did was turn to the work done by Google on team effectiveness.
Google’s work on team effectiveness is good. Very good. They have invested heavily in understanding how to get a modern world team operating at its highest level. Their model, crafted from years of research, can be seen in The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team by Julia Rozovsky who worked at Google People Operations.
According to Google, here are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams:
Psychological safety: Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans for our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?
I think we need to ask these questions of our team. We need to know where they stand.
I suggest you look at their Team Effectiveness Discussion Guide in the article Help Teams Determine Their Needs and start asking yourself how well you would score in answering the questions.
Team Effectiveness Discussion Guide
Below is a sampling of improvement indicators and guiding questions:
Psychological Safety
Signs that your team needs to improve psychological safety:
Fear of asking for or giving constructive feedback
Hesitance around expressing divergent ideas and asking “silly” questions
Questions to ask yourself:
Do all team members feel comfortable brainstorming in front of each other?
Do all team members feel they can fail openly, or will they feel shunned?
Dependability
Signs that your team needs to improve dependability:
Team has poor visibility into project priorities or progress
Diffusion of responsibility and no clear owners for tasks or problems
Questions to ask yourself:
When team members say they'll get something done, do they?
Do team members proactively communicate with each other about delays and assume responsibility?
Structure and Clarity
Signs that your team needs to improve structure and clarity:
Lack of clarity about who is responsible for what
Unclear decision-making process, owners, or rationale
Questions to ask yourself:
Do team members know what the team and project goals are and how to get there?
Do team members feel like they have autonomy, ownership, and discrete projects?
Meaning
Signs that your team needs to improve meaning:
Work assignments based solely on ability, expertise, workload; little consideration for individual development needs and interests
Lack of regular recognition for achievements or milestones
Questions to ask yourself:
Does the work give team members a sense of personal and professional fulfilment?
Is work matched to team members based on both skills/ability and interest?
Impact
Signs that your team needs to improve impact:
Framing work as “treading water”
Too many goals, limiting ability to make meaningful progress
Questions to ask yourself:
Do team members see their work as creating change for the better?
Do team members feel their work matters for a higher-order goal?
How are current team processes affecting wellbeing/burnout?
You can download your copy from re:Work here.
These questions and worksheets will hopefully stimulate you to look at your teams, and get you to think about what you can do to improve their effectiveness.
For more, check out:
Google’s Distributed Work Playbooks