Why your Leadership team needs a candid self-assessment
What you don't talk about will rule you.
When was the last time you and your leadership reflected on how you were performing as a team?
Not yourself, not your departments, and not your company. You as a leadership team.
If you’re like most teams, you haven’t. And you have a glaringly obvious and painful blindspot that is a huge headwind to your success.
Why your Leadership Team Needs a Self-Assessment
Performance reviews are standard at most companies. Feedback is an essential tool for improvement, after all.
When most companies do performance reviews, they assess performance at three levels:
Individuals
Departments
The company as a whole
And ask questions like:
Is XYZ person meeting or exceeding expectations?
Has XYZ department achieved its OKRs/KPIs?
Is the company as a whole hitting its milestones?
This makes a lot of sense! Excellent people are the foundation of a company’s success. Without them, you’ll go nowhere. Additionally, every function needs to be executing effectively for the company to reach its goals. So you’ll want to review your people as individuals and your departments as a whole.
And yet… excellent people + well-performing functional areas ≠ a high performing company. There are many, many companies where each of these components are high functioning, but the company is in a general state of dysfunction.
Why might that be?
Well, it all comes back to the leadership team.
Your company can only perform as well as your leadership team. Even if individual departments perform excellently alone, your leadership team is the glue that binds them together. Your strengths as a team become the company’s strengths. Your blindspots become the company’s blindspots.
How to Self-Assess as a Leadership Team
If you’re on a team that has never self-assessed, I’ve got good news for you:
There is an unbelievable amount of low-hanging fruit available to you.
My experience with leadership teams that have never self-assessed is that when they first start to, it’s like wandering into a bountiful orchard that has never been picked. There are lots of high leverage learnings that can be surfaced, and quickly. You only need two ingredients: Good Questions + Candor.
Good Questions
Assessing the Team
There are only three questions that are needed to perform an effective self-assessment:
How are we doing, as a team?
What are we doing well?
How can we improve?”
Any other questions you ask will be subsets or specific ways of asking one of those three questions. When I work with teams, my favorite questions to ask are:
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your effectiveness as a leadership team?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your trust in each other’s decision-making?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your ability to leverage feedback to improve?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess you team’s ability to have level 3 conversations?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess how well the team knowns and understands each other?
You can find more directions in the PDF below, specifically around what the meaning is for 1 vs 10.
To do this effectively on your own, schedule at least an hour with your leadership team. In the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting, have everyone answer those questions. There’s no need to analyze it to hell or make it perfect. Just blurt the answer.
When I work with teams, I have a rule that you can’t respond with 7. 7 is a copout and dodges saying good (8) or bad (6). Either choose 6 or choose 8. By making a stand, you’ll surface more information and feedback for the team.
Once everyone has rated the team, go through each question one by one. Have each person share their answer and take 60 seconds to share why they gave the team the rating they did.
The objective in this conversation isn’t to fix anything. It’s to shine a light on the team’s assessment of itself. It’s to surface the team’s beliefs about what it does well and how it can improve. You, as a whole, are simply looking to gather data. You’ll likely notice some patterns emerge. That will be your low hanging fruit.
Assessing Relationships
For leadership teams with strained relationships, it can also be beneficial to discuss the state of relationships on the team. For that, I use the following questions:
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your relationship with each other member of the leadership team?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your trust of each other member of the team’s decision-making? How do you assess their trust of yours?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your ability to give feedback to each member of the team in a way that empowers them to improve? How do you assess their ability to give it to you?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess your ability to have level 3 conversations with other members of the team?
On a scale of 1-10, how do you assess how well you know and understand each other member of the team? How well they know and understand you?
Notice that every question has the answerer rate their relationship with every other member of the team. If your leadership team is 6 people, every respondent will answer with a rating for their relationship with each of the other 5 members of the team.
Additionally, many of these questions require a bidirectional assessment of the relationship: how you feel about the other person, and how you believe the other person feels about you.
It’s a lot of information, but helps each individual get clear on how they feel about all of their relationships on the team. Strong and weak points are quickly illuminated.
When reviewing this together, it can be a lot to have each member share their assessment of each and every relationship. Instead, have each member share their highest and lowest rating for each question, and why. This quickly identifies areas of strength and areas of weakness.
The Role of Candor
Here’s the simple truth: this exercise will only be as powerful as the level of candor that you and your team are willing to embrace.
The reason why this process works is because it surfaces all of your unspokens. And the unspokens are what comes to rule you, your leadership team, and your company.
If the leadership team is dysfunctional and you can’t talk about, that dysfunction becomes an anchor to the company’s performance.
If relationships on the leadership team are broken, those relationships become the primary point of friction in everything that the company does.
If you want to win, you need to be candid.
The number one thing to watch for is when an answer comes to you that you decide not to share. Maybe you make up that it’s irrelevant, or that it’s too personal or challenging for others to hear.
These are exactly the things that need to be said. Left unsaid, they become what drive the ship, and they rarely drive it in the right direction.
Candor vs. Blame
In this process, it’s important to separate candor from blame and criticism.
Make sure that your entire team is aligned on the fact that the goal of this process is simply to surface information, not to assess why things are how they are. Analyzing and assigning fault while you go is a great way to derail the process entirely.
Remember: You don’t need it to be anyone’s fault that things are the way they are, you just need to be honest with the way that things are.
Getting into Action
Once you’ve executed a candid self-assessment, have everyone on the leadership team draft a list of the 1-3 big things they’d like to work on.
Schedule another meeting to share your lists. Look for patterns.
Things that show up on a lot of lists should become explicit objectives that the leadership team tracks.
Things that show up on a small number of lists should become the responsibly of that subsection of the leadership team. Those items should be kept in a place that is public to the leadership team and reviewed monthly or quarterly. You want every top priority of the leadership team’s to be executed upon, so build in accountability up front
This process, done regularly (annually, bi-annually, quarterly if you’re ambitious) is absolutely transformative for companies. Once a leadership team is able to speak candidly about their own relationships and performance, performance at a company takes off.
A leadership team is a team, after all. It’s not a loose coupling of people trying to execute against objectives, but a tight coupling of people responsible for the company’s success. The closer, more honest, and higher functioning you are, the better the results you’ll achieve.
Challenge
Enroll your leadership team, no matter how big or small, in a self-assessment.
Find 90 minutes to discuss the above questions.
Answer the first five questions on team assessment in the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting.
Next, share your ratings and why.
If you sense individual relationships on your team may be weak or strained, do the same thing with the relationship questions.
As homework, have everybody fill out their 1-3 top opportunity areas based on the assessment.
Come back together and identify the top 3-5 areas that the leadership team as a whole is responsible for improving. For everything else, delegate it to those who identified it as an opportunity.
For every single area, determine an easy, measurable first step with a deadline.
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Justin this is gold dust. Perhaps it speaks to the practicality in me. Such a simple, yet powerful exercise.