Turning Your Team Around: Step 2

Get Clarity on How Things Are Currently

You’ve committed to take action and turn around your underperforming team. 

You’ve taken Step 1: Let everyone on the team know what you are doing. (If not, take a look back at my prior blog post, it’s key to having the foundation to move forward.  

Now it’s time for Step 2: Get clarity on how things are currently. 

Whether you’re new to your team or not, you likely don’t fully understand the current reality and the underlying root causes of that reality. 

This information should come from a variety of sources:

• Your supervisor - they are ultimately responsible for the performance of your team, so it’s key to understand what they think about the current status of your team. 
• Are they hitting their targets and achieving expectations? 
• Are they on a trend of improvement or is their performance deteriorating? 
• Are there any special concerns your supervisor has about your team? 

• Your peers (other people who report up to your supervisor) - is their work dependent on your team’s performance? If so, what are their thoughts? 
• And most importantly, your team members - ask them - individually and/or as a group - what they think. 
• A great question to ask them is, “What do you think I need to know in order to help you do your work better?”
• Many of their ideas will be excellent. Some may be unrealistic. No matter what they say, your first response should be, “Thank you”, then restate what they said asking them to confirm so that you are hearing them accurately. 
• Let them know that you are in
• Also, obtain objective performance information from a variety of sources - finance, HR, IT, and other support services that are key to your team’s performance

Now combine the objective data (usually number-based) with subjective information. When you interview the key stakeholders above, what is the impression you get? Work with your team to capture how things feel. 

For this step it helps to encourage your team to be creative. Ask them to draw a picture of what the team looks and feels like to them. Doing this as a group exercise helps build connection and camaraderie. Take the “improv" approach:

• Let people know that there are no wrong answers.
• When someone suggests something that others don’t agree with, rather than correcting them, ask people to respond with “Yes, AND . . .” building on what is there rather than backtracking. 

The point here is to capture as much as you can the mood and culture. 

Once you are armed with both data and a subjective sense of your team’s current state, it will be time to take the next step, which we’ll cover in the next blog post.