- It's probably no surprise
that adaptive performance management with a team,
starts with individual performance.
Every member of the team needs to be clear
on their own mission, goals, and agreements.
Without that commitment, you can't possibly have a team
that's able to perform adaptively.
The second requirement
is that every member has to be committed
to the overall performance of the entire team.
Whether your goal is a sprint or a marathon.
A short term project on which you're collaborating,
or say a long term product launch,
everyone on the team needs to reach the finish line.
This kind of coordination can be much harder
in a constantly changing world.
Customer needs change, workers mature and grow.
Business goals can change dramatically.
A rapidly transforming business landscape
makes it significantly harder to keep a team in sync.
So, what steps should you take to help encourage
better performance in a team?
Step one, be sure to have a group dialogue about
each person's goals and deliverables.
Get to know what each worker is driving towards personally.
Next, identify the shared target goals
and deliverables of the entire team
as if the team was an individual person.
What's the group commitment to the things
that need to be delivered?
How do those align with the overall goals
of the organization?
Step three, break down those long term deliverables
into short term goals.
Long term deliverables without clear steps to achieve them,
make no sense in a constantly changing world.
Instead, team members need to identify
near term deliverables so they know
they'll be able to remain on track for their overall goals.
Next, solidify roles and responsibilities.
Who is best at what activities?
Who's the lead on which part of the project?
How should roles and responsibilities change over time
through the life cycle of a project?
Step five, and the most crucial part,
is to solidify those learnings into agreements.
How will you all coordinate
to ensure those goals are reached?
As part of that process be sure to agree on timing
for how often you'll be updating those agreements.
Remember that adaptive performance management
is highly dependent on the ability of the team
to continually update its' agreements between each other.
In a world of constant change,
static agreements don't cut it.
So for long term projects,
you might need to do this once a month.
For other projects, especially those using more agile
project management methods,
it might be once a week or even once a day.
Now once a week isn't a bad idea in most cases.
It can just be a standing review,
a quick recalibration to determine what needs to be changed
from the prior week.
If you're a manager, remember that you don't need
to micromanage that process.
You can simply tell each team member,
that a critical part of the deliverables
is to synchronize with the entire team.
Then you should step out of the way while they do it,
only stepping in if there are glitches in the process.
Go ahead and try it.
You'll be amazed what people can do when they're empowered.