Team 360 Feedback: Building a Team Action Plan for Performance

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to this live broadcast on LinkedIn about team 360 feedback and building a team action plan for performance my name is is Joey Ubie and I you're very very welcome to join me on this broadcast also you may be listening on a recorded version in which case you're also very welcome so I guess the idea behind today's event today's broadcast is that most of us are familiar with 360 degree feedback for individuals so people in different roles give feedback to help the individual stand strengths and development needs but what about team 360s is it possible to use the same type of techniques and facilitation to help teams to improve and to build their own action plan for performance so what I'm going to cover today is the idea the concept behind this what it looks like and how it works what kind of feedback can help a team to learn and perform the team team leaders role the facilitator's role and I'll give you some examples as well of all of those areas so that's what I'm going to cover today team 360 feedback building a team action plan for performance if you have any questions please do let me have those as we go along if I don't answer them immediately I will pick them up at the end of the session alternatively please feel free to direct direct message me on LinkedIn if you have any questions and I'll share the answers with with um the people who've been on this session today so if we just go to an initial quote I think this is a great quote um from Patrick lenion from the five dysfunctions of a team I'm sure you very familiar with this it was a groundbreaking book around teams and what he said was not Finance not strategy not technology teamwork it's teamwork That Remains the ultimate competitive Advantage because it's powerful and also rare so I'm sure that you are looking at this from the point of view of your own team and potentially teams that you work with this slide is about a mood so this is about team mood and I guess I just picked this up because there was a study done U by Professor Frank Walter at the University of groing and in the Netherlands on team performance feedback and it was called harnessing positive mood for team learning facilitation the role of perceive team feedback and that's a very complicated title but the essence of the study was that by giving the team feedback or allowing them to pull together ideas about how they're performing um individual team members had a positive feeling about the team and this reinforce their ability to actually learn together so I think this is very relevant when we come to the part of the session about the team actually building its own development plan for performance so the objective um of using 360 feedback for a team is to create a situation where the team can give itself and give each other feedback without blaming any individual or without criticism but also as honestly as possible so it's focused on the team how does the team operate how do we behave now this may be a challenge if it's the first time the team has been given a chance to do this so the feedback can be gathered in a number of ways the team leader can get feedback from each member of the team but not sure that's a great idea because you might not want to tell your team leader everything about what's going on in the team because it might feel like you're criticizing her so an outside facilitator could gather the feedback by simply talking to each team member and putting their feedback together alternatively the team members could write up their own feedback send it to the facilitator now this might work very well but without a structure or a set of themes or questions the feedback will be subject to individuals experiences and while this is very helpful what we are looking for are some consistent them as with all feedback so where are the key consistent themes that are coming out of this exercise so on that basis I would always recommend a structured approach so that means that all the respondents respond to the same questions or if they are rating in a more formal situation the same statements this provides a focus on the key areas of team performance rather than just general ideas are stories so the questions should be the same for everyone and these could be asked by a facilitator or Run online written feedback is also useful it's useful in terms of focusing the ratings so if you've given a rating for a particular statement about the team giving written feedback helps to put that into context now one question I've been asked about this is what's the difference between this type of feedback and just putting together the aggregated feedback from the individual team members that they have received as individuals this is also a very useful way of finding out what the gaps are in skills but what you're not necessarily uh measuring in that case is team behaviors so if maybe individuals um communicate effectively in in themselves but as a team they may have some gaps that they want to fill around that so A Team 360 is more focused on behaviors that indicate a strong functional and effective team so what do those what do those measures look like now there are many excellent team Effectiveness models that you might want to use for this exercise I'm going to share some with you and if you you are going to use them please do make sure that you're using them without infringing any copyright um they have formal tools that you can use and if you want to use those then please make sure you're doing those legally and correctly but they provide a good basis for a 360 feedback discussion in your team and you'll also find that there are a lot of common themes in these models so they're all very good but they also tend to cover the same kind of themes so if I take you to for example the first one um is called the grpi model of Team Effectiveness and these models this model like many has a number of headings which then break down into more detailed um statements for each of those headings so you can see the focus here is on team goal and interpersonal relationships and I'm picking those out because they you will find that they are common themes around team Effectiveness also processes how the team actually operates another uh model is katsen Bach and Smith and don't know if you can see this um but we can see that there's accountability there is personal growth there are skills problem solving and interpersonal so again we've got interpersonal relationships as one of the key skills that's needed to have an effective team so this is the five dynamics of teamwork and by lto and lson and this shows the same idea but in a slightly different way so you can see here you've got the individual member relationships again is so important and problem solving so how does the team actually operate but how do they solve problems and that's one of the key questions around getting feedback for a team leadership is important of course and in this particular model they also talk about the organization and how that supports the team the Hackman model from 2005 it talks about individual team members and a real team so that's the relationship part compelling direction again we've got this idea that we had earlier about goals about a compelling direction for the whole team so everyone is working towards a compelling goal or a set of compelling goals we have slightly different um way of looking at it but the dysfunctions so this is lenion who we've just talked about where teams go wrong where they're not so effective and one of the things again trust and trust is about relationships right so trust is so important how the team deals with conflict we've had that in a previous model how it solves problems accountability again personal responsibility and results so again we're going back to what the outcomes what the goals are and interestingly I thought you would be interested in this corn Ferry uh report this is a great report uh from the corn Ferry Institute called driving te Effectiveness and I thought you'd like to this is a brilliant summary of all the things I've just been pointing out about what you get 360 feedback um on for a team so I'll just leave you to have a look at that for a second if you are interested in this paper it is the a white paper that corn faery published in 2009 and there this gives talks about those models in a lot more detail which you may find very useful and specific to your um to your particular needs one um 360 or team type feedback that we work with which is a fantastic model um uh built by George careras and his team at um the teamup uh company is called building high performance team and that sets out a stages of team feedback and development so the team give get feedback or do feedback on their own team on these areas as they develop and it's a highly effective uh tool very well researched and and something I definitely recommend that you um have a look at I guess there's also a bespoke approach and the models that we've talked about some of them are a specific test some of them are are a written model um you can also think about or you could look at a bespoke approach now we work a lot with bespoke approaches to 360 feedback and there was some research done um and and published by Bracken and Rose who are experts in this area who talked about a bespoke approach to feed back and the relevant content so content that's specific and customized to the unique strategy of the organization helps to engage people with that 360 and reinforces organizational messages and that works the same way for teams so it could be that you are thinking about um a specific bespoke 360 for your teams and that can be based based on potentially if you are looking at developing team skills within your organization you may very well have a model that's been developed in a bespoke way well you can use that to help the team to analyze where they are to do a 360 H to to to actually measure where they are now and if I show you um uh one of these bespoke 360s for this is specifically for a team and this shows you the key areas that in this particular project were key to the team's Effectiveness now it's very interesting that although this is a bespoke questionnaire the first section is about alignment and that of course goes back to common goal and all facing in the same direction so one of the critical areas then to make sure if you're doing a team 360 whether it's bespoke or off the shelf that it covers the uh commonality of goals and you can see here the questions are about the team so people are not an asking about individuals what they do what they don't do what they're saying is our team has a vision and common purpose for what we're trying to achieve now is that right do we have that all the time are we always focused on that or is it not something that we think about very often often now it does have some questions about the team leader and that's perfectly fine the team leader should be accountable and at the end of the day for the team's Effectiveness so these questions are about the team leader working with each team member to develop their own skills and so forth the team leader checks to ensure the team has the support to do what they need to do I think there were four areas in this particular 360 for the team performance so this is about the actual what the team does so it talks about drive and passion regular performance review sessions so in one thing in one area it's about attitude and and team spirit I suppose but it's also about how often do we do these things performance review sessions focus on maximizing performance and motivation how often do we do that that relationships as we've said key to effective team performance so again what does what does that look like within our team does the team share successes and challenges um including the team leader our team leader has a culture which allows people to do their best work do we encourage each other and so forth remember we talked earlier on about um solving problems dealing with conflict so one of the areas here that we ask the team about is the team deals with people issues through Straight talking with the individuals concerned do we confront issues when they're needed now this is an interesting one reputation and the reason why this particular H competency was included is that this was one of the key values of the organization and therefore to make this even more tailored and specific this these uh questions were included in the 360 so you can see that the 360 was tailored around the key areas that we all agree are important for team Effectiveness follow those models that we looked at but also reputation so this was very specific to the organization and was key to making sure that teams were working towards the values um of that organization and to show you what that looks like in the outcome let me just share a slightly different um paper with you so this is just a quick summary now I don't know if you can see this um clearly I hope you can where let me make it I don't know if this will make it bigger I hope it does you can see that this is how the feedback for the team has been shown so when the feedback was all done online in this case and the team all gave their feedback we started to be able to rank the skill areas from top to bottom based on the ones with the highest to the lowest uh rating we also looked at the highest skills so the individual statements so where were the highest where were the lowest we can see that the team shares priorities and and discusses um areas clashes to be the best way forward the lowest rated skills seem to Cluster around strategic objectives and common goals so we're already picking up a theme here for the team to be aware of and then we looked at um alignment so then we started to look at each of the areas and we can see here that we have the green which is the team members versus the team leader and we have deliberately picked out the rating that the team leader has given the team and we think that that's really important because if the team leader h has a particular idea or a particular piece of feedback they may be surprised when they see what the team is saying so if we look at this question here team members are in regular contact now the team leader has uh very frequently or almost always the team members average is quite a lot lower than that so there there may be some calibration necessary and for the team leader to see that maybe there's something that she is not aware of that is going on in the team which is a great opportunity to develop and improve again performance these are the areas we looked at and we can see the differences between the team and the um the team leader and also the team itself where it um creates where it's got strong ratings and where it hasn't so and reputation and we've also provided as you know as you saw in the questionnaire the opportunity for people to give some written feedback normally there'd be a lot more than this but I just wanted to give you um an example of what that looked like so the the team then are are asked or in the report what are the key themes coming back from this feedback how do the themes fit in with what your perceptions are what strength development areas are most relevant for the team and which strengths of development might be useful to develop so if I go back to let's see [Music] I'm just going to go back to the slides that I was showing you before okay so that is the what we were talking about if I go back to the slides we were looking at so I guess the next important piece um so we've talked about the content um what questions to ask so now we're looking for what happens next so the next critical I guess theme on this is um the team leaders role so what is the team leaders role in all of this well it's really important we've seen that the team leader has an important input into the 360 but she will also need to drive the case for team 360 so she needs to be really committed to this process and be prepared to take responsibility and ownership of the whole project so it's something that the team leader is absolutely crucial too she will also work with the team and the facilitator if they are two different people to understand the feedback support open discussions so the team leader has to have a really open mind about this and not be defensive and not say well I disagree with this or you know why why have you said this why have you given this feedback that's not right because that's going to make the team close in on itself and not get the benefit out of this process and ultimately the team leader is going to be responsible for helping the team to put in place and carry out the development goals that they they create so as I said open-mindedness having the trust of her team to help to facilitate team feedback and also to take it back into the workplace again so ultimately the team leader has to create the space and the opportunities for the team to use this feedback to improve now if this is the first time the team has done this it's really useful to have an external facilitator to keep the discussion on track as well well so a facilitator alongside the team leader and you can be flexible about how that works the facilitator's role is and the process that we would recommend is firstly the facilitator reviews the feedback that the team has given about itself with first of all picks up the key messages and reviews that feedback with the team leader so so it's important that the team leader is clear on the feedback that's coming through and the facilitator needs to have the coaching skills to help the team leader to accept that feedback and take it Forward once the team leader has seen the feedback the report can be shared with the rest of the team and then the facilitation can begin so as if you were coaching an individual the facilitator should coach the team together all in a room who've had a chance to see the feedback report we would say maybe give them the feedback report at most a day before the team meeting block out some time for the team to get together about this and the first thing to do for the facilitator would be to open the discussion for the team what do you notice what is this feedback saying what does this look like and give everyone in the team a chance to speak and as a facilitator if you've done facilitation you'll know some people will be more talkative than others in this feedback process it's really important that everyone gets a chance to speak otherwise some issues may be missed out because somebody might not want to talk about them so what our team what are the key messages from this feedback do you agree with it what areas do you agree with what areas don't you agree with and then and whether there any surprises for the team and let provide you know open the discussion an open discussion on this area and then ask the team what they think the key areas that are coming out of the feedback that they themselves have put together what are the consistent themes maybe focus on two or three themes that are really important for the team to move forward they don't have to do everything all at the same time if the team can maybe talk together break into little groups maybe for each area that might be a way of helping them to get their own ideas about what they can do with this feedback so we saw four sections in the sample team diagnostic that I showed you so maybe break the team into four smaller teams four smaller groups to talk about each area bring it back into the facilitated session and start building some velopment actions and these could be daily actions for the team to um take forward they could be some trust building exercises some information sharing exercises some learning sets the more that the team themselves get excited about this the better the feedback is going to be to take them forward to their development plan and of course what's great about this type of exercise is the team te can do this in six months time they may not even need so much facilitation in six months they can go back and run this again and see how they've progressed so this can be incredibly powerful Performance Tool for the team and for the team leader and that then builds into their team action plan for performance just one point remote or hybrid teams so how does the type of activity suit remote or hybrid teams is it the right thing for them I would say definitely in fact it's really important for remote working or or teams that are not always together because they have less of an opportunity uh to discuss things in an organic way hybrid and remote teams tend to have very structured discussions in other words let's speak now let's speak about this particular topic so getting a broad idea of how they're feeling about the teams operations common goals Etc is even more important um technically and logistically an online team diagnostic is ideal for remote and hybrid teams but of course they do need to be brought together in some form uh for the facilitation when that happens so I've covered I think all the areas that I had planned to cover so what's the concept behind a team 360 feedback and how does it help the team to build an action plan for their performance I've shown you some examples of models that do this and a bespoke model something that you can build yourself or if you need any advice on that then please do let me know and the the role of the facilitator and the role of the team leader I hope that this has given you some insights as I've said please do direct message me on LinkedIn with any comments and of course feedback as well thank you for your time and your attention and I look forward to seeing you at another broadcast very soon