How is your team doing? 3 Questions
Most of the time, I am a vocal advocate for open questions. Open questions are much better at getting conversations started. Make the question wide open, and it will likely take the conversation to unexpected places that help you deepen relationships and have more productive work.
All that is true.
But, there are exceptions. Closed questions are great for choice making (would you like fries with that?) and evaluation (is this good or bad?), and sometimes that’s what you need.
Today, I want to share three of my favorite, most productive closed questions. These questions are specifically designed to evaluate your team. That could be a team you are part of at work, but these questions will also work for the volunteer committee you serve on, or for other non-work teams.
Is your team hitting the mark? These 3 questions will help you assess your performance.
So often when we evaluate a team’s performance, we look just at the team’s metrics—did they meet sales numbers or reduce delivery times as forecasted? If yes, queue the confetti cannon. If not, queue the sad violin music.
Richard Hackman, a Harvard organizational psychologist and one of the world’s leading scholars on team dynamics, says it’s not enough to look at the metrics to know how your team is doing. I agree.
Instead, Hackman defines success for teams with a three-pronged approach that I’ve paraphrased here. You know you’ve hit the bullseye if you can say yes to all three of these.
Did we meet the expectations? That’s the metrics measurement, or to put it in project management terms: were we on time, on spec, on budget?
But Hackman doesn’t stop there. He says real success has two additional evaluation questions.
Are we improving so we can work better together next time? To get better over time requires improving technical skills, developing capacity to work cross-functionally, and learning to give and receive feedback often and well. Successful teams are teams that improve with age.
Are the individuals growing? Teams are containers for the development of people (so say other top team dynamics scholars)—so if your people aren’t growing, your team is failing. There’s trouble coming if individuals on your team find more friction than fulfillment and learning in their work.
If you can answer yes to all those questions, terrific. Your team is doing well. If you can’t say yes to those closed questions, it’s time to ask some open questions:
Imagine a future where we exceeded our metrics. What would that future look like, and what would it require?
What team norms or processes might help us function better together?
How can we do a better job at developing each other? Where is there friction when there should be fulfillment?
In the next newsletter, I’ll offer more questions for teams—next time, the focus is on designing a team from the start.
Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash
