Four Key Questions for Managers That Boost Team Performance 🔥

Issue No. 29

Managing team performance is crucial for any manager. This week's issue outlines four key questions that can help managers effectively evaluate their feelings for their team members, ensuring continuous improvement and success.

By integrating these questions into regular check-ins and meaningful conversations, managers can foster a high-performance culture and build stronger relationships with their team.

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• 💡 Four Key Questions for Managers That Boost Team Performance
  • 🎯 Essential Questions to Evaluate Your Team
  • 📅 Make Monthly Check-Ins a Habit
  • ⚠️ The Risks of Not Reflecting on Performance
  • 🗣️ The Power of Meaningful Performance Conversations
  • 📝 Important Notes to Keep in Mind
• 🔦 Highlight of the Week

Four Key Questions for Managers That Boost Team Performance 🔥

I've talked about performance ratings before, and I don't like them much.

But managing performance is super important.

It's one-half of a manager's job. The other half is making sure the team meets the business's goals.

Because managing performance is core to a manager's job, I wanted to share these four questions again. They were in my original article about performance ratings, and I wanted to share them again with more context around operationalising them. Asking these questions not only provides a clear direction for action but also has a dramatic effect on the performance of an organisation, empowering managers to make a significant difference.

🎯 Essential Questions to Evaluate Your Team

We can't consistently rate how well others do their jobs, but we can rate how they make us feel.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall suggest these questions in their book "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World" when they talk about Lie 6: People Can Reliably Rate Other People.

These four questions are not just a set of random queries. They are strategic tools that help managers evaluate their team members and make informed decisions about their performance.

1. Given what I know of this person's performance, and if it were my money, I would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus.

This helps managers see who is doing a great job.

2. Given what I know of this person's performance, I always want them on my team.

This shows if someone is important to the team or perhaps they are hurting the team.

3. This person is at risk for low performance.

Is this person not doing well? If yes, it's time to help them improve.

4. This person is ready for promotion today.

If they are, good managers will find a way to reward the person through intrinsic motivators like personal growth, giving recognition, and finding a way to promote them.

Each of these should be answered with a Likert scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree).

Managers can better understand their team and take the right actions by asking these questions.

📅 Make Monthly Check-Ins a Habit

Managers should check in with themselves about their team members every month and talk with their manager about how they are addressing what comes up. This commitment to regular performance checks is crucial in ensuring the team's continuous improvement and success, making managers feel more responsible and committed.

Keep a spreadsheet of your team and track your answers to these questions over time.

If you are a manager of managers, you can review your team's answers monthly.

Intentionally tracking your answers to these questions over time is hugely important in making this approach work for you.

Regular performance checks are not just a formality. They are a crucial part of maintaining a high-performance culture. By conducting these checks, managers can quickly identify and address issues, ensuring everyone is continuously improving.

It's also good to ask these questions after big projects or tasks. It helps you track how people work under different conditions.

This ritual allows managers to have better conversations that help everyone grow and succeed.

⚠️ The Risks of Not Reflecting on Performance

Not checking how the team is doing can cause big problems.

People usually try harder if they feel noticed.

Problems can get worse if no one talks about them.

Not addressing low performance can make the whole team work badly and feel unhappy.

Skipping checks also makes it hard to know who can be a future leader.

Skipping checks also makes it hard to know who can be a future leader. It can mess up the team's trust and make people think the boss is unfair. Regular checks help everyone get better and feel valued. Not doing them can hurt both the team and each person.

The long-term effects are scary. The high performers and those with high potential leave, and the others stagnate. You won't have a high-performance culture, folks won't realise their true potential, and the team's performance will slowly slide downwards.

🗣️ The Power of Meaningful Performance Conversations

Managers can use these four questions to have better 1:1s with their team.

If you have a clear idea of what good looks like for your team, you can praise them when they do those things (and you should, frequently!). Praising folks for doing things right makes them feel good and keeps them doing good work, and it helps others understand what good looks like if you give praise in front of others.

Next, you need to discuss any problems from your reflection and work to fix them together.

If you have team members who stay for a couple of months at risk of low performance and you feel you would rather they weren't on your team, you need to take progressive and appropriate action. I recommend working with someone from your HR department as early as possible when you have someone in this situation.

Through these conversations, ask team members about their career goals and make a plan to help them grow.

Set clear expectations on what good looks like and set goals so everyone knows what they are aiming at.

Having these conversations helps build trust and makes the team work better. It also keeps everyone improving and feeling engaged.

📝 Important Notes to Keep in Mind

I advocate for a positive approach to performance, focusing on a person's potential and development rather than their deficiencies.

That said, people can sometimes not pull their weight. Worse, they make the boat sink. Those people need to be removed from the boat.

My goal is not to create a hyper-competitive environment between people; there is no place for competition in knowledge work. Instead, our work requires collaboration.

You might read this as one-way traffic, with managers evaluating those in their teams top-down. An ideal system for me involves staff in the assessment and decision-making process. I also believe in a similar upward assessment of managers with their team members answering questions where they rate how their managers make them feel. I might write about my experiences doing this in a future issue.

💬 If you had some thoughts while reading this, I would love to hear them in the comments.

🔦 Highlight of the Week

Given we are talking about managing performance and having (sometimes hard) conversations with people, this quote from Maya Angelou felt particularly appropriate to share this week.

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
― Maya Angelou