Assessing the present

- One of my recent clients ran the marketing team at a small tech firm, and I was helping him with coaching the members of his 15-person team. He had already been working on the goals he would like to see and was starting to think about how to assess where the team was currently. A few were pretty easy. For example, they'd started a social media campaign that was being led by one individual. So we could easily see what traffic that campaign was bringing in. Others were a little trickier to assess. He had to work harder to assess where his team currently was, so that he could help fill the gaps between current reality and the desired future. I advised him to use four perspectives to get a full picture and advise you to use the same approach. The first perspective to consider is your own. You have access to both objective measures and subjective measures and you should take advantage of both. Objective measures are often utilized because they're difficult to argue against if you have pre-established key performance indicators, KPIs or previous goals, you have set, take a look at how you are tracking against those. If your kitchen manager is supposed to be maintaining a 32% food cost and she's running a 40% food cost, you can clearly see the gap between goal and reality. Like the name suggests subjective measures are personal perspectives that can be impacted by unconscious biases. Research shows clearly that when assessing others we tend not to assess performance honestly, and fairly. This is not to say that you shouldn't use your observations and expertise as guides, you certainly should. But always compare them back to objective measures when you can. If you can't remember that you should always seek other perspectives to balance out any potential biases. The next perspective you should always consider is the perspective of the employee. Remember, coaching should be a conversation so you should involve them in the assessment part as well. One thing I always do leading up to a coaching session is to ask my team to take a look at the notes from our last session and complete an assessment of where they are on each goal. And then to think of potential new goals and do the same thing for those. If you do this, you're more likely to get an opinion that is not unnecessarily influenced by hearing what you think first. The next perspective is the blended perspective. In conversation, you should explore any areas that you and the employee don't agree on to determine the best way to move forward. This will assure you of more balanced understanding and likely more buy-in from your employee. The fourth perspective is not always required but can oftentimes be very useful. It includes the perspective of those around the employee. This can be done in a variety of ways. It may include customer reviews and should always, if that's a KPI. Assessments completed by other supervisors, coworkers or those that they supervise. These can be done anonymously through a variety of tools or through conversation. Peer assessments are a great way to understand where your team is and how they're contributing to the team. When you have a clear understanding of where your team is, you can make better adjustments that help team members and the organization. The key here is to stay positive. The best coaches are realistic and optimistic.