Credible performance feedback for high-performance teams

The purpose of the last team I was privileged to lead as a corporate executive was to “surface important insights and bring these to life in the minds and actions of the most senior decision-makers in the organisation and beyond”. This naturally sounds pretty abstract and difficult for performance assessment, but we instituted a 5-pillar framework to help us judge the effectiveness of what we were doing and guide efforts for improvement. With appropriate customisation, this structure should be valuable for all teams seeking high performance.

Here are the 5 performance assessment boxes:

1. Quality of Tangible Deliverables:
   Some things can be measured directly, like bottom-line financial returns, so are very tangible. But there are other tangibles that are delivered by teams like reports, presentations, workshops, designs etc. It is possible to make judgments about the quality of these, preferably from the stakeholders they have been delivered to, but also through internal deliberation.

2. Specific Recommendations:
   A team that is advising others should be making specific recommendations as well. These may or may not be implemented, but the rigour of thinking through the implications of your work for others inevitably improves the team’s focus and relevance. Simply tracking the number of specific recommendations made can improve performance quality.

3. Fingerprints on Major Decisions:
   Whenever a major decision is made by an organisation, multiple people and teams will have been involved along the way. There will be many “fingerprints” on the decision. But organisations generally only make a handful of major decisions every year, and every team should be asking itself “are our fingerprints on those decisions and, if not, why not?”

4. Evidence of mindset shifts:
   A high-performance team influences others. That may be an explicit aspect of the purpose of the team as with my former activity, or it may be simply through its reputation for high performance. There will be evidence for how the team has changed the way of thinking of other people. We used to pay careful attention to the speeches made by the most senior people inside and outside our company and look out for use of language that we had introduced. Use of language is a good way of judging how people are thinking. 

5. Disappointments and opportunities for improvement:
   This could be approached as a sub-category for all the pillars above, but I’ve found that it’s helpful to collect all disappointments together to see the whole picture. One of the main purposes of the assessment framework is to take lessons from experience that propel improvements, and identifying disappointments is powerful for this. In any case, the tendency is to recognise mainly the successes in the previous 4 pillars, so making the disappointments explicit in the 5^th is a necessary balance.