Now picture this: a team playing game and at the end of the game you would ask them ‘how did it go, did you win or loose?’. Every team member of a high performing team would know the answer wouldn’t they? Now back to business…

Many teams suffer from URS! The ‘Unknown Result Syndrome’ is pretty frustrating for people in the team as well as for the manager. fighting rumors, complaints or negative feedback is a pretty tough activity. Assuming we play 20 games a month (20 working days) how often do we know whether we had a good or a bad day? Did we win or loose? Too often teams simply don’t have a clue and why? Because we don’t measure, that’s the simple answer to it. Of course your team does measure it by looking at monthly KPI’s… aha monthly… so your team performs 20 games and only every 20 games they know how they genuinely did perform? Turning it around I would argue that you then missed 19 opportunities to give quick feedback, taking the opportunity to improve as an individual as well as a team. Apply it with care though because pushing a button immediately could also destabilize the process itself, so right-balance the data and your response to it and remember there is no team that can win every game, so accept your losses, try to minimize the impact of those and learn from it!

So let’s start measuring the team performance: just ‘feeling-tired-because-we -worked-so-hard-today’ is not the strongest indicator of a team’s performance. Start putting the goals on the pitch and agree with the team what scoring means today. This is possible and can be done for ANY team, don’t fool yourself saying it can’t be done for your team. Of course applying measurements need to be done efficiently (including the frequency) and with a higher goal in mind, not just to do it. And measurements have to relate to the team’s performance, but that speaks for itself.