Author: Dr. Dana

Few things frustrate me more than when a group of people working together are called a team. It’s frustrating because unless they’re actually a team it sets everyone up to be disappointed. Disappointed because the team doesn’t seem to be ‘working together well’. The team does not hit performance expectations – never mind achieving any of the exceptional outcomes that teams are supposed to offer. This inevitably leads to requests for team building sessions. And regardless of how skilled the facilitator, the events result in no meaningful improvement because they aren’t teams in the first place. One way to...

Most agencies are finishing up the mid-year performance period. In doing so, you’ve been asked to review each team member’s performance appraisal and their accomplishments. Then, you likely met with each member of the team to let them know where they stand. What you probably didn’t do is reality check of team performance alignment. For our purposes, team performance alignment is the comparison of a rating of the overall team, the cumulative team member ratings, and the manager rating. Why do a reality check of team performance alignment? The value of a functioning team is that the cumulative performance...