Sports continues to show us a recipe for success. Great teams rehearse, practice, play and then evaluate their performance. One of the most popular ways to assess recent performance is to “review the game film.” In other words, sit and watch the game over again as a group. Watch for good execution and breakdowns.
I’ve been teaching family businesses how to do this for 20 years. It’s pretty easy and can be very helpful if done right.
Great families and teams learn how to embrace the “game review” process and realize it is the key to continuous accountability and improvement. The process is usually led and facilitated by a leader who embraces the ideas that coaching and teamwork are the key to high-performing, happy and successful teams.
If you want that for your team, here’s what you need to do.
Call a meeting and ask everyone to come prepared for the team’s first quarter performance review.
Ask everyone to be prepared with the following information:
Success Highlights – Individual and Team
Come prepared to share where you felt you produced your best result as an individual player over the first 90 days and where the team produced its best result. Be prepared to explain your assessment – help everyone see your thought process on the result.
Opportunities for Improvements – Individual and Team
Come prepared to share where you felt you came up short as an individual player and additionally where you think the team might have come up short during the first 90 days. Be prepared to share your thought process in your assessment.
Here’s what happens when you start doing this as a team:
It creates more accountability for success.
Without stopping to take notes, and comparing notes as a team, accountability becomes a bit murky or clouded. When you have to come together as a group, it teaches you how to hold each other accountable.
It trains your eye to look for success
As you get better at this process, it helps you identify and articulate your successes. Remember, it’s really great when you can have a successful result. It’s even better when you can articulate how the result happened.
Wrapping up and moving forward
After everyone shares their individual and group assessment of performance, the final part of the meeting is to identify new commitments to improve in the next 90 days.
So individually, you can identify one or two new skills, behaviors or mindsets you need to have to make sure you don’t have the same performance issue in the second quarter.
The same process works for the team. You can identify collectively things that need to happen to make sure that the team doesn’t miss the mark in the same way in the second quarter.
Having a quarterly review of performance is a great practice to build accountability. Learn how to notice and celebrate each other’s successes and prioritize the improvement opportunities for the next 90 days.
Don’t hesitate to lean on me if I can help you via phone, Zoom or email as you plan and execute on your first quarter team evaluation.
Play to your potential!
Coach Pete
Pete Walsh offers family business consulting services, workshops, tools and resources as the founder of Family Business Performance Center. Subscribe to his newsletter or get in touch to get actionable insights to help your family business grow for generations to come.
