There are four major areas you need to assess when judging your team members’ results.

Beyond how you’re spending your leadership capital, you need to assess the results your team members deliver. There are four major areas you need to assess.

Assess the quantity of their results compared to what’s expected. Also look at the quality of their final work, again versus what you expect. Consider how timely the work they deliver is versus expected deadlines. Last, evaluate intangible results related to how they conduct themselves, to what degree do they improve morale on their immediate team, and to what extent do they improve relationships with external stakeholders.

This assessment includes objective observations like quantity relative to a goal, as well as subjective assessments like how well they build relationships. Knowing the results your people are delivering tells you what you get for your leadership capital investments in them.

Quantity of results

The first thing to look at when assessing team member results is the quantity of work they’re getting done. What’s the quantity of their results compared to what you expect of them?

Let’s compare what meeting versus falling short of expectations could look like. The quantity of work delivered should be equal in work load to their peers. You don’t want someone who’s responsible for a little bit of work when you’re asking everyone else on the team to do a lot of work. You want that work complexity to be comparable to that of their peers, and their work should meet or exceed goals that you set for them. The quantity of work shouldn’t be smaller in workload than their peers or lower complexity versus their peers, and it certainly shouldn’t fall short of the goals you’ve set.

Think of someone you’ve led who delivered a high quantity of results. What differentiated them? How did you measure them? How about someone who delivered few results? How did you measure them? How did you set their expected goals? Make sure your people are turning out the amount of work you expect. Measuring the quantity of their results is exactly how you do that.

Quality of results

Quality is an important aspect of someone’s results. You don’t want your team members making a bad trade-off between quantity and quality. To prevent that, you need to monitor the quality of their work versus what you expect. When assessing quality, consider whether their work meets quality expectations versus the expectations you’ve set for their peers.

Take a look at if their work gets good feedback from customers or business partners. Do other people seek out their help and expertise? Does their work add to your team’s reputation? If they’re delivering low quality work, their work is below expectations versus the expectations you’ve set for their peers. They may get no or even bad feedback from your customers. Other people may avoid working with this person, and the quality of their work detracts from your team’s reputation.

At one point in my career I had a quality issue. I was a consultant, and the other consultant on my team was a very high performer. She turned out great work. The thing is, both of us had similar quality expectations. When my project manager looked at my work versus her work, it was pretty clear my work was below expectations versus the expectations of my peer. I was getting some bad feedback from our clients on the quality of my work. Other people avoided working with me. I had a couple of client team members who went to my colleague instead of coming to me. I know the quality of my work definitely detracted from the reputation of our team. It was pretty easy to look at my work and say it was low quality.

Is there someone you’ve led who delivered high-quality results? What made their result high quality? What impact did they have on the team? How were they viewed by your customers or other stakeholders? Have you ever worked with someone who delivered low quality work? What was that like? You need to get high quality results from your team members to justify the leadership capital investments you make in them.

Timeliness of results

Work needs to be delivered when it’s promised. Timeliness is a major evaluation criteria for your team members’ results. How timely is the work your team members deliver versus the expected deadline? When assessing timeliness, consider is this team member held to the same expectations as their peers in terms of deadlines? Does this person meet expectations and deadlines? Do they negotiate realistic deadlines with you? And do they get good feedback from their stakeholders on the timeliness of their results?

Or do you have a situation where they are held to lower expectations then their peers? Where they miss expectations and deadlines? Where they’re constantly renegotiating deadlines with you? Or, where they’re getting no feedback or even bad feedback from your stakeholders about when their deliverables come in? Do your people get their work done on time and as promised? What’s it like when people consistently meet deadlines, or better yet, complete their work before the deadline? What’ve you experienced when people miss deadlines?

It doesn’t matter how much work you do or how high the quality of that work is, if you don’t get it done on time. Timeliness needs to be a major consideration when evaluating your team members’ results.

Build team morale

When looking at how your team members generate the results, the first intangible thing to consider is the person’s impact on team morale. To what degree does this person improve morale on their immediate team?

We’ve all worked with that person who generated great results, but they were a nightmare to work with. Intangibles matter. To assess their impact on morale, ask yourself, is this person optimistic? Do they lift team morale? Do people seek out working with them? Is the person thoughtful and helpful? Do they generate good team energy? Or, are they pessimistic, and they deflate team morale? Do people avoid working with them? Are they selfish and disruptive? Do they drain the team’s energy?

I know one organization that looked at people’s results, both in terms of the what they delivered and how they delivered them. If you delivered awesome results but you were a jerk when you did it, you ended up with a low rating. It was important that you were building team morale as you delivered your results. While morale isn’t necessarily something that goes on people’s annual goals, it is a result of people’s actions. You invest time developing and coaching your people to behave in a certain way. For you to get a return on that investment, you’ll hopefully see them building morale on the immediate team.

If you focus on morale building as a result, they will, too. In doing so, you’ll focus appropriate energy on building morale, and they’re going to build the morale of the overall team.

Strengthen external relationships

It’s not enough for your team members to just build morale within your team. Team members should build and strengthen stakeholder relationships outside your team too.

Assess the extent to which this person improves relationships with stakeholders like business partners and clients. Take a look at the following to see if they’re doing it well. They should be getting good feedback from these external parties. They should be seen as a trusted advisor to represent you and your team. People should be asking to work with this person and they should build your team’s relationship goodwill. If they’re not doing this well, you’re probably going to hear bad or no feedback about this individual from these external parties. They won’t be seen as a trusted ambassador of your team. People might avoid working with this person. And over time, they’re going to drain your team’s relationship goodwill.

I coached one executive who had a member of his team who was not doing this well. She was causing all sorts of problems with their external partners and clients. She was pushing back on deliverables. She wasn’t following the prioritization that they had already agreed to. She was even talking about people behind their backs, and they found out about it. Over time, she was poisoning the relationship with these external stakeholders, and the leader I was coaching had to spend a lot of time rebuilding those relationships. High performers do more than just deliver the basic quality, quantity, and time-based results. They strengthen your team’s reputation. Make this intangible a key consideration as you assess their results.

People who perform poorly in this arena will cause you to spend excessive leadership capital repairing the damage they do. Those who build relationships well are going to save you a lot of time and energy.

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The better you understand who’s consuming your leadership capital and how they’re consuming it, the easier it will be to change their behavior and yours as you work to become a more effective leader.

Assessing who’s consuming your leadership capital helps you understand how and where you’re spending your time and energy. To conduct this assessment, list out the 12 activities under the four major ways you spend leadership capital: directing, doing, delivering, and developing.

For each person on your team, ask yourself if you’re investing more time and energy in this person than you should for that particular activity. This is a subjective call. For situations where the answer is yes, you’re spending more time and energy than you should, put a yes in the box and give it a score of one. For times where it feels like you’re investing an appropriate amount of time and energy, answer no, and that gets a zero. If the total is seven or higher, this person is a high consumer of your leadership capital. Below seven makes them a low consumer of leadership capital.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say Jim is on my team and I’m going to look at at Jim across all of the leadership capital consumption activities.

Directing 

In terms of directing, I’m spending an appropriate amount of time planning and prioritizing his work, so I answer no to both of those questions. However, in terms of coordinating, I’m doing a lot more coordination than I should. I’m making too many introductions for him and he’s asking me to be in the middle of a lot of those activities, so I would say yes, I’m investing more time and energy than I should in coordinating activities.

Doing

In terms of doing, I don’t have any problems with Jim making decisions, so I answer no. But I find myself constantly motivating him and clearing obstacles for him, and these are obstacles he should be able to clear on his own. I answer yes to both motivating and clearing. On delivering the work, I’m investing a lot of time and energy in Jim, way more than I should. I’m constantly having to monitor his work and his tasks. I’m correcting work all the time and I find myself a lot of times repairing damage after he’s caused it. I would answer yes to all three of those areas.

Developing

On developing, I’m spending a lot of time training Jim on tasks he should already know. I also have to invest a disproportionate amount of time in coaching him.

Promoting

Now in terms of promoting him, I’m not having to put in too much activity there, so I answer yes to training and coaching and no to promoting. When I add up all those scores, I get a score of eight. Jim is a high consumer of my leadership capital. These are subjective ratings based upon my assessment of how Jim should be performing, given his skills, tenure, and background.

You should conduct this assessment for all your team members. When you go to populate the leadership matrix, these scores will be one of the major inputs into that analysis. The better you understand who’s consuming your leadership capital and how they’re consuming it, the easier it will be to change their behavior and yours as you work to become a more effective leader.

Want to learn more about leading effectively? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to navigate politics as a senior leader. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Keep these three leadership roles in mind when helping your team members deliver their work.

One of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital is helping your team deliver their work. A leader’s role in delivering the work requires them to monitor progress, correct work that needs fixed, and repair work that was done incorrectly. Consider these approaches to ensure your team is delivering the work.

Monitoring Work

In terms of monitoring, it should be goal focused. Your monitoring should be by exception, and hopefully when you’re doing monitoring, it should be confidence building for the members of your team. Monitoring should not be tasked focused at the individual task level. It shouldn’t be a total review of all the tasks your team members are working on. And hopefully, your monitoring is not stress-inducing for the members of the team.

Correcting Work

Correcting activities should be occasional. You should be dealing with first-time mistakes. You should be the final check on the deliverable. Correcting should not be every day. You shouldn’t be correcting the same mistakes over and over, and you definitely should not be the first check of your team member’s work. They should be doing that themselves.

Repairing Work

In terms of repairing, hopefully it’s infrequent. The repairs are done at a small-scale and your team members should be alerting you to the need to repair something. Repairing should not be frequent. It shouldn’t be large-scale issues that you’re trying to fix, and your team members should not be hiding those issues from you.

I know one leader who wasn’t doing monitoring well. He had a total review of all the tasks in his division. He used to have a 10-hour long monthly meeting with all of his direct reports. In that meeting, every single direct report went through every task they were working on. And this leader dug into every task, trying to monitor their activity on all of them. Eventually, the team got so frustrated with this approach that they left. Many of them sought jobs in other divisions or even other companies. His monitoring activities were not calibrated to the level he should have been operating at.

Delivering the work is about ensuring your team is doing high quality work that meets the commitments you’ve set out with your stakeholders.

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Keep these three leadership roles in mind when helping your team members complete their work.

One of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital is helping your team do their work. You should make decisions, motivate them and help them overcome obstacles:

Making Decisions

In terms of deciding, you should be making decisions that are beyond their authority. You should be reviewing their plans and pressure-testing the decisions they make. Deciding should not be making decisions that are within their authority. You shouldn’t be making their plans for them and it’s definitely not about them offloading accountability for decisions to you.

Motivating

Motivating should be occasional. It should be about helping your team overcome new challenges. You should be setting aspirations for them. Motivating should not be every day. You shouldn’t have to motivate them in terms of routine activities and motivating definitely is not about invoking fear.

Clearing Obstacles

Clearing activities are helping them deal with issues above their level. You’re going to help them overcome new or tough barriers. Clearing is not about helping mediate conflict with their peers or helping them overcome routine barriers.

I have one client I work with as an executive coach and he was having some problems with deciding. When we sat down and talked about the decisions he was making, he felt great about it. When we dug into it, what we learned was most of the decisions he was making were ones that were definitely within the authority of his team. His team members were coming to him and saying, “Hey, here’s a decision. How about you make it for me?” Now, my client felt great because he felt important, he felt needed and he felt like he was making great decisions. On reflection, he was doing work that should have been done by the members of his team. We had to reassess how he was going to engage with his team members on deciding activities.

Remember, doing doesn’t mean you’re actually doing the work. Your job is to ensure the team members are able to get their work done.

Want to learn more about leading effectively? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to navigate politics as a senior leader. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Directing work is one of the four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. Directing work involves planning, prioritizing, and coordinating.

There are four major activities that will consume your leadership capital. They’re directing work, doing work, delivering work and developing people. Let’s look at directing activities, and what doing them right or wrong looks like. The three activities, in terms of directing, are planning, where you’re translating your vision into team and individual goals, prioritizing, where you’re turning individual goals into team priorities, and coordinating, using your position to provide a broader perspective to the members of your team.

Planning

In terms of planning, it should be about team goals, and reviewing those goals. You should be approving the team members goals when they bring them to you. It shouldn’t be about driving individual tactics, drafting their goals for them, or renegotiating those goals on a regular basis.

Prioritizing

Prioritizing is done at the team level. You should be deciding what the top priorities are, and what the things are that you’re not going to work on. Prioritization should be done routinely. It’s not a one-off activity. Prioritizing should not be done at the individual level. That’s up to your team members. You shouldn’t be renegotiating priorities on a regular basis, and you shouldn’t have to re-do your priorities all the time.

Coordinating

Coordinating is about connecting your team members with people outside your organization. This should be for first-time connections and you should play the role of the referrer in those situations. Coordinating is not about relationship management. That’s up to your team members. Coordinating shouldn’t be repetitive. You should make the connection once, and be able to step back. And you definitely should not be the referee in these relationships. Leave it up to your team member to work effectively with the people you introduce them to. Focus your directing time on higher level activities versus individual tactics.

Want to learn more about leading effectively? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to navigate politics as a senior leader. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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