Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Management Team

Your management team is pivotal to the success of your business.

In a perfect world, your management team works together seamlessly. Each member brings to your business a unique set of talent and skills. Their work gets done on time, and each member contributes to your overall business goals. In addition, they are respected and valued by their co-workers.

Is your management fulfilling these goals? Are you evaluating the effectiveness of your management team?

Today, we look at how to gauge the effectiveness of your team along with some steps to improve it. First, let’s look at the role of your management team.

Management Team Roles

Whether your business is retail, healthcare, food service, or something else, the role of your managers contains similar aspects:

– Leading staff through managerial duties
– Fostering teamwork
– Delegating and distributing the workload

You may think your manager is doing a great job, but it really is up to you to evaluate their effectiveness in regards to your employees and your customers.

How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your management team? Through feedback from employees and customers and a long look at your company’s financial performance.

Here are some specific ways to evaluate your team’s success and help them work more effectively.

Be Clear with Your Expectations

It’s hard for your management team to work together successfully if they don’t know your expectations from the start.

Let them know, in writing, what you expect. If you have management team goals, lay them out for everyone so each team member is on the same page.

When you let them know your expectations, you can also use this list to measure their effectiveness. It gives you a starting point for discussion when you think your team isn’t working well.

Follow the Traits of an Effective Team

When evaluating your team’s effectiveness, you want to ask yourself if you’ve done everything you can to motivate them and connect with them.

The Harvard Business Review says there are five components to emotional intelligence that you can use when evaluating and inspiring your team.

You can also use these five criteria when evaluating the individual members of your team, and the team as a whole:

1. *Self-Awareness:* Is your manager able to recognize his own moods and how they affect the team?
2. *Self-Regulation:* Can your manager separate her personal mood from her job performance?
3. *Motivation: *How much passion does your manager have for the job? Does it go beyond the basic salary goal?
4. *Empathy:* Can your manager connect with employees and customers?
5. *Social Skills:* Does your manager gel with the management team and your employees? Can she communicate clearly her ideas and concepts?

Using these criteria can help you when evaluating the effectiveness of your management team. If you find a weak link, talk to the manager about working on the above mentioned skills.

Maintain Accountability

Use established business stats to gauge the effectiveness of your management team. This might include things like sales goals, financial goals, production and delivery goals, return customer metrics, amount of work done in a day and others.

You can use these metrics to decide on your team’s overall effectiveness as related to your business goals.

It is worth noting that even if your business is growing and doing well, this isn’t the only indicator as to whether your team is working effectively. You still want to look at the state of their emotional intelligence as a team.

If they aren’t meeting the above criteria for emotional intelligence, you are headed for failure.

When evaluating your team, it’s also helpful to rate them on a group basis instead of looking at each member separately.

This has the added value of keeping them accountable to each other and can improve group dynamics. Just make sure they know beforehand that you are going to do this.

Things That Signal Trouble

Another way to evaluate the effectiveness of your management team is to watch out for these signs of trouble. They almost always mean that something is amiss and needs attending to.

1. High employee turnover may mean that your management team isn’t communicating well.
2. Negative customer feedback should always be looked at closely. Repeated complaints from customers may signal problems between your employees and management team.
3. A decline in sales that isn’t seasonal or related to the economy may indicate a poorly functioning management team. Take a look at your management team and decide if change is warranted.
4. When managers don’t communicate with or respond to you or other employees in a timely fashion, this is worth investigation on your part.

Again, if any of these issues are happening in your company, it’s time to look at your management team. You’ve entrusted them with much responsibility and leeway, and their ineffectiveness can spell disaster for your business.

To Conclude

Your management team has a dramatic effect on the performance of your employees and the success of your business.

When your management team is working effectively together, you’ll avoid inner-office problems and lackluster performance issues.

An effective management team is more than a group of individuals with “managerial” titles. Your team is at its best when it is working as a cohesive unit with shared goals and a singular sense of purpose.

**How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your management team? Do they work well together as a unit, or do you experience problems? Please share what’s worked for you below.**

Jon Hainstock