There are many ways to assess the performance of a team and the conditions under which the team performs. Let’s look at an approach developed by McKinsey and refined by the World Management Survey.

The World Management Survey’s approach is to get a variety of employees taking about  18 topics, to reveal the conditions under which work is performed. Questions are used as conversation starters to cover topics such as how change is introduced, if and how people are held accountable, what people are held accountable for, performance measurement and tracking, etc.

Here are some of the questions (the complete list may be found here). The questions have been used across manufacturing, retail, healthcare and education which means the questions are robust and the discussions generated will help you make better decisions about enhancing team and supervisor performance.

Example questions

The conversations about process improvement and documentation include:

1. How do problems typically get exposed and fixed?
2. Talk me through the process for a recent problem that you faced?
3. Who typically gets involved in changing or improving?
4. How do/can different staff groups get involved in this process? Take me through a recent example?
5. How can the staff suggest process improvements?

For the topic of clarity and compatibility of goals the conversation starters include:

1. If I asked someone on your staff directly about individual targets, what would they tell me?
2. How do people know how their own performance compares to other people’s performance? Is this published or posted in any way?
3. Could every person here could tell me what they are responsible for and how that will be assessed? What would they say? What would you say?

Contrast the scenarios where most people interviewed about the above topic in an organisation indicated they had no clear idea of how performance is measured, with another organisation where performance is continuously tracked and communicated to all staff using a range of visual management tools?

It’s hard work to identify accurately the development needs of a supervisor independent of the operational maturity of the organisation.