In her article Getting Along on a Diverse Team, Karen Nelson summarises an article in Harvard Business Review. The article, in the July/August 2008 issue, looks at how 360 Degree Feedback can be a powerful tool for building trust among team members, identifying the fit between team members' skills and styles, and increasing the team's performance through better collaboration and communication.
In addition to Karen's summary, the key points that stood out for me in the article, and the case study, were:
- The Team leader openly discussed the feedback that he himself had been given, with his team. This created trust within the team and led to team members opening up and discussing what they themselves could do differently
- The Team leader also made some simple, but critical, changes in the way he managed the team (e.g. asking them to come directly to him to discuss budget issues). By listening to the feedback and visibly changing his behaviour based on that feedback, the Team leader demostrated his willingness to learn and change, thus encouraging his team to do the same.
- Because potentially difficult discussions had begun to open up, members also began talking directly to one another, and to look at how they could increase performance proactively.
Track's Team Works is a tool that's been specially developed to allow Team leaders and their teams to gather feedback and to review their own performance as a team, giving them a powerful tool for discussion and action planning.