Managing All-in-One For Dummies

Book V

Managing Teams

Five Ways to Foster Accountability

• Conduct status review meetings. These meetings create positive peer-group pressure, keep you in the loop without having to micromanage, provide focus, and build accountability.
• Report results outward and upward. Monthly or quarterly, create a written progress review of your team's work that broadcasts your progress to people outside the team. Occasionally make presentations to management above you or to other groups that are interested in your team's work.
• Conduct postmortems. With your team, evaluate their performance after a project or special event has concluded. Learn lessons from the past and apply them to future performance.
• Conduct a performance evaluation. Guide your team in evaluating its overall performance at the end of a given cycle, generally at the end of a quarter or six-month period. The team evaluates results against established performance criteria that are selected in advance.
• Use peer feedback. For any team that's going to be together for an extended period, peer feedback is one of the stronger strategies for building accountability among individual team members.

As your team's leader, do you model accountability? Do your actions enhance or detract from your credibility? Find out by taking a quick team leadership inventory at www.dummies.com/extras/managingaio.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Putting ...