Assess Your Group's Effectiveness

An important characteristic of effective teams is that they spend some time evaluating their own processes and outcomes.  In most work situations, a team stays together for a long time,  working together as a work unit or project team. A team that is able to evaluate and improve its own work processes will become increasingly effective over time.

For student groups, the most relevant measure of your effectiveness might seem to be the grade received.  In reality, there are important differences between measuring the quality of a team's output (i.e. the grade) and its  processes.   Unless they are careful about looking at their both output and processes carefully, teams will tend to make two crucial errors.

  • Teams that enjoy working together will tend to over value the work they actually performed.  Unfortunately, group cohesiveness turns out to be largely unrelated to group productivity.  A team could be quite happy because members spend too much time socializing, for instance, and fail to realize that they are producing far less than other teams doing the same work. 
  • Teams tend to assume a good output means they had good processes.  The reality is that many factors can cause a group to succeed or fail.  The group's own internal processes are part of the picture, but management support, the availability of resources, and even plain old luck can make a difference.  
For long term success, a group needs to know how others actually perceive its output; future promotions depend on what the group actually accomplishes, not on whether its members enjoy working together.  The group also needs to know whether its own processes are effective, regardless of whether other factors created (or prevented) success. It's important, then, to carefully and objectively evaluate BOTH the actual output and the processes used to acheive that output.

Assessing Your Output
Team output is generally measured in terms of  how well it meets its "charge." If the task involves delivering something to a client or supervisor, then that customer has the final word on quality.  For student teams, a grade might not be given until the very end of the semester, too late for effective self-evaluation during the project.  As an alternative, ask your professor for an informal assessment of your work in progress.  Or, honestly compare your work with that of other students in class, or perhaps with examples of previous groups' graded work.

Assessing Your Processes
Some supervisors (or professors) will required teams to conduct self evaluations, but whether required or not, a team will benefit if it takes the time to evaluate how well it is doing on a regular basis. Even for the classroom team that will "never" work together again, a mid-project assessment can allow you to identify and solve problems before they damage your outcome.  Even more important to your eventual career success, you will learn more about team processes (and give yourself a great answer in job interviews!) by performing at least one mid-project team evaluation.