Get Ready for a Winning New Year—with Our End-of-Year Team Check-in Process!
As another year draws to a close, it’s only natural to want to reflect back and start planning ahead. That’s why, even if your fiscal year doesn’t align, the calendar end-of-year is a perfect opportunity for you and your team to check-in on (and out of) the year that’s about to wrap up, so you can get ready for your best new year yet!
Team development for the win
As AMWTW’s signature program, The Modern Method is a simple, get-it-right-the-first-time program that teaches the tools high-performance teams need to unlock their potential and become an unstoppable force.
That said, there’s a good reason why the 4th principle in our Modern Method guide is: Take time to do development work together as a team.
Have you ever noticed how sports teams spend the majority of their time practicing so they’ll be ready when the real game begins? Most work teams, meanwhile, rarely step outside the day-to-day long enough to assess how well they’re functioning together—let alone what they could be doing to improve their performance.
That’s where the team check-in comes in.
Our team has developed an incredibly simple but effective way to make the most of our year-end reflections—and we’d like to share that process with you.
Our end-of-year team check-in process
At AMWTW, our end-of-year process is focused on 2 simple questions:
1) What worked well in the past year?
2) What could be better?
To help facilitate your team’s discussion around these 2 topics, here are a few points to keep in mind.
What worked well?
It’s a good idea to start with the positives by asking this question first. While your team may be slow to respond initially, if you allow some time for silence and thought, people will soon start remembering, sharing, and then adding to examples of what worked well as the conversation gets going.
Make sure you record every example that comes up in a dedicated document (you’ll want to revisit this list later). As a guide, we typically run the question of what worked well around our 5-person team for about 20-25 minutes.
What could be better?
The first time our team asked this question, I worried what I’d hear as a manager—and how lengthy the list of items would be!
As it turns out, not only is our “what worked well” list consistently longer than our rundown of “what could be better”, none of the feedback here is ever surprising. A lot of it, in fact, is the result of team members self-identifying areas of improvement for their own work.
Once again, make sure you allow some time for silence and thought around the question of what could be better, and then document every point raised. As a leader, it’s important that you resist injecting a defense or explanation for points expressed by team members—and that you also add some points of your own.
This part of the check-in process generally takes our team another 20 minutes.
Next steps
Once we’ve compiled our two lists, several important things happen:
· People naturally start to take ownership of the items that could be better (and that are in their control to improve)
· We brainstorm as a team around what we want to prioritize fixing
· We make it a point to celebrate what worked well, since feeling great about our successes reinforces this behaviour moving forward (this is a great opportunity, by the way, for leaders to hear what people are most proud about—some of which they may not have seen for themselves)
Finally, to close out our team check-in, we all take a few action items away with us and make a plan to revisit our “what could be better” list every few months.
Spending time as a team to discuss your performance is essential for becoming—and staying—improvement-focused. While this type of check-in activity can be done any time, capitalizing on your team’s natural end-of-year reflections is a winning way to ring in the new year!