Having an effective management team has the potential to be a solid competitive advantage for your or any organization, and when it comes to running a successful organization, having a competitive advantage is a must. With the authority and power to manage, execute, be the problem solvers, and ultimately foster the workplace culture, your organization’s success is mainly reliant on the performance of your management team.

By hiring and delegating power and duties to your management team, you are increasing their responsibility for optimizing your organization’s performance (after all, “with power comes great responsibility”). But how do you evaluate whether your management team effectively handles this responsibility?

1. Clearly outline your expectations from day one
   The first step to evaluating effectiveness is to clearly define your expectations to the whole team from the start. Next, conduct a team meeting and explain what you expect, what you require, and what each team member is responsible for. By having set clear expectations and regularly following up on these, you will be able to understand and ensure they know who is doing what, making evaluating your team’s performance and the project overcome easier.
   
   
2. Set up evaluation parameters
   It is essential to devise specific evaluation parameters for your management team, as you cannot evaluate them on the same skills and responsibilities as the rest of your employees. To effectively evaluate your managers, you will need to create parameters that assess them more closely on project and people management skills, such as team building, conflict resolution, innovation, etc. These parameters will vary between organization and management levels and can only hold accountability if your managers are made aware of them.
   
   
3. Be approachable for feedback
   A valuable way to assess the effectiveness of your leadership team is to measure and understand your workforce’s attitudes. To ensure that your managers aren’t abusing their power in the workplace, you must make yourself approachable to your employees to provide feedback, even through an anonymous feedback system. By implementing this in your workplace, you will gain an insight into how your employees feel about your management team and ensure everyone is satisfied with how the organization is running.
   
   
4. Provide regular training
   Having your managers attend management, and leadership training seminars is essential as it reminds them of their role and the power they have within your team and encourages them to want to do their best and grow in their responsibilities and career. Following these training, it is vital to create a detailed follow-up plan or assigned tasks to report on and evaluate the benefits of these trainings. This will not only help assure these trainings are worth the investment but will help you to identify which managers are willing to put in the effort to learn and polish their management skills.
   
   
5. Look at objectives and key results
   Now that you have clearly defined your expectations and set evaluation parameters to identify who is responsible for what, using your significant picture objective and the key results of your organization as a reference point, you will be able to measure the progress of your workplace. Are the objectives and goals of your organization being met? If not, by tracking the progress of these results and taking a deeper dive into what isn’t working, you will be able to identify any management revisions that need to be made to your organization in the future.

An organization’s success or failure comes down to its management team’s effectiveness. Therefore, as a leader in your organization, it is vital that you make yourself approachable and foster a culture of trust, transparency, and learning to help ensure that everyone can be and is performing at their best.

To learn more about your team’s effectiveness and organization, take our Scaling Up assessment today! Then, in just 5 minutes, get an immediate analysis of your organization based on questions around the Scaling Up 4 Decisions framework – People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. So let me ask you this…is today the day you decide to scale up your business?