TSR #13: How team health checks can help you lead by listening

How to facilitate a small conversation with big results

5 minute read

What’s in this newsletter:

• What is a team health check

• Why it’s important

• The cost of skipping regular health checks

• One actionable exercise you can do with your team

Leadership isn’t a one way street.

In fact, it should be more listening than speaking. More observing than steering. More amplif-OK you get it.

The fact is, how you listen means as much (if not more) to your team than how you teach.

One easy way to lead by listening is the team health check.

What is a team health check

The team health check is an opportunity for your team to have an open and honest conversation.

It helps you identify key areas to change within your team and issues to escalate.

It’s usually facilitated by a non-biased person but if you’ve built up enough trust you can run it as a manager.

If you decide to guide the conversation, try not to influence the conversation with your own perspective.

Remember, you’re here to listen.

If you want to recruit a non-biased partner, you can always find a Program Manager, team member, or HR Business Partner to help.

Why it’s important

Teams can get so caught up in day to day challenges that they rarely take a step back and look at the big picture.

Health Checks help your team:

• Come together and have a high level discussion, beyond the day to day work

• Reflect and align on what they feel is important

• Self identify issues rather than have someone else diagnose them

• Track progress in problem areas by holding these conversations over time

The cost of skipping regular health checks

Highway hypnosis

Like when you’re driving and all of a sudden wake up and ask yourself if you ran that red light back there… 

This is when you make little tweaks as they come up and continue ways of working because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.

Having regular health checks can help you snap out of this hypnosis.

Symptom chasing

We’re so wrapped up in our day to day we tend to fix a problem enough so it works again without getting down to the root cause.

Like patching a flat tire, there’s only so much you can cover up before you have to dig deep (that was the last driving metaphor I promise).

Having a high level health check can help you find these root causes.

The big picture

If you’re always running from one project to the next it's difficult to look at the bigger picture.

Beyond this, it's difficult to align around why you’re doing the things you’re doing.

Without the why, even the best functioning team can get lost.

Team health checks can help you find yourself again… like a GPS… sorry, I had to, it was right there.

One actionable exercise for you and your team

This is actually 3 exercises, but try to at least tackle the first one to show your team you’re listening.

Facilitate the conversation

Talk to your team open and honestly across 3 major altitudes:

• Organization

  • Do you feel like you have the support to make a big impact at the company? 

  • Do you feel like your company delivers value to the customer? 

  • How is the company culture affecting you, good or bad?

• Team

  • Do you feel aligned with your team? 

  • Do you have too much process? Too little? 

  • How do you show up for each other day to day?

• Individual

  • Does each person understand their role within the team? Within the company?

  • Do you feel fulfilled and that you’re growing? 

  • Do you feel supported along your path?

Just a few of these questions could take hours, pick and choose 1 or 2 from each and try to cover all three altitudes.

Distill the insights

• Cluster the answers you get, put them on Post Its or in Miro if you need to.

• Look for common themes, what keeps popping up as a problem area?

• Look for common denominators, what seems to be the underlying factor across problem areas?

Turn that insight into action

Use the answers you come up with to

• Identify areas you can solve within the team

• Escalate the areas you can’t to higher leaders who need to be aware

• Create proposals you feel may help other teams

Team health checks can take as short or long as you want them to.

The important thing is that you’re showing your team that you want to listen and make things better.

Try it out and let me know what you think.