Imagine you’re the manager of a professional football club.  It’s Monday morning and your team had a game on Saturday.  What do you do?

  1. Don’t mention it and just focus on the next game and hope it goes well
  2. Sit the team down and review want went well, what didn’t and plan for the next game

I’m guessing it would be the second option.  The first one sounds pretty ridiculous, right?  But in the business world, most managers do number one by default.

We may do a ‘post-mortem’ after that horrific project finally limps over the finishing line.  But the savvy football manager wouldn’t leave these team reviews for when their team get thrashed.  They do it every single week.

The power of team reviews

If you think that sounds a bit excessive to replicate in the business world, think about this.  The football manager has his team reviews to improve performance.  To focus the team’s attention on to doing more of the good stuff, and highlighting the things that aren’t bringing the results.  We all dream of having a high-performing team and this will help you get there.  Taking some time to reflect on what is going well and what could be improved will help you continuously up the game.

You can either schedule some time for a team review each week (or monthly if you prefer), or open up the discussion as part of your regular meeting.  Remember this is not a ‘pointing finger’ exercise or an opportunity to beat yourselves up.  Find the positives too and build on those.

And as the football manager wouldn’t just focus on the score, you should look deeper than the deliverables.  Don’t just dwell on what you’ve achieved or haven’t, think about what you’ve learnt. Because whether you smashed the week out of the park or you can’t draw a line under it fast enough, there are learnings to be had.

Here are some questions that will get the discussion started.

Questions for your team review

  • What were our successes this week?
  • What have we learnt?
  • What were we disappointed about?
  • What frustrated us?
  • What made us laugh?
  • How could we have worked better together this week?
  • As a team, where do we waste our time?
  • How can we resolve that problem going forward?
  • What progress did we make towards our goals this week?
  • If we could do this week again, what would we do differently?
  • How will we be better next week?
  • What’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt personally this week?
  • What’s our main focus for next week?
  • Is there anything that will get in our way?

Choose five or six that work for you.  Maybe change them up for each session to get different insights.  And I’d recommend you circulate your questions before the meeting to get your team to reflect before they arrive.

           Check out this video for more reasons to do regular team reviews
Click here to get access to the rest of the video series

 Click here to download some templates for both individual review and one to do with your team.  I guarantee this will make your team meetings much more impactful, your team feel more united and your performance improve.

Writing this post made me think of the classic spoof team review with James Corden and the English Football team for Comic Relief a few years ago.  Enjoy for a little light relief but please make your team reviews more collaborative 🙂