Overview

I spent years as a business growth Adviser and Investors in People Adviser working with organisations to create a “golden thread” from organisation vision>organisation strategy and planning > team planning, right through to individual performance objectives.

More information on broad approaches to strategic planning ideas are here.

I often found that organisations had done some of the future planning around vision and planning at a corporate level and people at an individual level had some performance objectives, but there was a lack of clarity at a Team level for the various different teams across the organisation, and insufficient specifics about the team purpose, aligning this with the organisation plans and ensuring a link through to individual objectives.

Team Performance Plan

A Team Performance Plan is a detailed plan used to:

  • Provide future direction of the team
  • Identify the desired performance levels of the team
  • Identify how these performance levels will be achieved
  • Provide guidance and direction to the team
  • Measure progress towards the desired performance levels

Although there are no strict rules as to the format of a Team Performance Plan they normally contain at least some of the following information:

  • A Team vision or at least a Team purpose statement
  • Performance measures/ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • These KPIs could be shown in the form of a “dashboard”
  • Actions required to achieve goals
  • Specific goals for overall team development, and goals to improve team competency
  • The team might also want to include elements like; gaining internal customer feedback if they are an internal support team, or external feedback if they are customer/client facing
  • Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) can also play a crucial role in this process by providing a structured approach to address individual performance issues within the team, helping to align personal objectives with overall team goals.

Suggested approach

An approach as a Team Manager, or “Head of” a number of teams could look like:

  • Do some preparatory work on broad vision and objectives for the whole Team/Directorate based on your understanding of the whole organisation vision and plan (that is of course assuming there is one, which isn’t always the case! Otherwise you are needing to create your own vision and plan without this in place)
  • Go through this at a session/team meeting with direct reports and field questions/feedback
  • Ask each of the Team Leaders to work on their areas using one of the templates below in resources section, to come back to a whole team meeting
  • Team Leaders are asked to present back their own team plans with feedback from other members of the Management Team, and the plans are integrated into a whole Directorate plan. My thought is that minimalism is key to plans being created, updated and reviewed, so should be short and succinct and probably no more than 2 pages

Resources