Follow Up: Inviting Evaluation From Your Team (Part 1)

Last month I posted about my invitation to our staff to evaluate my performance as a leader.  You can read that post HERE.  I promised to do a follow up post with their input.  This will actually be more than one post, because of length.

To get started, here are some general observations about this process:

1. I received more positives than negatives, but it is true that you reflect far more on the criticisms than you do the praise.  Still, I asked for this and appreciated  all the feedback, including those I didn’t like reading at first.
2. After all the evaluations were received, I hosted lunch for the staff where I asked for clarification on some of the comments, gave my observations, and stated the action plans I intend to implement going forward as a result of this process.  I probably learned more from this meeting than I did from the paper evaluations, so I learned it is a “must do” step in the process.
3. The top two things I learned is that communication eliminates a lot of perceived problems and that personalities play a large role in determining what a person expects from leadership.  (This will be a future blog post by itself.)
4. Our staff is very diverse, more than I probably realized, and I’m not sure I’ve always adapted my leadership style to different people.  I have always done and taught this as a parenting trait, but never consciously did it as a leader.  I wonder if this is true for other areas of our life as well.  Different people expect different things from people. (This is another blog post to come.)
5. I allowed all the feedback to be anonymous, but some signed their name anyway and in our follow up meeting, some identified specific comments as their own.  I compiled all the comments into one document though, so for the most part I have no idea who said what either because they didn’t tell me or I don’t remember.
6. The meeting seemed to be productive for all of us, not just me, and I think we all learned some things about each other, again not just about me.
7. I would like to do this again in a year or so and see what has changed.
8. I encouraged the staff to consider doing this with the volunteers and/or staff who report to them.  I did something similar to this about 6 months ago by surveying key leaders in our church asking them the question, “What would you do if you were in my shoes leading this organization?”  I got great feedback to that question also.
9. You may want to do something like this in your organization.

Tomorrow I will start posting feedback.