What questions should you ask your team members in order to evaluate the leader's effectiveness?

On a scale of 1-10 how would your rate the effectiveness of the team leader. Follow question. What made him/her that number? What would it have taken to move it to the next level?

Hi Alicia, 360-degree feedback is one good way of measuring effectiveness of a person. Typically it's done for leaders of a team of people - and in the survey you can ask a variety of subordinates, peers, stakeholders and boss(es) to evaluate you. The idea is to get an overall "360-degree feedback" from everyone. Typically you nominate around 15-20 persons who will evaluate you. Hope this helps. Nersey Rastan

Great question Alicia. You might also find it helpful to simply ask open-ended questions like:

What's your opinion on this leader?
In what ways is she is effective?
In what ways does she make work easier/harder?
How might the leader improve her performance?
What would you do differently than the leader?

Then it's a matter of carefully listening to the employee's feedback. The idea is to not direct what they say or restrict their answers. This will give you a richer and wider perspective on what's really going on in the workplace.

There is one question that is often very revealing:

"How has this leader helped you perform at your highest level?"

1. Do team members hold each other accountable or is that left to the team leader when there is under performance?
2. Are roles clear on the team?
3. Is the team's individual and collective authority clear?
4. Is the team leader clear about how to be utilized as a resource versus "a manager."
5. Does every team member "own the result" without fault, blame or excuses?

1) If you just found out that you had to take a car ride with the department leader for 10 hours, would you look forward to it or dread it? Enjoying that sort of car ride means the leader must be self-aware, must listen, and must be comfortable with silence.

2) Can we send our leader into a tension-filled environment where a lot is at risk, do we trust him/her to make the right decisions?

Rather than just directly asking opinions about the leader, I would approach it by indirectly looking at the results (or lack of results) achieved and the environment created by the leader.

For example, ask each team member about the unit's mission, key goals and values . If they can't answer, or give widely different answers, then I would question the leader's effectiveness. If, on the other hand, the team members appear to share common views on these subjects, then I would say that the leader is likely doing a good job.

Similar questions could be developed which indirectly evaluate the leader's communications skills, vision, technical acumen, etc. Obviously, the specific questions to be asked, and the potential for gaining valuable info, will be impacted by the level of the leader, the size of the organization, etc.

The key point is that directly asking about the leader will often yield biased or inaccurate results. Looking at outcomes removes much of this difficulty.

I would ask questions from a slightly different tack.

For example asking if the team member feels their work and contributions are valued can elicit a lot of information about how the leader treats others. What is the leader's vision and does the team and the employee share it? Without positive answers to those 2 questions the leader isn't a good leader let alone even a good manager.

I find that it is very tricky to get honest and direct responses about a leader’s effectiveness through direct polling of their reports. As a general rule, the less reports that leader has, the less likely you are to get candid and reliable answers. Even when anonymity is provided, if there are relatively few reports they realize that things that need to be said will likely be traceable back to them so they aren’t completely honest.

Given that challenge, I prefer a less direct but no less effective method. I prefer to have the team members describe the things about their job that really bug them, frustrate them, and prevent them from achieving their highest productivity. I also ask them to provide ideas on “opportunities for improvement”.

This focus on the situations and the environment as opposed to the leader takes away the apprehension and allows observations, ideas, and concerns to flow more freely. Then it’s my job to determine which of these “environmental” and “situational” problems are a direct result of leadership and which are the result of other factors.