John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Effective Leadership

Idea 13: Evaluating

Leaders need to be good at:

• Assessing consequences.
• Evaluating team performance.
• Appraising and training individuals.
• Judging people.

In assessing consequences, leaders should be able to foresee the outcome of action (or inaction) in terms of the technical, the financial and the human aspects of a particular activity, and to ask probing questions of the team in order to establish the likely consequences.

In evaluating team performance, perhaps through a debriefing session after a particular project, the performance of the team as a whole in relation to the task can be examined:

• Has it been a success, a partial success or a failure?
• Can lessons be learnt?
• Can action be taken to improve performance?
• What feedback can be given ...