Even after the team has been assembled and trained, the Lead Assessor remains accountable for ensuring that its processes remain on track.
As team manager, the Lead Assessor assigns and helps negotiate roles and responsibilities for various assessment activities. Ideally, team members make these decisions collectively, including who will monitor which KPA or PA, who will ask which question, how the consolidation time will be organized, and so on. When the team reaches an impasse, however, or when no one agrees to take on a particular task, it is the role of the Lead Assessor to take responsibility for seeing that a decision is reached.
The following seven areas are the cores of team management skills.
- Planning Mapping out the sequence of activities and their interdependencies is a key skill for managing the assessment method. Planning is much more than scheduling because it involves being able to estimate with some confidence all resources required, and to identify, coordinate, and negotiate with key stakeholders.
- Decision-Making The team needs to identify and agree to both a set of decision rules and a process for arriving at decisions that is consistent wit the purpose of the assessment and the needs of the team. While the recommended decision-making strategy during the assessment is consensus, the team needs to consider what latitude rests with the Lead Assessor in making a decision when the team is either unavailable or is at an impasse and refuses to negotiate.
- Ground Rules The team needs to create a set of ground rules for how it will work together. Although certain ground rules are implicit in the assessment method (e.g., confidentiality and consensus), it is important that the team explicitly agree to guidelines for what they expect from one another and how they will handle various situations that may arise.
- Communication Communication has two components: sending and receiving. The team is expected to provide high-quality written and oral communication during the assessment, adhering to the principle of neutral (i.e., non-judgemental) feedback. The team is also expected to listen carefully to participants and to control their own biases as much as possible so that it can hear and understand the participants’ perspectives.
- Collaboration The assessment method places a high value on recognizing that each team member and each participant has expertise to share. You can enact this by conducting all meetings as peer activities and giving multiple opportunities for team members and participants to provide input. Within the context of this value, however, some boundaries need to be set in the interest of time, especially during the closed team meetings. Although guidance is provided, the team needs to identify where it needs to collaborate and where it is appropriate for team members to work independently.
- Negotiation The assessment method involves a large number of people and activities that require careful coordination. Line managers, participant, and the assessment team all must understand and agree to the schedule, the resources committed, and their roles and responsibilities so that the assessment is conducted effectively. The Lead Assessor has dual responsibility for securing those agreements as well as being explicit about his or her needs during the assessment.
- Conflict Resolution Each team member brings a unique perspective and set of experiences to the assessment activities, which by definition creates the potential for conflict. These different perspectives should be welcomed because they offer a more complete picture of a situation. The problems arise when differences harden into non-negotiable positions or when they are perceived as personal attacks.
The Lead Assessor also serves as team facilitator and addresses the processes by which the team works together to perform the assessment. Effective performance is based on a shared understanding of and commitment to the ground rules and a shared commitment to the neutrality of the outcome. These issues are initially covered in the team building sessions during assessment team training, but they need reinforcement starting from the first activities of the assessment.
Facilitation keeps the team focused on the desired outcome of each assessment activity, especially when situations arise that divert the team from its expected course.
Teams often find that designating an individual to act as process facilitator keeps them focused on working together effectively, especially under the stress of the late hours and frequent deadlines that are part of the assessment onsite period. This role may be traded off throughout the assessment so that it does not become a burdensome addition to the responsibilities of team members.
In the final analysis, though, the Lead Assessor must be the ultimate arbiter. When there is conflict between two or more team members, the Lead Assessor is responsible for sorting it out. (It is quite common in fact to have situations where two team members cannot get alongone will always disagree with whatever the other says.)
The Lead Assessor must also continually monitor confusion about what the assessment is trying to accomplish or differing expectations about how an activity has been or will be conducted. Many of these confusions are based on misunderstanding the model, and they lead to arguments about what the model says (or should say). The Lead Assessor, as the facilitator, must anticipate these situations and negotiate a way through them, in part by on-the-spot instruction about the model.
The Lead Assessor needs to watch carefully for differences that can escalate into conflict and raise them in team discussions. (It may be helpful to establish ground rules for this early.) Focusing on objective data rather than on opinions, inferences, and conclusions is a good way to turn an argument into a discussion.
To the extent that team members keep focused on assessment principles, the risk that conflicts will sidetrack the team or split it into factions will be lessened.