Assessing project outcomes starts with defining business goals, objectives, and present status. From there, you can prioritize actions and determine how best to establish awareness and understanding with your stakeholders to manage expectations and measure success.
Being honest, direct, and empathetic about the positive benefits and negative aspects of the task at hand can help foster trust and strengthen connections. Furthermore, respecting people’s preferences and uncovering what motivates them can improve dialogue, enhance commitment, and demonstrate emotional intelligence.
Ultimately, your stakeholders must internalize what you share to buy into any potential changes or adopt new ways of working. Customize your content for relevancy to help constituents understand what the undertaking means to them. For example, highlight pertinent details, impacts, and milestones they need to know about and review with their teams.
Outline criteria to gain insight and align on focus.
Once you know what information you want to garner from others, you can select the most effective tactic. For example, hosting an in-person meeting to kick off a new assignment is a great way to introduce project members, disclose facts, and solicit feedback on scope. Additionally, you can build rapport by creating a shared purpose, defining what success looks like, and prioritizing actions and next steps.
If your topic is related to remediation, such as a negative employee morale score, privately contacting individuals could encourage them to speak up more honestly. To initiate discussions, you could review results and gently ask, “What do you think is the root cause of the low employee morale?” or “What could be different or better in the organization to improve morale?”
Integrate quantitative and qualitative feedback for a more comprehensive analysis.
Concrete data points—quantitative and qualitative—can help you engage stakeholders throughout the project and provide baselines to measure progress between your current and desired states over time.
Quantitative methods specify tangible numbers and percentages to show incremental improvements or declines. In comparison, qualitative insight captures feelings, perceptions, and opinions through words, which can help pinpoint underlying themes and issues.
Here are four techniques that work well together:
#1 Interviews.
Interviews are usually one-on-one and can be conducted in person, on the phone, or virtually. They are optimal for collecting in-depth perspectives and experiences for highly sensitive topics. They are typically confidential, where people are notified that the output will be characterized in the themes, and any direct quotes will be stripped of identifying markers. You’ll want a diverse group of 15-20 people representing different functions, departments, levels, and temperaments.
#2 Surveys.
Surveys are suitable for gathering information from large groups of people in a consistent and structured format to ensure reliability and validity. You can conduct surveys by paper, telephone, and online. Questions typically are true-false and multiple-choice that enable you to compile and trend data over time. Some may also include a few open-ended questions to uncover themes and sentiments. Unfortunately, the response rate can be low unless there’s a real push or incentive to take a survey. However, you can further emphasize the significance and allocate time during staff meetings for people to respond.
#3 Focus Groups.
Focus groups can elicit intel on operations and organizational norms by discussing behaviors, habits, challenges, and concerns. These touchpoints are usually confidential and involve asking the same questions in a consistent format to derive themes. Focus groups should be conducted in a small group setting, either in person or in a virtual meeting, with approximately 12-15 people. Similar to interviews, you’ll want to have a diverse sampling of individuals making sure to separate people managers and employees to enable everyone to speak freely. A skilled facilitator, preferably from outside the company, is key to achieving desired results.
#4 Observations.
Observations help collect data on behaviors occurring in their usual contexts. They tend to involve checking off what the observer can see from a predetermined checklist of desired behaviors. The person conducting the observation study must be onsite and have a keen eye to notice details around what is and is not occurring. Keep in mind that people may alter how they act or behave to be seen as doing their functions properly. Additionally, this method is very time-intensive, and the quality depends on the observer’s overall abilities.
Embrace a “positive expectations” outlook to encourage action.
Your mindset is a collection of values, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that affect how you think, act, and feel. Incorporating optimism into your outlook, where you believe positive outcomes are possible and that small changes can reap significant benefits, can energize you to move forward and inspire others to do the same.
Activate your best with those around you.
Self-leadership is about getting to know yourself better and applying that knowledge to how you connect with others. As a lifelong student, certified professional coach, and consultant, activating the best in others through self-leadership, interpersonal relations, and team dynamics are passions of mine. My approach is personalized and customized, tapping into various assessments, disciplines, modalities, and techniques. Also, check out my “Micro & Mini Service Offerings” and try one session to inspire you. Sign up solo or with another person or group to work on a specific exercise or activity and split the costs! Contact me to get started.