Loud Thinking April 25, 2014 at 01:28PM

Boost Your Team’s Performance with a Task Map

If your team isn’t functioning as well as it should, ask whether employees are in the right roles. People are happier and more productive if they have opportunities to use their skills, but misalignments of abilities and responsibilities can happen over time. Get back on track by creating a task map: a visual tool that allows you to see where skills are lacking or duplicated on a team. It can realign people’s tasks to fit their skills, and result in greater productivity, high performance, and reduced turnover.
Assess people’s skills by looking at their accomplishments and assessments.
List their primary and secondary abilities on a whiteboard to see redundancies and gaps that have arisen. (For example, you may have four great analysts, but only one stellar project manager on your team.)
Create a list of the responsibilities and tasks required of your team members. How do their skills match with their tasks?

Adapted by HBR from “ Use a Task Map to Improve Your Team’s Performance” by Allison Rimm.

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