Saturday, May 29, 2010

Are you a good manager? 100 questions to evaluate yourself.

Are you a good manager? 100 questions to evaluate yourself.

Communication:[Listening,Two-Way Feedback,Written Communication,Oral Communication,Oral Presentation,Vision/Goal Setting]

1. Do you listen to your team members patiently? empathetically?
2. Do you send him/her a signal of actually you are listening e.g. like yes, ok, nodding your head etc.
3. Do you reword and ask them whether you have understood correctly to make them assure that you have listened and understood the problem carefully?
4. Do you give an opportunity to express their concerns?
5. Do you carry out periodic 1:1 and ask them questions and get their feeling about which went good/bad/ any concern area and capture their inputs?

6. While taking a decision do you ask them "What do you feel?" and get their feedback?
7. Do you ask your team member's opinion for any approach?

8. Are you prompt in sending emails?
9. While communicating do you make sure that the thought is logically build?
10. Do you make a judgement when written communication is required over Oral communication and act accordingly?
11. Are your status report easy to understand and capture every bit of information?
12. Are you prompt in providing comments when your expertise is sought after?
13. Do you conduct a focused QA meeting?
14. Do you share the objective of the meeting to be held with your team members?
15. Do you call Stand up meeting with team/sub team as on when required?
16. Do you coordinate with other stakeholders when your team members require any info?
17. Do you attend status call when your presence is required?
18. Do you make a note of important thing what you are going to tell, organizing the ideas, practicing mentally before and say with enthusiasm and confidence before your team members?

19. Do you take any presentation (technical/soft skill/report etc)?

20. Do you share the big picture with your team members
21. Do you share the context, objective of the testing instead of giving the instructions what to do?
22. Do you involve your team members for the estimating effort?
23. Do you contribute towards the value add activities in the team apart from routine tasks?
24. Do you explain what is the best can be done in a given condition when team is subjected to constraint of different criteria?
25. Do you measure individual development plan and share the roadmap for achieving own’s goal?



Task Management [Planning/Organising,Delegation,Administrative Control,Performance Evaluation,Performance Management, Recognising/Rewarding]

26. Do you do any ground work/home work before presenting the information to the team?
27. Do you involve your team members for the decision making process?
28. Do you participate in brainstorming session when the area is completely new?
29. Do you share the data (schedule etc) with the team members (whether they are comfortable in executing and completing the tasks) before publishing it?
30. Do you sometime ask for volunteers for the task which needs to be executed instead of directly allocating the resource?
31. Do you spend time in understanding the technical complexities, domain knowledge of the product and extend your technical help, domain knowledge to the team members?
32. Are you prompt in giving comments for documents written by your team members and your superiors?
33. Do you guide team members how they can prepare themselves when a new task is under the pipeline and utilize their time to best?
34. Do you co-ordinate with diff stake holders of the project and get the necessary information for the team members?
35. Do you keep maturity of the team in mind and always look for opportunities how you can improve upon that. Do you capture data to establish that?
36. Are your status report accurate and detailed?
37. Do you effectively utilize your resources?
38. Do you forecast for required resources based on the available information on the project (when you are handling multiple projects)?
39. Do you manage the leaves of the team members effectively? Availability of alternate resources to ensure smooth progress of the project? Plan for transitioning of required info to another person if someone goes for leave etc?
40. Do you formally/informally chat with dev team/product management team to get to know proactively what might come next to qa's plate?
41. Do you follow up with the other teams to make sure your entry criteria are successfully validated to start the task without delay?
42. Do you try to find out how you can improve the efficiency of the team (by adopting any tool etc by applying proper cost benefit analysis)?

43. Do you encourage the team members to brainstorm among themselves and let you know the decision derived?
44. Do you sometime give the team members liberty to divide the tasks among themselves?
45. Do you sometime give the team members the opportunity to directly communicate with the diff stakeholders?
46. Do you see the opportunity and delegate enough responsibilities to your team member and empower them?
47. Do you take judgemental decision when to offload and delegate the tasks to your team members?

48. Do you monitor the progress closely?
49. Do you try to find out plan-b task which the team member can execute when the execution does not go as per the prepared plan and thus minimizing the risk

50. Do you monitor performance of the team members periodically and share with him/her positive and improvement areas, areas of concern etc?
51. Are you open to take suggestion from the team members?
52. Do you give timely feedback to the team members?
53. Do you focus/highlight on their strengths rather than their shortcoming/faults?

54. Do you encourage your team members and applaud their effort?
55. Do you always have time for your team members when they need to talk to you?
56. Do you always provide positive enforcement to the team which will boost their productivity?

57. Do you recognize your team members?
58. Do you nominate them for any award?
59. Do you appreciate your team members / applaud in the team meeting for their achievement?



Interpersonal [Team Development, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Conflict Management, Coaching, Leadership/Influence, Employee Involvement]

60. Do you make sure the person whom you are allocating the task has the necessary competency to execute that?
61. Do you encourage the team members to communicate and collaborate with fellow team members?
62. Do you encourage them to come up with their own ideas?
63. Do you always make them as part of project team and make them feel responsible for project success/failure?
64. Do you check stability of the team members and take necessary action to address it?
65. Do you maintain a skill matrix in your team to deploy the team members effectively when a new task arrived?
66. Do you regularly conduct 1: 1 with the team members and collect what went well, what they could do better, any concerns , their aspiration and derive action item from there and execute it
67. Do you identify for each of the team members , their strong and their improvement area
68. Do you allocate some time for training for your team members depending on both project needs and individual interest?

69. Do you show them care and respect?
70. Do you show empathy for their personal problem?
72. Do you ever criticize/condemn your team members?
73. Do you make your team members feel important?
74. Do you smile enough and promote a healthy culture in your team?

75. Do you collect and derive a conclusion from the collected data for managing a conflict? Do you ever go by mere perception?

76. Do you measure what is your contribution towards coaching/grooming the team members?
77. Do you openly admit your shortcomings/lack of knowledge to your team? Do you help them to find a right reference from your network of people in case if you are not able to directly help them on a technical issue?
78. Do you make them self sufficient incrementally?

79. How do you influence the team members, by doing yourself first, being the first change?
80. Do you set an example by actually doing by yourself?
81. Do you discourage to do any kind of blame game?
82. Do you appreciate effort of a team member who truly deserve that?
83. Are you always fair in approach?
84. Do you motivate your team members by occasional motivational talk in the team meeting?
85. Do you ever take share of team member's achievement?
86. Do you respect team member's opinion/ideas? Do you ever say they are wrong?
87. Do you ever admit your mistake in front of the team?

88. Do you seek their feedback after putting your ideas?


Problem Solving [Problem Analysis, Decisiveness/Judgement]

89. Do you always try to understand the root cause of the problem and try to attack the root of the problem while solving it?
90. Do you ever try to attack the person instead of the problem?
91. Do you apply the solution and gain an experience out of it?
92. Do you say what you want to say without spoiling the relationship?

93. Do you always apply judgement before imposing the tasks to the team mebers?
94. Do you take prompt decision before the situation gets out of control?
95. Do you gather all the relevant information before taking the decision.
96. While taking the decision do you list out all the possible solution? Do you narrow it down based on pros and cons.?
97. Do you think about the consequences as well while applying a solution?
98. Do see from other's angle and feel if it is applicable?
99. Are you comfortable in project/people/operational issues?
100. Do you help team members to take any decision instead of giving direct orders?