First 90 days: Assessing team performance and skills as a new manager

Congratulations, you’ve landed a new role! As a new team manager, how do you set your team up for success? It starts by getting to know your people and their skill sets so you can identify the right path forward. 

Here’s our guide to your first 90 days as a new manager, complete with tips to identify your new team’s skills, gaps, and opportunities.

Use this checklist to identify your new team’s skills, gaps, and opportunities for growth within your first three months. Keep reading for more details about each step.

Days 0 – 30:

• Connect with your team 

• Understand business priorities and how you support them

• Define the key soft skills and technical skills your team needs

• Set success metrics

• Validate skills and metrics with leadership approval

• Seek input from team members

Days 31 – 60:

• Build psychological safety in teams

• Choose the right method to assess your team’s skills

• Create a skills inventory

• Identify and prioritize skills gaps

Days 61 – 90:

• Implement tailored upskilling initiatives

• Start building a culture of learning within your team

• Re-assess skills and evaluate progress

Entering a new role is bound to be overwhelming. Don’t try to do everything at once. Instead, dedicate your first 30 days to defining success and getting to know your team beyond their work contributions.

First, understand your organization’s goals and how your team supports them. For example, let’s say your organization is building a custom model to make customer communication more efficient while maintaining data privacy.

What skills does your team need to support that goal? If you lead a team of machine learning engineers, they’ll need deep Python knowledge and familiarity with popular ML libraries and frameworks to train your AI model. 

If you lead a team of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) specialists, they’ll need to understand data privacy regulations and cybersecurity laws to evaluate the risks of the model and develop appropriate security controls.

If you lead a customer success team, they’ll need prompt engineering and critical thinking skills to interact with the model effectively and validate its output. 

If you aren’t sure what skills your team might need, our tech career roadmaps share critical skills for roles across AI, cybersecurity, data, cloud, and software development.

Next, define what success looks like with clear metrics you can track over time. Metrics are critical to identifying your new team’s strengths and opportunities for improvement.

For example, you might lead a team of developers. To be successful in your organization, they need to write clean code, collaborate with other teams, and deliver meaningful results. 

That might translate into metrics like number of bugs or incidents, feedback from other departments, or on-time project delivery rates. On top of that, your new organization might value curiosity, so showing a willingness to learn and solve problems is also important. 

Once you’ve identified skills and metrics for team success, share them with your leader for feedback. This step confirms you’re on the right track and have identified skills and metrics aligned with your organization’s goals and key performance indicators. Bringing in other opinions also reduces bias.

After speaking with senior leaders, present the skills and metrics you’ve identified to your new team members. The way you do this will impact your dynamic with the team moving forward. 

Clearly explain your reasoning: You’re new, and you want to understand everyone’s skills. This will help you identify the right person for each project and provide professional development opportunities, like leadership development programs. You created this list of important skills and performance metrics with your leaders and you want to know what they think.

Have a conversation with them, hear out any concerns, and make sure everyone agrees the skills and metrics are fair. Leading with transparency and open communication will help you build trust.

Now that you’ve outlined the skills your team should have, it’s time to understand the skills they actually have. Your next 30 days should consist of evaluating your team’s skills and performance to identify gaps and opportunities.

Any type of evaluation can give employees anxiety, especially when they have a new boss. Evaluating skills is no exception. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to assuage their fears and create psychological safety in teams.

• Be transparent: Be clear about the purpose of these evaluations. Assessments and feedback give you context and provide a starting point for learning opportunities. You won’t use them for employment decisions, and employees won’t be penalized for their score.

• Maintain confidentiality: Tell employees that their results are confidential and won’t be shared with the rest of the team. 

• Share your score: Use the same criteria to assess your skills and share your results with the team. Be vulnerable with them, and they’ll feel more comfortable being vulnerable with you, too.

There are many different ways to evaluate your team’s skills. Select the right methods for your use case. In most instances, you’ll use a mix.

• Performance reviews: Performance reviews can give you a quick overview of each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. 

• Self-assessments: With self-assessments, each team member evaluates their own expertise. Self-assessments are lightweight and relatively easy to roll out, but they’re subjective. Your employees may over- or underestimate their abilities. (Did you know 79% of employees exaggerate their AI knowledge?) If you use self-assessments, pair them with additional measures for a more accurate evaluation.

• Peer feedback: Peer feedback can also contain bias, but it’s a great way to measure impact, especially for soft skills like collaboration and communication.

• Norm-referenced assessments: Norm-referenced assessments like Skill IQ measure team members’ skills against other people who have taken the same assessment. These assessments provide immediate feedback and can help you identify employees who are particularly strong in certain areas.

• Skill assessments: Skill assessments are more objective measures that confirm employees have the skills needed to achieve intended outcomes. These assessments also identify specific areas for growth, but they tend to be more time-consuming than other techniques.

Assess your team’s skills, identify gaps, and build custom learning paths with Pluralsight.

After assessing your team’s skills, create a skills inventory. A skills inventory is a list of all the skills, capabilities, qualifications, certifications, and experience your employees have.

Compare your skills inventory with the skills and metrics you listed in your first 30 days. Where are they aligned? Are there certain skills your team needs that aren’t reflected in your skills inventory? If so, you’ve found your team’s skills gaps.

Make a list of the skills gaps and then rank them by priority. Which skills are most critical to team and business goals? This will help you develop an effective upskilling strategy.

Right now, the main purpose of your skills inventory is to find and fill critical skills gaps. Over time, you can use your skills inventory for proactive team development.

Learn more about how to identify skills gaps.

Now that you know your team’s strengths and skills gaps, you can create a comprehensive upskilling plan. In your third month as a new team manager, start rolling out skill development and laying the groundwork for a culture of learning.

Take another look at your team’s skills gaps and assessment results to identify training needs. Leverage a mix of online courses and resources for skill enhancement.

Let’s say your team needs to buff their cloud computing skills, specifically when it comes to designing secure S3 buckets. Refresh their knowledge with an Amazon S3 Deep Dive course, and then let them experiment with a hands-on lab. This will give employees real-world experience before they dive into your environment. 

You can also create custom learning paths to fill specific skills gaps or meet certain goals. Learn more about Pluralsight’s AI learning assistant Iris.

A culture of learning encourages and rewards employees for upskilling. Building one is an organization-wide effort, but there are a few things you can do within your team:

• Encourage mentorship and peer learning: Norm-referenced assessments can help you identify team members who are strong in certain areas compared to the rest of the team. These employees may be ideal mentors who can teach everyone else.

• Create opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange: Share learnings during team meetings or schedule semi-regular lunch-and-learn sessions. 

• Provide leadership development programs: Help team members upskill to advance their careers and eventually lead their own teams.

• Recognize and reward skill sharing within the team: Incentivize learning and shout out team members who meet learning goals.

Encouraging continuous learning and professional development extends beyond your first 90 days. Looking for inspiration? Get the free Tech Upskilling Playbook to unlock seven tech skill development strategies.

Remember those metrics you set for assessing team performance? And the skills gaps you found in your first 60 days? Revisit them now.

Re-assess your employees’ skills and compare their performance to their original results. Where did they improve? What skills gaps remained the same? Did you move the needle on any of your team metrics? 

Depending on the assessment outcomes, adapt your upskilling strategy and set new, measurable goals for skill improvement.

Don’t stop assessing your team’s skills after the first 90 days. Make it a habit. 

Continually evaluating your team’s skills is the only way to help them learn, grow, and stay on top of evolving technologies and changing business needs.

From your first 90 days to beyond, Pluralsight is your skill development partner. Learn more about how we help leaders guide their new teams towards success.