Once a year, Forums should run a member-to-member (M2M) assessment as a way to give an objective measure as to how well each member is doing in terms of their participation within the Forum. Typically this process is done just before a full retreat because then the group can use a retreat section to go over the results together.
A well-executed assessment should cover the following six main areas:
- LEADERSHIP – Does this person actively work to make the Forum a better group by taking on leadership responsibilities?
- PREPARATION – Is this person prepared for meetings by having well-filled monthly reflections, goals, and presentations?
- COMMITMENT – Does this person demonstrate a commitment to the other group members and isn’t just focused on themselves?
- COMMUNICATION – Does this person respond promptly to all Forum communication and participate in the group conversations throughout the month?
- DEVELOPMENT – Is this person showing growth in their life and actively working on their goals and overcoming their challenges?
- VALUES – Does this person live and breathe the values of the Forum?
While you can choose your own questions that make sense for your Forum, here are some questions I’ve used for each section to give you ideas.
LEADERSHIP
- Has a meaningful role beyond being a member
- Manages their role effectively
- Goes out of their way to make the group better
- Is willing to work hard for the team and will raise the tide for everyone and not just themselves.
PREPARATION
- Consistently provides meaningful goals during each meeting
- Presentations are meaningful and well prepared
- Monthly reflections are done ahead of time
COMMITMENT
- Doesn’t do business with, or have a business/personal conflict, with someone else in the group.
- Speaks from personal experience and doesn’t give advice
- Maintains appropriate levels of confidentiality
- Is engaged during presentations
- Asks meaningful questions during presentations
- Has meaningful and relevant experience shares.
- Steps up to coach others for their presentations
COMMUNICATION
- Follows up quickly to all Forum communication
- Shares personal tidbits with the group between meetings
DEVELOPMENT
- Is willing to share at the deepest levels of business, personal, and family to allow themselves to reach new levels of success.
- Discussion focuses on the 5% of information/feelings that are the deepest and most meaningful to the group
- Takes an active role in their personal development.
- Loves to set and work on goals within a group setting.
- Lives with a growth mindset (vs fixed mindset).
- Has a desire to be successful in all areas of their life.
- Makes changes in their Business, Family, Personal lives at the highest levels.
VALUES
- Controls their own schedule (e.g., they can walk out of a meeting if they need to)
- Has a schedule that allows for monthly meetings as well as yearly retreats
- Comes from a diverse background and experience, unlike those already in the group.
- Has experienced growing and scaling a business to something larger than themselves.
- Has an adventurous spirit and open to challenging themselves and others outside the comfort zone and into the learning zone.
- Not an a*shole
The easiest way to run an M2M assessment is with a Google Form. To make your life easier, here’s a templated M2M assessment that you can modify and use for your group > https://forms.gle/YpfY1mSssCc6E4gz6
Have each person fill out the assessment, including doing a self-assessment when they get to their own name.
Once everyone has completed the assessment, one person in the group, usually the person in charge of the M2M compiles the results into a readable format. Ideally, you want the results to show how someone rated themselves compared to how the group rated them.
Distribute these results to each person before the retreat and then carve out some time at the retreat for each person to reflect on their results. Some questions they could answer might be:
- Which results surprised you the most?
- What do you plan to do to increase your lowest results for next time?
- What makes you proud about your highest results?
- Any member who scores a group average (excluding their own score) of below 3.5 on any category for 2 consecutive evaluations will be subject to group removal by a 2/3rds vote excluding the member in question.
- Any member who scores a group average (excluding their own score) of below 3.5 on any category for 3 consecutive evaluations is automatically removed from the group.