It’s a good thing that you have goals of your own as a leader, but what about team goals? Have you ever talked with your team about where you want to be by the end of the year, and what is it you want to achieve as a team? If so, are you making any progress towards your team goals?
Honestly, setting team goals is a lot more complicated than setting personal goals. There are a lot of people involved in it, which means you have to take into account their personal goals as well as each individual progress. It is even harder to work together towards a specific goal due to individual differences.
Setting a team goal might be challenging, but it goes a long way towards your team’s long-term success. When you set specific and challenging goals for your team, it boosts employee engagement, productivity, and retention. Unsurprisingly, it can also lead to motivated employees and a collaborative team.
Golden Rules of Team Goal Setting
Unfortunately, only 7% of individual employees have a clear understanding of their company’s business strategies. Meanwhile, a massive 44% are unable to name their organizational goals even when they are already familiar with them. This problem boils down to one root cause: not setting effective team goals.
So how do you set goals for your team to ensure effectively to ensure that everyone’s on the same page? We’ll show you.
1. Find out what it is you want to achieve.
As a leader, it is your responsibility to initiate goal planning. Before you communicate with your team, you must be ready to provide them with answers regarding goal-related questions. Think about the reason why you want to achieve these group goals. How will it benefit your organization? At the same time, how will it benefit every individual member?
When setting goals, you must provide measurement so that you can track your progress as well as completion.
2. Set a team goal based on the team’s perspective.
What is it that your team members have in common? Perhaps, each of you is striving for a promotion. By knowing your common goals, you can easily set goals for the team. And when your team has a meaningful goal to work towards, it’s likely for you to be collaborative with each other. All the more, it will help your team focus on the goal rather than attempting to beat one another.
Make sure that you write your goals once you’ve identified them. Research states that there’s an 80% higher chance of achieving your goals when you write them down.
3. Let your employees develop their own goals.
Give each employee the freedom to develop their own goals out of the team goal. If, for example, they want to set their own deadline apart from what you’ve set for them, let them do so. It’s important that they have personal initiative and goals that are relevant to the greater team objectives.
Just be sure to provide them with the support that they need. Guide them to develop achievable goals, so their personal goals are still aligned with the team goals.
4. Hold your team accountable.
Holding your employees responsible for their duties will make them feel that they are truly part of the team. Additionally, it will be easier for you to keep track of everyone’s progress.
Ensure that you keep your employees accountable by having them report to you by the end of the day. And when you do hold them accountable, make sure that they do it with trust and transparency.
5. Track progress on team goals.
Your team goals should be tangible and measurable in the first place, so you can easily determine your success.
By checking in with your employees, you will know where to course correct, which tasks are going smooth as planned, and which tasks need more focus.
Not only does tracking goals help you measure success, but it can also keep your team stays motivated when they see progress. In the end, everyone becomes even more motivated when they see progress in what they set out to do.
6. It’s alright to tie team goals to incentives.
Look, tying team goals to incentives is alright — as long as you know where to tie both ends.
Some managers like to set high sales goals and to tie them with an awesome incentive. Unfortunately, this can only lead to a toxic work environment and may result in your members going through inappropriate lengths just to make sales.
Rather than doing this, you can give incentives to those who were able to highlight their strengths. You can also give merits to those who were able to show outstanding behaviors while reaching the goals.
7. Help each other meet your team goals.
As a leader, you are responsible for your employee’s personal goals as well as team goals. There are many ways you can do this:
- Set a time to talk to them one-on-one to see how things are going.
- Let them know that you’re open to answer questions and give guidance.
- Give them regular feedback.
- Help them define milestones, so they will be inspired to reach them.
- Give them advice on how to achieve their initiatives.
8. Accept and learn from your mistakes.
There are situations where things will not go smooth as planned. Perhaps, you have set too high goals, or you’ve experienced unpredictable changes throughout the quarter.
When this happens, your team must be prepared to accept defeat and face such failure. But keep in mind that being prepared for failure doesn’t mean accepting mediocrity. Your team should strive to achieve outstanding results while being open to the idea that it is possible to fail.
What’s important is that you will be able to learn from your mistakes. So that when you’re about to set new team goals, you’ll know what to do differently by then. With that, you can move on from your failure and do better things.