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About this lesson
Teams perform better when they have clear shared goals. One key element of good team leadership is helping your team establish team goals. This module will provide several suggested approaches for establishing goals and a set of criteria for good team goals.
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Quick reference
Setting Team Goals
Teams perform better when they have clear shared goals. One key element of good team leadership is helping your team establish team goals. This module will provide several suggested approaches for establishing goals and a set of criteria for good team goals.
When to use
When a team has been formed, one of the first activities should be to create team goals. It is often helpful to periodically review those goals. With a functional team, I suggest reviewing them twice a year or possibly every quarter. For project teams, it is helpful to review them at the start of every major project phase.
Instructions
There are numerous methodologies and approaches to help you set your team’s goals. Dr. Edwin Locke identified five key principles to follow when setting goals from his extensive research, the acronym SMART has become a best practice used by many teams when setting goals, and finally, I have my own checklist which I have developed. This represents the best practices that I have learned (sometimes the hard way) to apply when working with teams on goals. Although goal setting is normally done when a team is formed, it often needs to be periodically reviewed and refreshed for both new team members and because some old team members begin to drift in their focus
Locke’s Principles on Team Goal Setting
- Clarity – Use SMART approach.
- Challenge – Aggressive goals, but not unrealistic, can inspire a team.
- Commitment – Team involvement in goal creation leads to team buy-in.
- Feedback – Status reporting and accountability strengthen the buy-in.
- Task complexity – Avoid simplistic goals, allow for some complexity; but don’t go overboard so that they become confusing.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
- Specific – clear and concise, not vague or ambiguous.
- Measurable – a measurable target so that the team knows when the goal is met.
- Achievable – challenging but realistic, if the goal is impossible, the team will think they have been set up to fail.
- Relevant – the goal aligns with organizational and personal goals.
- Time-bound – there is a time period associated with the goal. This creates a sense of urgency and focus.
Goal Setting Checklist
- Aligned with organizational goals.
- Understood by all team members.
- S.M.A.R.T.
- Accountability allocated for elements of the goal.
- Establish performance indicators and progress monitoring.
- Identify internal and external dependencies.
- Identify and manage risks.
- Ensure full team commitment to the goals.
- 00:04 Hello, I'm Ray sheen.
- 00:05 The next team process that I would like to discuss is the process
- 00:09 of setting team goals.
- 00:12 There are dozens of different techniques, principles and approaches for
- 00:15 going about setting team goals.
- 00:17 I would like to discuss one that has been developed by Dr.
- 00:20 Edwin Locke and is based upon over 30 years of actual research.
- 00:24 I like this approach because it not only has the credibility from the research,
- 00:28 it's straightforward and easy to follow.
- 00:30 I found that this works well with teams that I've been on.
- 00:33 First, Dr. Locke advocates setting clear goals.
- 00:37 A great way for understanding what that means is to use the SMART acronym which
- 00:42 I'll discuss on the next slide.
- 00:44 Next is challenging goals.
- 00:46 The goals need to be aggressive enough to create a challenge.
- 00:49 Not so aggressive as to be seen as impossible, but a challenge is
- 00:53 motivating and can help to create an emotional attachment to the goals.
- 00:58 Third is commitment, the team should be involved in the development of the goals,
- 01:02 so that they feel that the goals reflect something important to them.
- 01:06 We are much more committed if it was at least partially our idea.
- 01:10 Fourth is feedback, teams need to get periodic status reports on how
- 01:14 they are doing on their goal for them to stay bought in and committed.
- 01:18 So when developing goals,
- 01:20 ensure they're ones in which there's some way of tracking progress.
- 01:23 And the last is task complexity, this is a balancing act.
- 01:28 The goal needs to be complex enough to provide a challenge, but
- 01:32 not too complex to confuse and frustrate.
- 01:34 In my experience, too many teams err on the side of overly simple goals that
- 01:39 are too basic and therefore never engaged the team.
- 01:43 Let's take a look at the SMART acronym.
- 01:45 There are several variations on this acronym, but
- 01:48 I found that this one works well with project team goals.
- 01:52 S is for specific.
- 01:53 The goal needs to be clear, concise description of expectations and
- 01:58 the objectives.
- 01:59 Avoid vague terms like empower employees or satisfy customers.
- 02:04 Be specific so team members understand what they're striving to do.
- 02:09 M is measurable.
- 02:11 This goes hand in hand with specific.
- 02:13 Clarify what metric you will be using to show progress towards achieving the goal,
- 02:18 and once your target value is for that metric.
- 02:22 You may need to run a baseline study first,
- 02:24 just to know what you are doing today with respect to the metric.
- 02:28 A stands for achievable,
- 02:30 the team needs to feel that the target is within their grasp.
- 02:33 Setting a target that is unattainable does not motivate the team.
- 02:37 Rather, they often feel like they're being set up to fail.
- 02:41 Make sure you include the time dimension and
- 02:43 resources when considering whether the goal is achievable.
- 02:47 Can this team accomplish this goal with the time and
- 02:50 money that is available to them?
- 02:54 R stands for relevant.
- 02:56 Do the team members understand why this goal is important to them in
- 02:59 the organization?
- 03:01 Help them see how achieving this goal advances the greater good.
- 03:05 If they feel the goal is irrelevant, they feel manipulated for
- 03:09 some nefarious purpose.
- 03:11 Finally, the T stands for time bound, timely or time constraint.
- 03:16 A date or a milestone adds urgency and focus to the goal.
- 03:21 Again, make sure it's realistic.
- 03:24 Let me wrap up this section with a checklist that I use when working with
- 03:28 a team to set up a team goals.
- 03:30 There's no particular order to this checklist.
- 03:32 Rather, I use it to remind me of what we need to address.
- 03:36 Some of these we've already covered.
- 03:38 First thing on the checklist is to be sure that the team goals are aligned with
- 03:42 organizational goals.
- 03:43 That helps to maintain buy into the goals from both the team members and
- 03:47 outside stakeholders.
- 03:49 Next, I make sure that all the team members understand the goals.
- 03:53 This is usually easy to do with your original team when the goals are being
- 03:57 established.
- 03:59 I find the bigger challenge for this is spending time with new team members to
- 04:03 ensure that they also understand and are aligned with the goal.
- 04:07 Don't overlook the importance of this.
- 04:09 A new team member who is not aligned, can quickly derail a previously high
- 04:14 performing team, and require weeks or months to recover.
- 04:19 Nex, t is the SMART acronym which I covered on the previous slide.
- 04:23 Another item, accountability, is an interesting topic.
- 04:26 The whole team is accountable for all of the goals, but
- 04:29 often some goals fall within one team member's oversight.
- 04:33 You need to be clear with that individual and the rest of the team,
- 04:37 as to how much authority the team members have.
- 04:40 And how much accountability is to be shared across the entire team.
- 04:44 This is situationally dependent upon the individual, the organization, and
- 04:49 the goal.
- 04:50 Another one that we've already talked about some, is establishing a metric or
- 04:54 monitoring system for progress towards the goal.
- 04:57 This is part of S.M.A.R.T, but I find that often needs to create a specific system or
- 05:02 process to get the information in a timely manner,
- 05:05 format it for the team's goal and then distribute it.
- 05:09 The last few items will help to ensure that the goals are achievable.
- 05:12 One of these is to understand any internal or external dependencies.
- 05:17 These often have to be micro managed by someone on the team.
- 05:21 Another is to acknowledge the risks of the goal, and again,
- 05:25 have someone on the team take the lead to manage each risk.
- 05:28 Usually that's the project leader.
- 05:31 Finally, ensure that everyone stays committed to the goal.
- 05:34 It's not uncommon that for either personal or professional reasons,
- 05:39 someone who was once committed to the team goals has lost interest.
- 05:43 I saw this one time with a senior engineer on one of the teams I was managing.
- 05:47 When I sat down to talk with him about it,
- 05:49 he told me that his father had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and
- 05:53 that he was worried about how to take care of both his father and his mother.
- 05:58 As we talked through, we decided to change his role on the team to more of
- 06:02 an advisor role rather than a major actor.
- 06:05 With this I kept him engaged and committed to the team while allowing more time for
- 06:10 the very important personal issues that he had to deal with over the next few months.
- 06:15 A team without goals is like a rudderless ship that gets carried away by every
- 06:20 wind and wave until eventually capsizes or runs to ground.
- 06:24 Set your goals and steer your team with these.
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