How to Set Effective Goals for High-Performing Teams

6 Steps for team leaders & managers to help their teams set goals & reach them.
How to Set Effective Goals for High-Performing Teams
By
Alejandro Carrera

To make your business flourish, you need to have a high-performing team. However, making teamwork effective requires a well-established set of goals that might be challenging, exceptionally when you are remotely working or if you are newly appointed to the job.

We’re going to look at some steps to establish effective goals for your team. Read below 👇

1. Put your thoughts on paper before reaching out to your team

The very first thing you need to consider before you address your team is to make your “wants” clear to yourself. Before establishing a GROW Model and taking steps towards its accomplishment, make sure you have a clear picture of what and why you want each particular goal to be achieved.

Try to establish answers to the following questions:

  • What is the purpose behind creating these goals?
  • What do you want to accomplish with your team?
  • What are the ramifications if your team grows?
  • What will it mean for your company?
  • How will it benefit your team?
Without planning, you won’t be able to set very clear, achievable goals.

Measurement is a crucial aspect of goal-setting. Hence, you need to think and evaluate every detail and consequence before proceeding, i.e. how you’ll track and assess performance and progress, what your communication strategies will be, etc. This will ensure that you’ll have answers to all the questions which might arise during the goal-setting process.

2. Gel together and establish team objectives

After you’ve decided what you want to accomplish, the second step is to start by establishing team goals.

Teams serve together as a more effective and cohesive unit when they have tough, meaningful goals to strive toward.

To get your team on the same page, it’s important to build a stronger bond through adopting the same objective, instead of attempting to surpass each other.

We don’t mean that they are to work collectively, they will work as a team, but the responsibilities will be split down from team goals to individual goals so that everyone has a job to do.

Have a team meeting and discuss. It would be great if you listen to every teammate’s opinion and see if you can fit it in or get any valuable insight in regard to that.

Lastly, once you have established the objectives, write them down. Ensure that you have everyone’s consent and that the goals gel in well with your team.

Know that the more you can include your staff in creating personal and group goals, the more dedicated they will be to those goals.

3. Allow individuals to choose their own objectives

After you have made the team objectives clear to everyone, you must encourage the teammates to establish their own individual goals. As per their individual role, you must ensure that they are capable of identifying the critical projects and goals because that’s what will help the team achieve its overall goals.

Your duty in this step is to make yourself available for them and offer assistance.

Show them how to create meaningful and attainable objectives. Moreover, assist them in aligning their objectives with those of the team as well as the organisation, and help them learn to appreciate the necessity of goal measurement.

Lastly, to present the objectives, you may consider some SMART Goals PowerPoint templates, which are widely used for more efficient teamwork.

4. Set a deadline for every objective

Once your team is done with establishing objectives, you must set deadlines for each of the goals you aim to achieve. Doing so will encourage the team to be accountable to you and to each other, making the goals more relevant.

A goal with no deadline will not serve its purpose well since it might continually get postponed, which eventually leads to failure.

Co-workers will become disillusioned and disengaged if they believe the goals are not being treated seriously. So it’s crucial to set some hard (but realistic) deadlines.

You can either create quarterly targets or project-based targets — it totally depends on your team’s capability and the intensity of the project. However, creating quarterly targets has been proven to work quite well.

Set a particular span of time for each task that is acceptable for the individuals responsible for getting them done, as well as timespans for running projects.

Dividing each goal into intervals will enable you to set bigger targets. It will also enable your team to be flexible enough and capable to work on a broader range of activities that support corporate goals throughout the year.

5. Keep track of your goals as you proceed

It would be best if you track your team’s progress as you move towards your goal. Checking in will allow you to see where you need to make course corrections, as well as which efforts are progressing quicker than expected, allowing you to re-allocate resources as needed.

In addition, tracking objectives will help your team stay engaged and determined, because they’ll observe progress as they get closer to each goal.

That sense of achievement will keep them going and will motivate them to complete ambitious projects.

Moreover, as a manager or the team lead, you must also personally evaluate and give feedback on how everyone is responding to their duties.

6. Take your mistakes as lessons to be learned

Accomplishing all the objectives as planned is an illusion. Be prepared to face challenges along the way. As you proceed, you’ll learn that some objectives may have been intentionally set excessively high.

Some goals might turn out to be unrealistic, while others may be subject to unpredictably changing conditions over the quarter.

Therefore, you must ensure that your team is prepared for unpredictable outcomes as well. Teach your team to view the objective as a means of directing people’s efforts rather than believing that all we have is this and there is nothing beyond this.

Accepting incompetence or ignoring objectives is not the same as being open to the prospect of failure.

It simply implies that no one can promise success. What matters is that we learn from our errors. In fact, we must work on the mistakes and find measures to avoid them in the future.

Conclusion

Establishing goals for a high-performing team requires a lot of planning and hard work. We hope the suggestions above help you to efficiently set goals with and for your team, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. So, give these steps a try and let us know how they work for you!


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