Setting Team Goals

Defining team goals

Team goals are the milestones, accomplishments, and outcomes that a group of individuals collectively strives to achieve. In contrast with individual goals, which focus on personal development, team goals help align and direct the efforts of the team as a whole toward a common purpose, ensuring each member is working together effectively. Typically, these goals will support the larger objectives of the organization or company. 

Whether big or small, team goals can help put everyday tasks into a larger context, helping build a sense of cohesion and collaboration between employees. They also give your team a way to measure progress, recognize successes, and learn from failures. These goals could be as ambitious as increasing sales by a certain percentage or launching a new product within a specific timeframe or as modest as ensuring every team member completes a technical training session on time.

The significance of setting team goals

Team goals are an essential part of leading your team to success—as long as they are clear, effective, and realistic. By aligning your team around a shared set of goals, you can accomplish the following:

• Drive employee engagement: When everyone on the team understands what they’re working toward, as well as why, they’ll be much more likely to collaborate and help each other out. This shared sense of purpose will promote camaraderie, which will keep everyone more motivated and engaged.
• Facilitate strategy execution: Without a common goal to work toward, everyone is likely to have their own opinions about the best way to do their job. This will make it challenging to carry out any kind of strategic initiative. But when a team goal is in place, adhering to a strategy and executing it together will become essential to achieving that goal.
• Improve business performance: Team goals not only get everyone working together, but also give them a way to measure their progress and look for ways to improve their efficiency and productivity. They may discover ways to achieve certain goals even faster, or find flaws in previous team strategies. All this will help improve how business is done.

Distinguishing between team and individual goals

While team and individual goals are different—the former focuses on collective achievement while the latter is centered on personal development—they are also closely related. In fact, they can help support each other in important ways.

For instance, team goals can give each team member a chance to showcase their unique strengths and talents, as well as push them toward improving their own skills. To use an earlier example, if the goal is to increase sales, then this might motivate some employees to look for ways to hone the way they reach out to prospects and make their pitches.

Likewise, by setting individual goals to achieve themselves, team members can help their team reach its larger goals faster and more effectively. By learning how to use a new piece of productivity management software, for instance, an employee could become better at recognizing inefficiencies, enabling their team to achieve more significant, ambitious goals than they could before.

So while it’s important to recognize the differences between team and individual goals, it’s also vital to understand how the two coexist. Focus on one, and you’ll inevitably impact the other.

Steps for setting effective team goals

Setting successful team goals requires you to think critically about what exactly you’re trying to achieve. That means understanding the full context of the goal, having a process in place for achieving it, and remaining flexible as your team or organization grows or changes.

Here are a few steps you can follow to create goals that keep your team motivated, focused, and aligned:

• Understand the big picture: Before doing anything, ensure you have a clear understanding of your organization’s mission and overall strategic objectives—both short- and long-term. Your team’s goals should directly contribute to these higher-level goals.
• Ensure buy-in through collaboration: By working closely alongside each of your team members to both develop your goals and the strategies for executing them, you will promote ownership and make them more committed to achieving them.
• Set SMART goals: The SMART system can help make your goals more Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. In turn, this will make them easier to understand and give your team a clearer sense of direction.
• Tie goals to incentives. You can motivate team members by tying their performance to incentives. Just remember to make them appropriate to the work. While a little competition can be good, you’ll need to ensure that the incentives are not overshadowing larger goals. 
• Set timelines for achieving goals: Creating deadlines for meeting your goals will give your team a sense of urgency. Just remember to check in with your larger team to ensure any timelines you make are realistic.
• Track your progress: Set up a system for tracking progress, then make it visible to the team. This could include regular check-ins, progress reports, or software tools that help visualize progress toward goals.
• Regularly review your goals: Circumstances change, market conditions fluctuate, and challenges arise. All of this means you should be regularly reviewing and adjusting your goals so that they remain both effective and relevant.

Assessing the goal-setting needs of your workplace team

As you start thinking about your team’s goals, your first step should be to understand what is most important for your team to achieve. 

Begin this process by considering your company’s larger mission or objectives. What are the overarching priorities that guide your company and how do they affect the expectation of your team? If need be, conduct a preliminary interview with a manager or executive to ensure your team is properly aligned with company goals. This will give you a good roadmap.

Next, identify the areas where you think your team can make the greatest impact. For example, if your team is composed of salespeople, then you may not want to focus on goals related to customer outreach and services as opposed to product development. This will not only speak to your team’s strengths but also ensure your goals are more likely to motivate your team.

Finally, determine some key performance indicators (KPIs) that your team will be responsible for. These should be quantifiable, such as sales made or revenue generated, so that there is no ambiguity or confusion about your progress. Don’t forget to come up with contingency plans for when these KPIs fall short and to recognize when your team meets or exceeds their goals.

Identifying challenges and opportunities

As in any endeavor worth doing, you’re bound to encounter certain challenges as you set team goals. The trick is knowing how to turn these challenges into opportunities. Here are a few common obstacles you may run into, as well as tips to transform them into something positive.

• Lack of alignment: It can be hard to ensure that the goals you come up with fully align with those of the larger organization. However, by carefully taking into account any wider objectives and considering how your team can contribute, you can come up with goals that help keep your team focused on what really matters.
• Ambiguity: Goals that aren’t clear or well-defined can quickly lead to confusion and frustration among team members. In contrast, coming up with well-crafted goals will help inspire team members and give them a sense of motivation and purpose.
• Competition: It’s common for individual team members to want to prioritize their own goals over the team’s. But when you are able to build your team goals around a shared sense of purpose, as well as tie them to incentives and personal growth, you can instead turn this competition into fruitful collaboration.
• Resistance to change: If it’s hard to see the value of team goals, individuals may not be open to any changes or disruptions they entail. But by making the value clear, as well as helping team members develop new skills and capabilities in response, you can turn team goals into an opportunity for growth. 
• Inadequate communication: If you’re unable to adequately communicate each goal to your team members, then the result will likely be misunderstandings and misalignment. However, by using goal setting as a framework for improving communication, you can facilitate better lines of feedback across your team.

Evaluating employee strengths and potential

Setting effective and impactful team goals should be part of a larger performance management and evaluation process. After all, in order to meet any team goals you set, you’ll need to make sure your employees are set up for success. That means knowing how to properly evaluate their strengths and potential.

You should start out this process by collecting any relevant information you have on your employees. This could include previous performance evaluations, self-assessments, and feedback from peers. Once this baseline is established, assess each employee’s skills (whether soft skills or technical ones) against their job role and its expectations. Are they proficient in their job’s tools? Do they know how to solve problems and communicate with their colleagues effectively?

As you conduct this evaluation, divide your observations into three buckets: strengths, potential, and areas for improvement. Strengths, obviously, are any areas where they clearly excel. They are not only meeting expectations but are positively contributing to team performance. Potential recognizes an employee’s ability to learn and take on new challenges, as well as adapt to changes. Growth areas refer to any places where an employee can further improve or develop their skills.

Doing this process, both before setting goals and during their implementation, will enable you to set more realistic objectives that align with the skills and capabilities of your team. And when you know how to do that, all of you are more likely to succeed.

Use the SMART system

When it comes to actually putting your team goals down into writing, the SMART system can help you ensure each objective fits the criteria for success. Simply align all your goals with its five attributes:

• Specific: You should clearly define the outcome you want to achieve.
• Measurable: There should be a quantitative metric for assessing the goal’s progress and determining its success.
• Achievable: The goal should be realistic, given your team’s capabilities.
• Relevant: In some way, the goal should help further the company’s larger objectives or mission.
• Time-bound: There should be a deadline for achieving the goal.

Simple and easy to remember, yet also comprehensive, the SMART system is a great way to gut-check whether your team goals have what they need to support your employees and help them succeed.