The best way to set team goals

Most organizations today are goal-driven and analytic-oriented. Setting the right goals is key for driving performance and moving the organization toward its long-term vision.

Team goals are performance objectives that require the contributions of everyone on the team. The best team goals are co-created with the team members and aligned with larger organizational goals.

Team goals have some important differences from the goals you might set for yourself. Think of the difference between an individual sport (tennis) and a team sport (basketball). 

As an example, a coaching client of mine recently came to a coaching session saying her team needed to improve on communication with internal stakeholders. She is the senior director of a team that provides enterprise-wide support, meaning many different divisions of the tech company have simultaneous projects that need her team’s attention. The team had recently doubled in size, with new hires brought on board to meet the increasing demand. And while they were excelling at the quality of the work, many internal stakeholders complained to my client that they were not receiving status updates on their projects.

Using the example of team communication to internal stakeholders, this article will explain the benefits of setting team goals, how to set goals with your team, and how to measure the results.

Setting team goals collaboratively with your team has many benefits for you as the leader, your team members, and the organization as a whole. 

• Team goals help team members understand how their individual work fits within the group.
• Team goals provide a clear direction and plan-of-action for your team.
• Team goals facilitate better accountability and encourage ownership
• Team goals create opportunities to build trust and collaboration.
• Team goals contribute to the professional growth and development of new skills among team members.
• Team goals provide a structure for measuring individual and group-level progress.
• Creating team goals may help you identify overlooked or unassigned priorities.
• Team goals can be used to evaluate performance.
• Team goals clarify the contribution the team is making to the organization.

The practice of coming together to define and agree on goals is beneficial in and of itself, giving the group time and space to reflect on where they are, what the team has accomplished, and where it wants to go. The process should raise points of misunderstanding, provide opportunities to clarify, and highlight conflicting priorities. Finally, the exercise allows everyone on the team to feel, and truly be, more bought-in to the goals and more invested in the results. Team goal-setting is a valuable exercise that shouldn’t be rushed through or done as proforma.

Revisiting the example of the senior director whose team was struggling with communicating to internal stakeholders, I asked her what her goal was.  Her first response was, “I don’t want missed communications to escalate to me.”  While this is a fair and desirable goal, it was not yet a SMART goal, nor was it necessarily a team goal. 

A SMART goal is one that is written within the following framework:

S: Specific. Aim to articulate the team goal in the most clear and specific way.

M: Measurable. Identify the metrics that will demonstrate the goal was achieved.

A: Attainable. State the goal in a way that is challenging, but possible to achieve.

R: Relevant.  The goal should be important to the team and the organization.  

T: Time-bound. Clarify the deadline or target date for the goal.

What does that framework look like applied in the real world? 

With my client, we discussed her challenge more deeply and she was able to articulate a SMART goal she could present to her team:

Proactively communicate with all internal stakeholders at least weekly on the status of their project, so that the number of escalations reduces by half in 3 months.

You can cross-check this new goal with the SMART criteria to see what is SMART about it:

S: The goal is focused, specific and clear.

M: This goal includes two measurements. The first is the weekly updates to internal stakeholders and the second is the reduction of escalations.

A: The action of “proactively communicate with all internal stakeholders” clarifies the action team members need to take.

R: Weekly communication is a high-priority, relevant, and realistic goal for her staff members.

T: At the three-month marker, the senior director will be able to know whether weekly updates have been sent and escalations have been reduced by half.

The most important part of team goals is making sure you know how you will measure success. You must develop an accountability system to track your progress.  When a team fails to achieve a goal, the lack of an accountability system is often the culprit. Some best practices for measuring success are:

• Decide on the goal-tracking process, and who is responsible for tracking what. 
• Select a technology that will help track your team’s work and keep people accountable.
• Know what data sets you need to measure your progress and ensure the right people have access to that data.
• Schedule check-ins with the team on a regular basis to get their input on progress and barriers that need to be removed.  
• Produce progress updates. Depending on the goal, you may need to measure weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Be prepared to provide data and progress updates to your higher-ups.

Remember to pay attention to what will motivate your team members throughout the process. When you measure progress toward team goals, you get the opportunity to make necessary modifications to the team goals. Make the progress transparent, whether you are achieving the goal or not, and discuss openly what is working and not working with the team.

You may need to provide additional support and development to team members or advocate for more resources and time. When team goals are on track, remember to celebrate the progress with your team members.

7 ways to help your team meet their goals

1. Know what you want to achieve

Before you communicate to your team, think about why you want to set goals and what you hope to achieve with them. If the wider team goal is completed, what are the implications? How will it benefit your organization? An important part of goal-setting is measurement, so ensure you know how you will track and evaluate progress as well as completion, and how this impacts what you want to achieve.

2. Set goals at the team level

Once you've determined what you want to achieve, start by setting goals for the team. When teams have challenging, meaningful goals to work towards, they come together as a more effective and collaborative unit. It helps them be aligned and have a common focus, rather than trying to outperform each another. Of course, team goals can (and should) be broken down into individual ones.

Once you've identified them, write down your goals. Research indicates that writing down goals makes for an 80% higher chance of achieving them.

The more you can involve your employees in setting goals for themselves and the group, the more committed to those goals they are likely to be."

3. Let people develop their own goals

After determining team goals, give people the autonomy to develop their own goals. Based on their function, they should be able to determine key initiatives and goals that will support the greater team objectives.

Make sure you are available to provide support: help them learn how to develop meaningful and achievable goals by using a framework such as SMART goals. Guide them so they are aligned with the team (and organizational) goals, and ensure they understand the importance of measurement.

4. Set deadlines

Deadlines help the team develop accountability. A goal with no deadline won't serve its purpose as it could end up constantly pushed back and never achieved. If people start to feel the goals aren't being taken as a serious assignment, they will become discouraged and disengaged.

Commonly people work by quarters so you could set goals on a quarterly basis. This is a relatively long period of time during which to run projects allowing you to set bigger goals, yet short enough to change course if need be. It also means that you can work on a bigger variety of initiatives throughout the year that support company objectives.

If quarters don't work for you, you could try setting project-based goals for example.

5. Track progress on goals

As mentioned previously, goals should be tangible and measurable so you can determine success.

Help your team stay focused by tracking progress. Checking in will allow you to know where to course correct, which initiatives are going faster than planned, and therefore help you re-allocate resources if need be.

Tracking goals also helps teams stay motivated when they see progress, and when they're getting close to completion. Knowing you've achieved something you set out to do, coupled with the sense of accomplishment, are very strong motivators for your people.

6. Help people meet their goals

As a manager and team leader, it's your responsibility to help your people achieve their goals in addition to giving the team direction. There are several ways you can do this:

• Help them understand how to define an achievable goal
• Have regular 1-on-1s to see how things are going
• Show your team that you're open to questions and to giving guidance
• Support them with advice on how to achieve their initiatives
• Help your team define milestones as they work towards team or individual goals
• Give your team regular feedback so they know what's going well, and what could be improved

7. Learn from your mistakes

Not all goals are going to be met. Some may have been set too high on purpose, some may not have been realistic (in hindsight), and some may suffer from unpredictable changes throughout the quarter. That's just the reality of work and the unknowns you have to contend with.

Make sure the team understands it's ok to fail. The goal shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, it's a way of guiding people's work. Being open to the possibility of failure doesn't mean accepting mediocrity.

It simply means no one can guarantee things will succeed. The important thing is to learn from our mistakes: what will we do differently next time? Is there a way this could have been prevented? And move on to do better things.

Examples of team goals

In this blog, I used the example goal of team communication with internal stakeholders from one of my coaching clients, but team goals can fall into all sorts of categories.

If you are feeling stuck on how to write team goals for your group, below are a few examples to get you started.

Notice that these goals use the SMART framework and are phrased in the positive, with an emphasis on what will be achieved. 

• Learning goal: Achieve six-sigma certification for all team members within the calendar year.
• Responsiveness goal: Reduce online chat support wait time by an average of 2% each month.
• Brand identity goal: Double the number of followers on key social media sites within the next 3 months.
• Customer loyalty goal: Achieve an annual subscription renewal rate of 95% or greater.
• Compliance goal: Implement new web-based data security protocols prior to the governmental deadline.
• Meeting goal: Hold cross-functional team meetings twice per month between the software development team and the test team to identify and resolve issues.
• Customer satisfaction goal: Within a year, improve product ratings on the e-commerce site from 4.2 to 4.6 out of 5 stars.
• Employee engagement goal: Maintain employee engagement scores in the range of above average-to-excellent on all quarterly pulses.
• Debugging goal: Resolve all critical-level software bugs within four hours of being reported.
• Educational goal: Implement five customer education webinars per quarter with at least 20 participants in each.
• Product development goal: Annually innovate two new business products that get moved to the development stage.
• QA goal: Achieve a nightly automated software QA test pass rate of 99+%
• Goal setting goal: Apply the SMART system to collaboratively create next fiscal year’s goals with my team.

While the "why" is not part of the goal, being clear about what will be achieved and why it matters can help inspire and guide the team. For any of the goals above, a team might try to complete the phrase "so that we can ..." Goals that are framed in a way that is compelling and aspirational have more power to motivate and align a team. 

Team goals are an important part of today's goal-oriented organization. Making yours SMART, focusing on outcomes, and keeping your team involved in the process is a big step toward success.