Setting goals is the key to moving your team towards a single vision. It plays a vital role in driving performance and achieving objectives through a collaborative effort. Team goals are based on organizational objectives. However, sometimes, leaders set goals that are impossible to achieve because of a thirst for growth. This sets teams up for failure.
Unrealistic goals can cause long-term damage to a business and its people. It can result in team members finding ways to do the impossible, which may be unhealthy, like rendering excessive overtime hours. Ultimately, it can cause more harm to the business.
Don’t burn your team out. Set realistic goals through the following ways:
Plan with Your Team
The top-most priority when setting team goals should be the team members. Goals are meant to give them vision, guidance and motivation to perform their best to help achieve the organization’s vision. Therefore, they should be involved first-hand in setting the team’s goal.
Simply sitting down to plan with the team can help make the process smoother. It is important to hear their opinion and suggestions on determining the team’s objectives and how you can achieve them in the most efficient yet realistic way.
Gather input on where they need more resources and gauge the member’s strengths and weaknesses. Being aware of each team member’s capability plays a vital role in making team goals realistic. This can help delegate tasks better and help them establish individual goals to contribute to that of the team.
Find Adequate Resources
Setting goals require analytics. As the manager or leader, it is important to calculate data based on facts in order to set goals that are possible to achieve. To achieve a goal, determine how many people with what skill using what tools will you need, ideally. Compare it against what you have and try to provide your team with the needed resources before setting a goal.
Ensure you have enough staffing and, if needed, hire more people or hire freelancers for a specific project. It is also a must to have the right tools and have the team members properly trained in using them. Setting all these into motion before the project begins can help success.
Utilize Software
Technology is helpful in all workplaces, so use it to its full extent. A tool as simple as Excel can help you fully organize your team and set and track your team goals. It may seem complicated, especially if you start from scratch, but such a tool offers automation features to help you plan and measure goals. You get easier access to data, which can lead to better decision-making.
It’s advisable to hire Excel experts to ensure the plan is successful. They can help you create a more comprehensive and valuable set up to execute your vision. Additionally, Excel sheets are easy to share and can give your team better visibility. Teams can also use excel as an activity log for better performance measurement.
There is also software that can help you in setting realistic goals and objectives, especially for specific projects like project or content planning and management apps and analytics software.
Use Agile Project Management
Known to help businesses in many ways, agile project management is a method of executing projects through iterations or incremental steps. This means you split the whole project or even objectives into smaller chunks of tasks, each delivering a measurable result.
Utilizing the agile approach means your processes do not have to be linear, which will fall apart if one fails, bringing you back to the start. This method allows you and your team not just to set a target, take aim and hope for the best, but rather, set a goal take steps and adapt to results and consequences until you reach success.
The team plans in sprints, which leads to planning smaller but attainable goals, and the team can determine if it is attainable right away. Otherwise, they can adapt and you can adjust the team’s long-term goal as well.
Set Your Team up for Success
Goals drive the team’s performance. Setting big ambitious goals can inspire the team to deliver the best results. Still, it has risks of becoming unrealistic which can do more harm than good to all stakeholders— team members, managers and the organization itself. Get the team involved and use the right tools to set the greatest yet most realistic goals to drive your team and the organization towards continuing success.
