Part 13 – Common Goal and Performance Goals
This post is a lesson excerpt from the How to incrementally improve your Team course
Common Goal
Ordinary teams respond to a mandate from outside the team. But to be successful, a team needs a meaningful and measurable team common goal of their creation. Creating a common goal is important as it gives direction to all actions and acts as a measure of success after a task is completed, it also acts as a target to direct and motivate team members and their staff. The common goal needs to consider likely changes in the organisation’s business environment, competitors’ movements and the future behaviours of consumers, combined with the team’s aspirations. Everyone on the team knowing the common goal becomes committed to it and has a stake in it. When each team member and their staff buy into the common goal and how their specific role contributes to it, productivity goes up.
Creating a common goal as a team has several important team-building aspects, they are:
1. The common goal creation process is psychologically important in that the team is agreeing on shared values and targets. They are giving meaning to their existence and this has a significant and positive impact on job satisfaction and personal feelings of being a contributor, not just a worker.
2. The team subconsciously works together, sharing honest views, feelings and opinions that they may not otherwise share. This is because the conversation around setting a common goal allows team members to express what they like about the team, what do not like and what they are prepared to let go.
3. It also forces the team members to answer questions like “what is the purpose of the team?”, “why does the team exist?” and “what would be missing if the team did not exist?”
4. Achieving a common goal should benefit everyone.
The best common goals merge organizational and team aspirations into one. The team common goal must be a goal the whole team will embrace and work towards in everything they do.
Examples
“Our objective is to transform IT into an agile and responsive customer-focused team, delivering quality solutions which meet the strategic needs of our business, in a timely and efficient manner.” – Colonial Mutual Life.
“We are best when we fix the things you hate.” – UBL.
When creating the goal, consider the following
1. Every action that the team takes, (a task, an activity, a project) should be moving the team towards the achievement of the common goal.
2. What is it the business does?
3. How does the team serve the business?
4. Does the common goal merge team and business aspirations?
5. How can the achievement of the common goal be measured?
6. Is the common goal something that staff will be able to relate to?
7. Try to limit the description of the common goal to one or two sentences.
8. The common goal is to be supported by individual team member performance goals.
9. All team members are individually and jointly accountable for the achievement of the common goal.
10. Team members accept mutual accountability for the team outcomes, whether success or failures. (one for all, all for one).
Create a team Common Goal
1. Working together as a whole team, craft an agreed team common goal that the whole team can use.
2. Consider what the common goal will look like in practice?
3. How will you know if the common goal is being achieved?
4. How will staff feel about the common goal?
5. How will the common goal be communicated to staff?
Team Member Performance Goals
The team leaders of great teams establish more challenging and ambitious performance goals for their team members as compared to the other teams. All the team members are supported and motivated to deliver excellence and are expected to be more passionate about the achievement of their goals. Team members are empowered and motivated to take risks and pursue individual initiatives.
Performance Goals need to:
1. Be in line with and support the common goal.
2. Act as individual KPIs.
3. Be clear. Team members need to easily understand the goals they’re working toward and why those goals are necessary.
4. Be measurable. The goal must have a measure within it to be able to know that it has been achieved.
5. Be realistic. The goals should be challenging; they should also be achievable.
6. Be on a timeline. When goals have beginning and endpoints, team members work to reach the finish line.
Examples
1. Improve communication skills over the next quarter.
2. Implement new methods within three months.
3. Increase team productivity by 30% over the next 12 months.
4. Support and manage team training.
5. Increase your team’s staff retention rate to 80% over the next 12 months.
6. Clear all high-priority work requests within 2 months’ time.
7. Meet monthly budget revenue targets.
Create individual performance goals
1. Create individual performance goals for each team member.
2. Ensure the performance goals are in line with the common goal.
3. Discuss with each team member and modify as required.