What To Get Your Team Working On – Choosing Valuable Team Goals
What to get your team working on is super important as a manager or leader. Possibly the most important thing. Your team’s time and effort is limited so using as much of it as possible on the most value creating areas is the difference between great and okay team performance.
Choosing valuable team goals is a vital part of getting your team working on the most profit creating activities and projects. Goals create focus and direction. Goals provide understanding to team members about where they are now and where they need to get to. Great goals unite groups of individuals around a common purpose, helping build true teams. Goals create engagement and with it increased team performance.
What To Get Your Team Working On – Choosing Valuable Team Goals
- Alignment, purpose and value are all huge
- Focus on what you can control and influence
- Dig to find the most valuable work
- Create different levels and types of goals
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Alignment, purpose and value are all huge in choosing valuable team goals
Highly aligned companies have almost 17 times higher employee engagement, they grow revenue 58% faster and have 72% higher profit margins per a LSA Global Survey.
We all instinctively know that if everyone in the group is working in the same direction towards common goals, the group will do a lot better compared to everyone doing what they think is best. The stats quantify what we instinctively know.
When choosing valuable team goals, understanding the company goals is not enough. You need to understand the priority of each company goal. Speak to your boss and the leadership team, read the strategy documents, and ask enough questions to figure this out.
Then you can prioritise your functional or business unit goals. Then you can prioritise your team goals to align with functional and company goals. When you get goal priorities right, you clearly understand how valuable each goal is.
Less than half the working population know their company goals. Even fewer can connect what they do at work to the strategies and tactics behind these goals. Prioritising goals and communicating these to your team easily puts you in the top 50% of managers.
When you understand the priorities and can explain the purpose of each goal, team members will be happier, feel more valued and will do a better job. Go a step further and explain how each goal is valuable, and what contributing to achieving that goal will mean for everyone and each individual and you will have team a lot less reliant on you in selecting the most profitable team activities to work on.
Explore 6 actions for successfully instilling team direction and hitting goals
Focus on what you can control and influence when setting the right team goals
There is little point in targeting goals that the team has little influence or control over. You and they will quickly feel demotivated and undervalued. Target what you as a team have significant control or influence over and set objectives for the team according. For example if the top priority of a company was revenue growth, the finance team might have goals focused on pricing and generating as much cash from debtors as possible to fund growth. These goals would be aligned and within the team’s significant influence.
If you were the customer services manager, you might have goals focused on driving repeat purchases or product accessories sales. Again, aligned, valuable and the team controls the activities to achieve the goals.
Be really clear on what you have substantial control and influence over and choose valuable team goals within these areas. Choosing goals you directly influence is a lot more motivational and increases team engagement, both of which increase team performance.
When choosing valuable goals for the team, dig to find the most valuable work
Our brains are designed to work with patterns which reduces the energy the brain needs to use. It is easy to fall into established patterns, do what has been done before or maintain the status quo.
This leaves opportunities for those who are prepared to look for them. In my experience, every business has serious value creating opportunities, though most of them are not obvious.
Be curious, stay open minded and ask a lot of questions. Challenge the current thinking. Be courageous. What tasks and activities can you find within your sphere of influence that will directly or indirectly help the business meet its most important goals.
In fast growing, turnaround, and smaller less established businesses, you should be able to find lots of opportunities and the challenge will be deciding which to prioritise. In larger, more mature, or well run businesses, the opportunities will be less, but they will be there.
Use your team’s knowledge and experience. They are at the coal face more than you. Use financial and other performance data. Speak to stakeholders of your team. Great opportunities come about through joining the dots that others haven’t spotted yet.
Great places to start are:
- Problems being experienced by the team
- Areas where the company or team has become lazy
- Activities out of alignment with company or functional strategies and goals
- Processes and approaches that don’t make sense or seem outdated
- Activities where the person doing them can’t explain why they are doing them
- Areas where there is little focus or activity compared to the importance of the outcome needed to meet functional or company goals
There may not be one single opportunity, but lots of smaller opportunities. Make many small improvements and the collective overall improvement can be very significant.
Create different levels and types of goals
Most companies produce financial goals, then cascade these down to team level and that constitutes their goal setting and planning. The business unit, function or team leaders are then expected to work out the tasks, activities, and projects to meet those financial goals.
Very few people relate to financial goals so don’t make these your main goals for communication purposes.
The different levels and types of goals you should use to maximise engagement and ownership are:
The Team’s Purpose
What is the main reason the team exists within the company. At a basic level sales and marketing’s purpose is to grow revenue, operations to make what is sold, finance to grow cash and profit. Communicate your team’s purpose in clear everyday language and make it specific to your team.
For the Team’s Goals
Turn the financial numbers into the outcomes desired from activities and projects that your team will work on to achieve those outcomes. So rather than “increase revenue by £5m”, the team goals could be:
- Grow total number of customers by 40 (new customers less customer losses) by year end, ideally increasing by 10 each 90 days.
- Retain 85%+ of our current customers.
- Increase the average size of our customer contracts by 9%+
These goals explain a lot more about how the team should grow revenue than a financial target alone would provide. Make the goals relatable to the team’s purpose and activities. Asking the team to come up with the goals is a great way to increase ownership and team buy-in.
Use Team priorities
To focus more of the team’s time on the most valuable activities and projects to achieve the most valuable goals. Talk to tasks, activities, initiatives, and projects with the team priorities you set. Constantly revisit the team priorities and communicate the priorities clearly and often.
Create individual goals
Aligned to the team goals. Individual goals provide clarity, focus, engagement, and are the foundation for objective and fair performance assessment. Goals that are clearly aligned to the team goals and carefully explained to team members, create purpose and meaning for the work they do. Set valuable goals in terms of tasks, activities and projects for each individual.
Set Individual Priorities
Finally, setting individual priorities help focus more of the individuals time on the more valuable activities and projects rather than all the urgent but no so important emails, requests, and tasks. Constantly revisit the individual priorities and agree or reconfirm the priorities regularly.
In summary
What to get your team working on by choosing valuable goals is one of the most important jobs you can do as a manager. There is only so much time available so how it is used is the difference between okay team performance and great team performance.
Setting valuable team goals and then selecting the most profitable team activities is a vital skill of a manager.
In finding valuable team goals, the steps to go through are:
- Alignment, purpose and value are all huge
- Focus on what you can control and influence
- Dig to find the most valuable work
- Create different levels and types of goals
If you have any questions on “What To Get Your Team Working On – Choosing Valuable Team Goals” please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
A manager’s ability to focus the team on the highest value tasks, activities and projects is an incredibly important skill – both for the business and more importantly for the manager. Value can be measured in many ways. In financial terms value is generating the most profit or cash.
Make time to sit back and consider the bigger picture and what team outputs would be commercially the most important to deliver over the coming weeks and months. Be open when explaining why you are focusing the team on certain tasks, activities and projects.
Focus more team time and effort on the high value areas and you personally will be seen as a more effective manager and leader and get all the benefits that come with this.
Jess
