Setting goals at the team level

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that President John F. Kennedy declared America’s ambition to go to the moon,  a choice that with others, Amercia would do “not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills.” That is the value of an ambitious future goal; it encourages you to change your current behaviours.

Goals are like lenses in a pair of glasses. The goals you pursue determine what you see and how you see it. Unless we set new goals, we’re committing to the status quo. Unless we take the time to imagine our aspirations and ambitions, we get pulled into playing a risk-averse, smaller game.

Goals, therefore, are how we make sense of change. As we start afresh with a New Year, how can we use goal thinking to support our capability to deliver our strategy, to balance the short-term with the long-term and improve?

Setting your goals for the next 12 weeks

You’ll want to set your goals to fit your company’s operating cadence. I’m going to focus here on the value of setting quarterly goals, a period that aligns with quarterly business reviews that are common in many businesses:

• 12 weeks breaks down longer-term ambitious goals into concrete goals that are stretching but attainable within the shorter time period
• Time-boxing to 12 weeks reduces risk by checking in four times more frequently than annually, encouraging you to re-evaluate, question how value is being delivered, and ultimately stay flexible
• 12 weeks is an excellent period of time in which to look forward and to try something new, improve a process, change how the team is working

Goals should be shared and transparent

We know that understanding how your efforts contribute to the company’s overall success is important for employee engagement. Yet, a 2018 study found that less than one-quarter of middle managers knew their company’s strategic priorities. This lack of clarity is complicated by how we work with other teams. A persistent workplace challenge remains cross-company alignment of work efforts. It’s doubtful that your team can deliver outcomes without working with other teams. When different teams don’t synchronise their objectives or work efforts, it can create significant workload issues, such as making excessive demands on specific teams and duplication of efforts.

That’s why “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs) have become popular. Andy Grove first implemented a ‘Management by Objectives’ concept of translating goals into concrete actions and metrics when at Intel in the 1970s. A fellow employee, John Doerr, used this as the genesis of OKRs he introduced at Google. A fundamental principle is that OKRs are public so everyone in the company can see what every other team is working on.

OKRs do a great job of exposing dependencies between teams and how teams need to collaborate to meet the company’s strategic objectives. Without this focus, individuals and teams can theoretically meet their own personal objectives, but the company could still miss its goals. Today, companies like Google set annual and quarterly OKRs and hold company-wide meetings quarterly to share and score OKRs. Objectives and Key Results create the permissions to understand the needs of other teams and how you can coordinate your work efforts.

Setting your goals as a team

Defining your quarterly goals is best done as a team exercise so that everyone can see the relationships between the company, cross-team and own-team goal-setting. The discussion can cover how the team can best help deliver the top-down company strategy whilst also delivering bottom-up objectives that are important to the team and its development phase. Helpful inputs to the discussion could include:

Your Team Engagement Survey – feedback from immediate team members on what is working well/less well and where individuals see opportunities and potential

Customer Research – Voice of the Customer Research that highlights areas to improve your service proposition or how to innovate against unmet needs

Feedback from other teams – Perspectives from other teams that you work closely with

All 3 of the above inputs will help you to develop credible goals that resonate with other business leaders and improve your intuition of what is needed.

Retrospectives – What have we learned from the previous period? Are we softballing our goals or being unrealistic? What is getting in the way of us reaching our potential?

Team Capacity – Charlie Gilkey uses the helpful resource acronym of TEAM, which stands for Time, Energy, Attention and Money. To become a priority, you must assign resources across these four dimensions. We’ve written previously on the importance of making workloads transparent so that team members aren’t overloaded.

Team Development Needs – Amy Edmondson (2002) suggests that every team can become learning agents for their company, either focusing on incremental learning (improving existing routines and capabilities) or radical learning – reframing situations, developing new capabilities or solving ambiguous problems. How can the team manage the pace of learning and learning as a team (through practice and knowledge sharing), not just individually? It may not feel immediately natural to share individual development goals with teammates, but it’s a great practice that supports higher levels of team connection, curiosity, insight, feedback and performance.

If you are working with OKRs, another of its principles is that they should be written to be deliberatively ambitious. The “sweet spot” for an OKR grade is 60% – 70%; if a team consistently fully attains their objectives, it’s a sign that they might be Sandbagging their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough.

Creating your road map from your prioritised goals

Your final prioritisation of quarterly team goals supports your ability to balance the company objectives with team needs, the long-term ambition with the short-term delivery. It needs to work for your team and the wider business (which is why transparency is critical).

What are your rocks (longer-running projects with the highest business and customer impact), ‘pebbles’ (small projects), and ‘sand’ (smaller but essential tasks and deliveries)?

It’s important to be clear that you are making trade-offs and delaying or cancelling specific opportunities in favour of higher-value priorities. Tools like MoSCoWA (is it something we must have? Should have? Could have? Won’t have?) can be enormously helpful to right-size the scope of priorities.

In the spirit of greater transparency, a road map is an excellent conversational tool to communicate what you will be working on for the next period and to help you achieve buy-in. Unlike a more rigid plan that communicates deliverables and % completion, the purpose of a roadmap is to share the outcomes your team is focused on delivering. This is an excellent article on how to create a Road Map.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but it’s frequent reviews that help you to make progress

As James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. To use a fitness analogy, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system.

In summary, setting goals at the team level works best when:

• You time-box your goals into quarters. This encourages you to re-evaluate, question how value is being delivered and ultimately stay flexible.
• Goals recognise inter-dependencies with other teams. They are transparent (i.e. published) and reflect how you must collaborate with other teams to deliver your strategy.
• It is informed by data – Goal-setting is forward focused but the discussion is informed by a range of different data inputs.
• Goal Progress is discussed regularly. What’s working well? What’s getting in the way? What do we need to do differently? Do our goals still make sense based on changes in our market?

Flow is a ways of working company. We help you to create the conditions where your people can flourish, where decisions, meetings and ideas can flow. If you’d like to discuss how we can help you to optimise your company’s operating cadence , get in touch at hi@thisisflow.co