Everyone sets goals for themselves, and every leader has goals for their team. These goals may be informal, aspirational, explicit, or any number of other things, but, in the end, goals are just what you hope to accomplish, both for yourself and for your team.
But what makes a good goal? What goals, and how many should a leader set for themselves and their team? Is it good to set easy goals so the team can have a sense of accomplishment, or should one make very challenging goals to inspire the team meet the challenge? The answer to many of these questions is: “it depends”, however there are a few criteria that all goals should adhere to, and several mistakes around goal setting that should be avoided.
It’s critical that goals are not only SMART, but well thought out, intentional, few in number, focused, and aligned with the company’s incentives. It may sound funny, but it is far more common in my experience for a company to want one thing, but structure incentives that encourage something totally different.
Aligning Goals and Incentives
For example, have you ever worked at a company that paid its sales team a commission on signed contracts? Once the ink is dry, the salesperson gets a cut of the agreed on sales price, and the company gets a new project. Great deal, right? Well, what does this scenario really encourage? Does it incentivize the salesperson to make reasonable promises and set appropriate expectations? Does it encourage the salesperson to collaborate with the implementation team to ensure that the project can be completed on time, on budget, and to the customer’s satisfaction? Or, instead, does it encourage the salesperson to say whatever they need to, make whatever promise is necessary, to get the contract signed so they can move on to the next one?
In most cases, the company doesn’t want a signature on a contract. That’s a nice and necessary first step, but what the company really wants is a successful implementation, a happy and reference-able customer, and repeat business. That first contract should just be the first of many if the company delivers on their promises, but if those promises aren’t made with respect to reality, then the company is going to get that signature on a piece of paper, and likely none of the things that they really want.
You can’t blame the salesperson for this scenario; they’re just doing what they have been encouraged to do. You can’t expect to set incentives that encourage behavior that doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, and hope to achieve them.
Aligning Goals Vertically
Another common mistake when it comes to goals is the creation of independent goals at every level of the company hierarchy. Imagine that the company leadership is looking to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, the engineering team has decided to work on issues for existing customers to increase the Net Promoter Score, and the sales team is working on customer education to get existing customers to adopt more modules of the product.
These are all fine goals, but they do not contribute to each other at all. Neither the engineering team or the sales team is contributing to each other’s goals, and neither of them is contributing to the overall company goal. Imagine three teams of people all pulling a section of an enormous rope in different directions. Nobody’s going to get very far without the support of the other people pulling the rope.
Now, imagine instead that the leadership team has announced that the company’s goal is to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, and then works with the engineering team to decide to build new features that prospective customers have been asking for, and with the sales team to reach out to contacts made at conferences to increase their awareness that the features they were interested in are in the pipeline. This is an organization all pulling the rope in the same direction, and it’s amazing how much can get done if the goals set by every team align with each other and contribute to the goals of the greater organization.
When you’re deciding on goals for your team, make sure to understand what goals your boss has set for their team, make sure that the goals you set for your team align with them, and also be sure that your incentives encourage behavior that will accomplish them.
Less Is More
Yet another mistake when setting goals is a loss of focus. Sometimes a team will have so many things to do, so many issues to resolve, and so many stakeholders to please that it’s tempting to set dozens of tiny goals to try to make everyone happy. In my experience, this only results in
the team not understanding what the real priorities are, no stakeholder really getting what they want, and results in the sense that little was accomplished.
Your goals set your priorities, and having a few, clear goals that everyone on the team understands and can work toward is far more valuable than many smaller goals that seem unrelated. It is a very powerful thing to tell a team that in the next three sprints we are going to accomplish two things, and everything everyone does is going to contribute, in some way, to the accomplishing of these things. It sets the vision, it enlists their support, and gives clarity to why they are working on whatever tasks are assigned to them.
It is fine to have smaller sub-goals, but they must all align and contribute to the greater, stated goals, otherwise the message gets confusing. If everyone on the team is working on tasks that clearly align with each other and contribute to a greater communal goal, it creates a sense of team, partnership, and purpose that cannot be replicated otherwise.
What your goals are and how challenging is less important than their focus, and alignment with incentives and greater company goals. Being thoughtful and communicative about your team’s goals is a great way to develop a high performing team with a track record of accomplishments.
