Moving into the New Year, if you’re like most businesses, it’s probably time to set new goals for your team. The goals you select will determine the areas of your operations that you focus on and may influence how you measure your team’s success. As a result, don’t take goal-setting lightly. Below, I’ll offer four pieces of advice to help you set practical team goals that will equip your employees for success.
Receive Input
Don’t set goals alone. Allow your team to offer their input and express their concerns. Inviting your team to add their voice to the goal-setting process might help you prepare for potential challenges and choose an attainable yet challenging goal. Your team won’t be motivated to work hard for goals they don’t care about–which isn’t to say that your team should dictate your goals, but it does mean that if you choose a goal your team isn’t excited about, you should go the extra mile to explain the impact and reasoning behind that goal.
Establish Accountability
Setting goals doesn’t do your company any favors if you never check in on your progress along the way. When you set a long-term goal, try to break it down into smaller deadlines and plan to review progress. This might look like monthly check-ins, shared documents where you can update progress, weekly email updates, or some other method of checking in. This will help you find weak spots in your strategies and allow you to develop a new strategy before you fall too far behind.
Celebrate Progress
Get your team excited about achieving their goals! Consider establishing rewards or celebrations for meeting certain milestones along the way to your goal. This might look like offering casual Fridays when a specific metric is reached or even public shout-outs for employees making significant contributions to the goals. However you choose to celebrate, make sure your team feels like their work is valuable and appreciated, and celebrate their successful efforts.
Encourage Individual Goals
Once you set your team goals, it’s a great idea to encourage your team members to set individual goals as well. Personal goals will help each team member be motivated to stretch themselves to help the whole team succeed at the goals you set. It can be easy to fall into a mindset of assuming other people will do the work. If you have a goal for your marketing team to generate 10% more leads, maybe encourage your team to divide that percentage amongst themselves so that they are each personally responsible for a portion of the increase.