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Whether your team members have been crying out for more direction to meet the team's goals or you want them to be more proactive and skilled at setting their personal objectives, this guide will offer some suggestions to help you achieve this.
If you recognize one or more of the following observations then this guidance might give you some fresh ideas:
- Members of your team are not clear about the organization’s vision, corporate and/or team objectives.
- Review your team members’ personal objectives. Are they genuinely useful, providing purpose and meaning to their role and contribution? Are they inspiring? Do they need to be more specific and measurable?
- Team members have the tendency to focus on their personal objectives to the exclusion of helping achieve team or organizational objectives.
- Team members do not review their objectives regularly.
- There is a culture where it is acceptable for deadlines to drift.
- You would like your team members to look forward to and come to objective-setting meetings well prepared so that they can shape their direction.
Suggestions
Take a look at these good practice suggestions to improve objective-setting within your team. It may be that a few could supplement what you already have in place:
Ensure your team know and understand the organization’s vision and corporate goals.
This is an essential starting point if the team and individual objectives are to be compatible with the organization’s goals. You might find a combination of the following suggestions helpful:
- Circulate copies of the corporate business plan.
- Deliver a brief presentation at your next team meeting, reinforcing the key corporate objectives and how they relate to your area of the organization. Show how your team contributes to the overall success of the organization.
- Ensure that every member of your team has a copy of your team or department business plan and your own personal objectives.
- Hold a question/answer session at the next team meeting to help consolidate understanding around these key documents. Is there a real appreciation of how they relate?
- Encourage someone in your team to start a scrapbook containing relevant press cuttings if this is not already co-ordinated for the organization.
Educate your team to write effective objectives.
Ensure your own objectives are SMART so they can be used as a good practice reference. SMART objectives are:
- specific – relating clearly and precisely to the person’s role
- measurable – so that you know when they have been achieved
- achievable – stretching but fair, within the person’s capability
- relevant – has a clear purpose that is relevant to work role and team
- time-bound – with clear timelines for completion
Encourage your team to be clear about the difference between inputs and outputs. In other words, articulate the goals as outcomes/results as opposed to a series of tasks (inputs).
One technique that can help you achieve this is to list success indicators for each objective. This defines what success will look like.
Turn objective-setting into a team activity.
To avoid team members setting objectives in isolation, the following suggestions may give you some ideas for encouraging members of your team to share their objectives with each other:
- Ensure everyone can access each other’s objectives on your computer system. This can help improve communication and understanding, and avoid duplication of effort.
- Post the team’s overall targets on the wall in the department.
- Ask each team member to bring one of their objectives and share it with the team during a team meeting or training session. The team can help review its effectiveness.
- Encourage your team to finalize their objectives in pairs or trios.
- Invite a colleague from ‘customer’ or ‘supplier’ departments to come to a team meeting to present an overview of their objectives and how they relate to and impact on those in your department. This will help to ensure that objectives complement each other between departments and individual efforts are well invested.
