Hit or miss, once your team finishes a goal, you may feel compelled to rush to the next one. Don’t do it. Otherwise you could end up repeating a costly mistake next quarter — or realize, a year from now, that you got too comfortable with your “fail-safe” process, and other teams are passing yours by.
To guard against these kinds of painful (and potentially career-limiting) outcomes, you’ll need to continually hone your goal-setting process. Try pausing after each big goal to follow these tips:
1. Evaluate your team’s performance, including how much they learned and improved their process.
People tend to make win-or-lose evaluations of goals, but performance is rarely so absolute. For example, if you end up at 95 percent of a goal, is that the same as meeting only 50 percent? Would it have been worth the effort to push for those final five percentage points and burn everyone out in the process? Maybe. Maybe not.
Also be sure to consider less quantifiable yet critical factors, like whether your team learned, improved their process, and worked well together. Did they broaden their understanding of a new market, implement new time-saving software, or better leverage each other for problem solving? These kinds of things — more than whether they hit 95 percent versus 100 percent of a forecasted metric — will lead to future success.
So, how’d the team do on the goal? Factoring in all of your performance considerations, grade your team’s success — for example, on a scale of zero to one. Maybe your team earns a 0.9 if they hit their target metric but you think they could have collaborated more effectively, and a 0.6 if they fell well short but showed some improvement. You’re not always aiming for a one here — too many perfect scores could mean your goals are easy.
Then, walk through the full evaluation in a team debrief (see point No. 5). By including the team’s learning and improvement, you’ll be letting your team know that those things matter to you, and should matter to them, too.
2. Consider what you learned about your team’s dynamics and address areas that need improvement.
How your team worked together toward the goal is one of the best predictors of how they’ll work together in the future.
As part of assessing your team dynamic, consider the important informal roles that team members played during the goal process. Ask yourself:
- Who stood up for the values and mission of the team or company — for example, by trumpeting these things or by subtly modeling a value in their behavior?
- Who provided support when others needed it (technical, emotional, or both)?
- Who acted as an expert, and on what tasks (and did the rest of the team view them as expert)?
Depending on your answers, you may realize that some of these roles still need filling. Consider who on your team might fit the bill. Or, you may need to encourage a team member to embrace their informal role more fully, or gently suggest that someone tone it down (for example, by saying to an overzealous expert, “Wei knows a lot about this too, and I’d like to be sure she has a chance to share her expertise”).
3. Determine whether you or your team made undue sacrifices for the sake of reaching your goal.
Goals give you tunnel vision — great for helping you and your team focus on an objective, but potentially terrible for noticing what that focus may be costing you. So when reflecting on the goal process, check whether high expectations or stress have caused you or your team to:
- Skip out on regular obligations. Canceling 1-on-1s lately? Not making time to give advice or help other teams? Missing more dinners at home? It may be totally worthwhile to make these sacrifices once or twice, or for a short period. But have they become a destructive habit?
- Lose interest in the work itself. Sometimes as the pressure of meeting a goal number or deadline rises, the work you or team members once loved just doesn’t seem that fun anymore. Psychologists would call this a reduction in intrinsic (or internal) motivation. This trade-off tends to happen slowly and, over time, can hurt performance and even lead to burnout.
- Take shortcuts. Some types of shortcuts may be improvements, like reducing steps in a legacy process. But plenty of others, like signing low-quality customers or deliberately inflating cost estimates, are potentially dangerous. It’s easy to say, “That doesn’t happen on my team!” But one third of workers report observing misconduct on the job, according to global surveys by the Ethics & Compliance Initiative.
If any of these sound familiar, you’ll need to address the issue, either with individuals or through team feedback.
4. Assess your coaching and leadership performance.
Self-reflection is critical to improving as a manager. Think back to pivotal moments in the goal process: expectations you set (or didn’t set!) around the objectives, feedback you gave to both individuals and the team, tasks you delegated, coaching you delivered along the way. What were the results of your actions? For example, in the case of feedback you gave, did the team heed and implement it? If not, you might want to work on giving feedback and your persuasion skills.
You’ll get a fuller picture of your performance if you ask your team members for feedback. Ask them what you did that worked well and what didn’t, so you get specific results that aren’t all positive. For help navigating what can be a tricky ask, given the power dynamic, see the video below.
Experienced manager Grayson Morris explains how he “seeds” the conversation to get more honest feedback from direct reports.
5. Conduct a debrief with your team.
Whatever you call it — a debrief, post-mortem, retrospective — schedule it soon, before you and the team are onto the next project or packing your bags for vacation. Your goal should be to walk out of the room knowing what the team’s going to do differently next time, and who’s responsible for making what happen.
This is often tougher than it sounds; teams tend to focus on dishing out recognition and possibly blame during a debrief — to the exclusion of what to do with this information. As these acknowledgments come up, you can incorporate the feedback you developed while evaluating yourself and your team, as well as ask, “What steps can we take to improve this next time? Who might be responsible for making this change?”
6. Resolve to implement at least one change that comes out of the debrief meeting.
Too often, teams go back to their desks after debriefs and forget what just happened, which means everyone just wasted their time. One debrief may not give you all the answers, but likely it will give you at least an idea or two to test, which will provide you with even more data to learn from.
You’re not looking to do some massive experiment that stakes the team’s reputation on the results. As experienced manager Michael “Zipp” Zippiroli explains, he prefers small, controlled tests: “I am uncomfortable with my team doing whatever they want,” he explains. “I am comfortable with them saying, ‘I have a hypothesis I’d like to test. My hypothesis is X, and I’d like to do five calls to try it.’”
Just make sure you’re measuring what you think should change (as well as important things you don’t expect to change, to check your assumptions). Also have a group doing it the old way, so you have a comparison for your test.
7. Communicate your results and plans beyond your own team, sharing what’s working and how the team intends to improve.
Once you have your team’s results, you’ll also have an audience — your manager and peers want to know how things went. And there may not be a better time to give your team’s ideas a voice. In addition to communicating how your team performed:
- Ask for additional input from your manager. Hopefully, you’ve been getting your manager’s feedback all along. But it’s worth asking for more now that results are in and everyone is thinking about what comes next.
- Ask peers how their teams fared, and solicit feedback. If your team is an outlier — performing really well or really poorly — it’ll be valuable to learn more about why. And if a bunch of other teams struggled, too, that may ease the pressure on your team.
- Consider getting feedback on any planned tests (point No. 6). Peers facing similar challenges could offer some great input, as could your manager. Or, you may need approval from your manager before doing a test, depending on your relationship and your organization’s culture.
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