7 Key Steps To Set Team Goals

1. Understand Your Organization's Goals

When setting team goals, leaders must take stock of what they and the organization want to achieve. X stands for higher sales of x products, whether for increased performance, better customer service, or a more efficient business model.

2. Collaborate with Your Team to Develop a Strategy

You should start planning a strategy for those goals once you have an idea of what you want to accomplish. Creating team goals based on this strategy helps you to identify a subject before going into depth. Defining an overall goal at the outset is crucial, as the team goal will facilitate it. Ensure that each team's individual goals add value to the business goal and vice versa.

By including such contributions, you protect yourself from unfair or unattainable team goals being set. Understand your strengths and weaknesses better than your team and involve them in setting the team goal while keeping your goals as transparent as possible.

3. Make your Goals Quantifiable

Incorporating those observations will help you establish appropriate, practical, and feasible individual goals. By this point the individual objective of your team will be more abstract; you will determine, for example, that you need more leads in your sales team. But "more" is a relative term; at some point, you have to decide for yourself whether it makes sense or not.

For example, if you think there are ten additional leads, a sales representative can understand more than a few of them, but not the rest of you.

This confusion can lead to confusion because the work process is already set in stone and there is no consistency within the sales team because different people have different perspectives. Leadership should set its goals in the form of milestones and associated milestones, not in the form of individual goals.

4. Tie Goals to Incentives

Clarifying your priorities at the outset prevents subsequent hiccups, and setting goals and milestones as an incentive is a great way to motivate your team. You need to be careful about what kind of incentives you are offering, however, they aren't necessarily the most effective.

Setting team goals with unreasonably high expectations and rewards could create an environment of toxicity in which employees compete.

Setting team goals with unreasonably high expectations and rewards could create an environment of toxicity in which employees compete. Make sure you promote performance goals as strongly as possible, not only as an incentive but also as part of your team's overall goals.

5. Set Deadlines

Setting goals with deadlines improve accountability within your organization, and if your team knows that the goal must be met by a certain date, it motivates them to get started right away. Your team is responsible for its performance, not just the goals of the organization.

Setting goals with deadlines always leads to gridlock, but it ensures that your team is not hesitant and more productive. Your team will be motivated to finish because it has a sense of urgency, rather than leaving a task unattended indefinitely.

6. Track Your Progress

The only way to determine whether you are meeting your long-term goals is to pursue them, and if you see your progress, you can correct the course. When your goals are measurable, the process becomes easier and your team's motivation increases.

If things progress faster than expected, you can allocate resources to other tasks to stay on track and recalibrate if something goes wrong.

7. Review Your Goals

It is always important to do a post-project review to evaluate your goals, but ask your team before setting them what they want to change.

Next time you set a goal, measure your recommendations against their expectations so that your plan is well thought out and your team has the skills to achieve it. This will help you set achievable and challenging goals and plan for the long term.

QuickScrum offers free project management software tools to help the teams streamline the process, enforce best practices, and enhance communication between teams.