Finding ways to identify and develop growth and success paths can help to ensure that each person in your team is positioned to achieve his or her full potential. As you can see, setting SMART goals can help to give your team a sense of clarity and direction. Setting smart goals helps your employees accomplish more, which increases team morale. Between what you want for your organization, team, and employees individually, setting goals can help to create a virtuous cycle in which everyone is moving in the same direction.
When there are clear goals the team needs to achieve, this will naturally increase their productivity, as they will have to better focus and prioritise tasks if they are going to reach this goal. Goals give team members clarity, as they know what they are working toward. It is important for every team member, from managers and supervisors down to the lowest-level recruit, to know what each member’s goals are in contributing to team success. Your team members need to know what their goals and roles are, and also how they will be evaluated.
Within the team, each person should understand his or her responsibilities, too. Once your team is clear about each of their responsibilities, you can then go ahead and make it crystal clear how they are going to accomplish those responsibilities. Your team cannot succeed unless they know what is expected of them, so having those two concepts clearly defined and communicated is critical.
In the most fundamental sense, you must provide your teams with the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their roles effectively. When you are outlining tasks and roles, you’ll need a well-established base of trust and understanding, which allows your team to have healthy conflicts and helps you allocate the work that needs to get done. Make sure that everyone on your team understands their responsibilities, and responsibilities, and how the functions of their jobs fit together with mission success.
Meet with the team to discuss the issue, lay out a plan of action and a timeline with clear steps for moving forward, and give them additional resources if possible. For example, ask about challenges that your employees are facing, how you can help them slice up their time more efficiently, and if more resources are needed. Make a point of giving informal feedback to employees regularly, instead of waiting until an annual review period, so that you can develop more solid high performance culture.
One-on-ones are a great time for you to give feedback that helps guide an individual’s performance, as well as give individuals a forum to give you feedback about their leadership, their roles, and their general thoughts on the team’s goals. Having regular team performance meetings can be helpful to build more effective teams, set goals, and engage employees. These meetings will help to build alignment, assist with team-building, and hopefully motivate employees to perform well.
When you communicate clear expectations, help your team achieve those expectations, and review performance regularly, you make it easier for employees to get better. Second, establish how to effectively communicate to your team what ideas about the success you have developed in a way that makes clear both goals and expectations.
Clarifying and communicating what the core goals are for each role or project will ensure that your high performance team is always aware of the correct direction in which to go, which will prevent any unlucky (and vertigo-inducing) wheeling in the doldrums. Having a clear view of which tasks are aligned to the overall goals of the business or division helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page, while also allowing individual team members to make decisions that affect the bigger picture. In larger teams, especially, it is always helpful if everyone knows what the project is about so that when they encounter challenges, they can remind themselves of the ultimate goals.
Knowing what the other teams are working on may motivate teams to work together with each other when jobs and goals overlap. Not only does it decrease the mental friction of having team members figure out what they are working on, but the systems make collaboration and passing projects among employees a lot more organized. Work management tools can improve visibility across teams by mapping out every stage of the project back to a single set of goals.
These tools can act as a central hub for sharing what you are working on with the rest of your team, and identify areas for different people of responsibilities to collaborate. Give your team the tools it needs to develop–you may even want to consider including a productivity team as part of your plan, which will help to achieve goals.
Use the steps we outlined in this article: Set goals, measure performance, offer training, give good feedback, and talk to your team about what tools and processes you could implement to make their lives easier. Giving your team feedback in a kind, clear, concrete, candid manner provides a solid overview of what they are good at, as opposed to skills that they could be working to build.
One of the ways that you can leverage your boss’s role to influence performance is by monitoring the communication among teams as well as between individuals within the team. As the boss, it can be difficult to avoid inserting yourself too heavily and start micromanaging teams and individuals while they are producing the work that their duties and roles demand.
When setting team goals, set out a series of clearly defined objectives that you want your employees to work towards, and build out a road map of smaller, actionable tasks to accomplish those. Identify the core goals, and consider the ability of your team to accomplish those goals. Your team KPIs should involve a mix of individual goals and team objectives.
