This Goal Help Your Team Deliver Results
This Goal Help Your Team Deliver Results
Create a process where goals are frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, and transparent.
Leaders are responsible for setting and managing goals for their teams. For most people, this means following a well-established process of designing SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. This approach has been used by many leaders to execute strategy andtrack performance, but is the conventional thinking on goal-setting doing enough to communicate each team member’s promise and potential?
According to researchers at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, SMART goals undervalue ambition, focus narrowly on individual performance, and ignore the importance of discussing goals throughout the year. Instead, they recommend that leaders focus on goals that are FAST–frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, and transparent.
Goal should be frequently discussed.
Depending on the nature of your work, realities can shift quickly: A sudden pivot in a project, unforeseen changes in team leadership, and new market conditions or client requests call for priorities to be reconsidered and realigned. Waiting for a capstone event (year-end reviews) to address an employee’s goals is simply not sufficient.
Consider setting and discussing goals on a quarterly basis. Several high-profile companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Accenture, have recently transformed their traditional performance appraisal process to incorporate ongoing discussions on how employees are doing against their goals, which keeps these objectives top of mind throughout the year.
Goals should be ambitious.
Setting goals that are “safe” may allow employees to feel good about their progress, but it may also deter them from the trial-and-error experimentation required to grow. By establishing ambitious goals for their team, leaders set a tone that promotes risk-taking and conveys faith in the abilities of others.
Asking people to stretch past their comfort zone may require leaders to seriously reconsider how rewards are tied to work. A 40-year study on motivation found that intrinsic motivation–defined by a genuine sense of purpose and challenge–was nearly six times more effective than external incentives in motivating people to complete complex, creative tasks. People may be more willing to take risks in their work when they don’t fear repercussions in their jobs.
