What to get your team working on is super important as a manager. Possibly the most important thing. Choosing valuable team goals is the difference between delivering okay or great team performance.

Learn 4 actions for choosing the right team goals to increase your team’s performance. 

Choosing the right team goals at work is super important as goals provide direction, focus, purpose, and a fair way to measure performance. To choose valuable team goals don’t make them financial as few people relate to financial only goals. 

Start with the company goals when setting valuable team goals. Alignment to the wider business goals is very important in selecting the most profitable team activities to work on. Goal alignment ensures everyone’s efforts support and compound the impact of everyone else’s effort, creating a stronger overall result. Many managers forget the important of alignment when setting valuable team goals.

Next, in setting the right goals, focus on what you have control and influence over. The more the better. When you have control and influence over the activities needed to reach goals, you and your team will be happier, more motivated and more successful. There is nothing worse than having goals depend heavily on others with different goals to make yours happen. This is poor goal setting. Focus on what you have control over when setting team goals. 

Now the harder part – digging to find what is the most valuable work to select valuable team goals. This takes curiosity, open-mindedness and asking a lot of questions. This is joining the dots that others have missed. 

The good news – every company has serious value creating opportunities. They come about because the business environment is always changing and a very human habit is falling into patterns of thinking and behaviour. This creates gaps, sometimes very big gaps, and amazing value creating opportunities are in these gaps. 

Finally, create different levels of goals. These are good team management skills. Goals should focus on a team level and individual level. Then focus on team and individual priorities (which are not the same as goals). Goals and priorities should be communicated in non-financial terms. Focus on tasks, initiatives, activities and projects and make them easily relatable to each person and the team. 

What to get your team working on by choosing valuable goals is one of the most important jobs you can do as a manager. Choosing valuable team goals is a key part of getting the team to focus on work that is more valuable to the team and company. 

If you have any questions on “What To Get Your Team Working On - Choosing Valuable Team Goals”, please email me at [email protected] and I will get back to you.

Jess Coles

Enhance.training