TEAM Goal Planning

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There is an endless amount of work you could prioritize for your company. Without a shared vision on where you are going and how you plan to get there, your teams could be heading in different directions, fighting over resources, or wasting time duplicating work. By defining your team values, creating a shared vision, and outlining actionable goals, you can help your team stay aligned and focused on moving the right work forward. Use these goal planning recommendations to get aligned with your team today.

 
 

 In this article, you’ll learn:

  • Benefits of outlining your team goals

  • Overview of how to create goals aligned with your vision

  • Other recommended resources for team goal setting

Why should you set team goals?

You can help your team prioritize and work together towards shared objectives by setting quarterly goals. If you  set goals with your team regularly each quarter, you will start to see a wealth of benefits, including: 

  1. Aligned vision and understanding of the plan

    • When your team understands the long-term vision of what you’re working towards, it can give them a sense of purpose and alignment on how their work matters to the company and your customers. 

  2. Clarity on what to prioritize and how it connects to bigger picture

    • By understanding the direction you’re heading, teammates will be empowered to make decisions, prioritize their work according to larger objectives, and help them connect the work they’re doing day-to-day to the bigger picture.

  3. Shared framework for negotiating resource allocation

    • If everyone agrees on what the most important objectives are for the company this year and each team shares their quarterly goals, you can allocate resources according to this agreed framework rather than always resourcing the team who yells the loudest. 

  4. Avoid wasting time on unnecessary or duplicative work

    • If everyone plans and shares their goals, you can identify opportunities for cross-functional collaboration and identify areas where there is overlapping work so you can prevent two teams from completing the same work. 

There are many options out there for different ways to set your objectives and goals. Below are the steps I’ve used with my team for quarterly goal setting, and below that you’ll find materials for other ideas and systems. 

How to build your quarterly team’s goals

There are 5 minimum required steps you should take to plan your team’s quarterly goals, and you can adjust these to fit within your company’s quarterly planning cycle as needed. Ideally, you should complete this goal-planning process within the month before the quarter starts, and you can also move to a bi-annual planning process if quarterly planning is too frequent for your team’s cadence. 

  1. Review your values, long-term vision, annual objectives, and previous quarter’s progress

    • Your goals should all be aligned to the bigger picture of your company’s mission and objectives for the year. Start off your quarterly goal process by reviewing this big picture, assessing your current state, and reflecting on the past quarter. 

    • To do this, prepare a document or slides that capture your company values, vision, and year’s objectives. Then, capture a brief summary of your team’s progress, major accomplishments, and key learnings from the past quarter. Once this material is ready, review it with the team in a meeting, or circulate and ask for questions and input asynchronously

  2. Brainstorm with your team and prioritize areas of opportunity

    • Once the team has reviewed and feels aligned with the high-level plan and vision for the company, do a divergent brainstorm to identify areas of opportunity for the upcoming quarter.

    • To do this, hold a brainstorming meeting and generate ideas for ways you could approach your biggest areas of opportunity. Then, group the generated ideas into trends and have the team each vote on the opportunities that have the most potential. Consider ranking each opportunity on a scale of impact to effort and then select the ones that have the most votes and are reasonable to accomplish in the coming quarter.

    • If your team is responsible for varying functions or areas, you may need to do a separate brainstorm for each to empower each function’s leader to set goals for their area. If everyone on your team has a similar role, you can likely capture all the ideas in one session and collaborate on the prioritization.

  3. Define your quarterly goals and make them SMART

    • Once you have ideated and selected a few of the top opportunities for the quarter, turn those into actionable goals. I would encourage you to have each team member responsible for drafting and owning a goal or two for the quarter, which can offer more autonomy and growth opportunities for your team. As your teammates define their goals, make sure they are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based (SMART goals). 

    • Additionally, you should capture the success criteria for the goal and spell out what it looks like to achieve the goal, partially achieve it, or miss it. This will make it much more straightforward and fact-based when you go to grade it at the end of the quarter.

  4. Create a plan of action

    • After drafting your goals, you need to create a plan for how you will accomplish them. I recommend building this out in your project management tool of choice such as Asana, Trello, Monday.com, Wrike, or Notion as this will allow you to assign the appropriate action items to members on your team and set due dates and timelines. At a minimum, you should have the milestones captured for each goal that will help you understand whether you are on track over the quarter. 

    • Ideally, you should have the owner of each goal build out the plan of action, and all of your team should be using the same system of record to outline their goal, the success metrics, and the plan of action.

  5. Plan your communication and reviews

    • Once you have the goals and plan of action defined, you are ready to start doing the work to achieve your goals! The last step is to outline how you plan to check in on your goals with your team and how you will communicate progress to stakeholders. Ideally, this would be captured and communicated directly in your project or work management system, but you can also use the information in the system to communicate in email, Slack, or whatever channel your company prefers for cross-functional communication. 

    • The key is to make sure that your stakeholders always feel informed about how you are progressing on your goals and whether you are on track to hit them. You should ensure that there are no surprises at the end of the quarter, and you can do this by communicating early and often about the progress and work on your goals. 

    • You can also use your goals to keep the team focused, recognize hard work, unblock issues, and celebrate wins by discussing your goals and the progress on them regularly in team meetings and 1:1s.

Other resources for personal goal setting