Goal Setting for your Team
Basics of setting goals for your team
Hello! Hope you are doing well and safe.
In this post, I am going to cover a bit about setting goals. I am sharing this based on my learnings & experience managing my team as a young manager.
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Key points I will cover in this post are:
Why set goals?
How to set goals?
How to pick the right metric?
Pick the right threshold
How to use goals once you set it.
Let’s dive dipper into each one of these.
1. Why set goals?
Goals are just a tool to help you align and motivate everyone on your team to successfully achieve the desired outcome.
Goals have three primary benefits:
Clarity: You know what success or outcome looks like
Alignment: All team members know what success looks like. Show them the bigger picture
Motivation: A push to achieve more than you would have otherwise
Where do goals fit into the bigger picture?
Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap
You start with your Mission (what you're trying to achieve), which informs your Vision (what the world looks like when you achieve it), then your Strategy (how you get there).
Now, you need to find a way to tell whether you're successfully executing your Strategy (and thus your vision and mission).
That's where goals come in.
A good goal is:
Simple: Easily understandable. Everyone on your team can understand it
Concrete: It's obvious if you've achieved it
Worthwhile: Making an impact actually matters to the business
Stable: Won’t be dropped out by the noise
Quick feedback loop: Changes can be seen in the metrics
How to set goals
Step 1. Pick the metric
Start with your north star metric —whether it’s revenue, subscriptions, or media consumed— and figure out what set of levers move that metric.
For example, at SalesHandy, our north star metric was emails sent. The levers that moved this metric were loosely broken up into demand, supply, and the dynamics between the two. One level deeper, on say demand, we looked at things like site visits, trial conversion, and churn rate.
Step 2. Pick the threshold (aka the goal)
This usually requires a combination of top-down and bottom-up thinking.
Top-down: In order for your business to achieve the level of growth required for long-term success, how much does this metric need to move?
Bottoms-up: Knowing what you know today, what impact could your team realistically deliver with current resources.
How ambitious the leaders should be when setting goals?
I think about a goal like a Candy Crush game. The game is built to ensure that the next level is just hard enough to motivate you to continue, but not so hard that you give up. But when it feels impossible, you quickly give up.
So when setting a goal, just like a game, you should set a goal that motivates your team.
How to use goals once you have them:
Get buy-in: Get stakeholders on board
Instrument: Make it easy to watch this metric
Prioritize: Impact vs. Effort
Operationalize: Build this metric into your team workflows
Revisit: OK to adjust if something isn't right.
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to visualize the bigger picture and show it to the team and make sure everyone is seeing the same picture.
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Sincerely,
Utsav