Engage Your Team with Reasonably Unreasonable Goals
This is a summary of a presentation I gave at Phoenix Startup Week.
When setting goals for your company, what’s the first thing you do? Pick a structure like SMART Goals? Get right to setting goals?
When do you pull your team into the process?
Goal structure is important, but not more than how those goals affect your team.
It takes a lot of work to find the right people that believe in your company’s vision. And getting those people on-boarded is just the beginning.
You then have to keep everyone aligned and focused on the long term vision.
When done the right way, goals can help do that.
The first step to engaging your team with reasonably unreasonable goals is understanding your team.
Understand your team
You’ll do a much better job achieving goals if you know and understand your team. To grasp how your employees operate and react to certain situations, try tools like these:
Understand what matters to each of them. For example, a first-time father might want schedule flexibility, while a recent college graduate might be looking for professional growth.
You can help them (and the business) much more if you take the time to understand what inspires and motivates them.
The next step is setting the goals. Easy, right?
Set goals that engage the team
To set goals that engage your team, you’ll want to:
- Be transparent
- Use a combination of goal types
- Celebrate success
- Align employees to company purpose
1. Be transparent
We surveyed employees about setting and achieving goals and found that 90% of companies set goals from the top down, and rarely involve management.
Executives usually see the company differently than management and contributors, since they’re farther from the day-to-day operations.
To be transparent with your team, make them feel like they’re part of the process — because they are. Transparency makes them feel trusted, not dictated.
Here are some ways you can be transparent with your team:
- Involve the team. Set 60–80% of the goal, then get your team’s input to hash out the details.
- Build buy-in. To connect your team with company goals, get them on board with achieving them.
- Keep goals visible. Show them daily or weekly what they’re working toward. Out of sight, out of mind.
- Communicate progress. This helps employees see how they’re making an impact on the company, further connecting them to its mission.
- Remember the why. Remember why you’re working toward a goal. Keep everyone aligned by making company purpose visible and showing employees how their day-to-day work helps the company as a whole.
2. Use a combination of goals
Whether companies realize it or not, there are different types of goals. But, before we go into types of goals, let’s go over what makes a good business goal.
Components of a good business goal
A goal is an idea of the future desired result that a person or a group of people envisions, plans, and commits to achieve.
What does it take to create a goal that everyone in the business can understand and get behind?
- Clear definition. Structure your goals, using something like the SMART Goals structure, so you and your employees know what to work toward. If your goals are too broad or undefined, then how will everyone know when you’ve succeeded?
- Focus. This is the reason you’re defining a goal in the beginning. So, instead of the team drifting around and getting very little accomplished, you can optimize time and resources for the best productivity.
- Top of mind. Make sure goals are top of mind for employees. Ironically enough, goals that should be top of mind are often forgotten. If people don’t remember exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, how can they make the correct decision?
- Effort. The larger the goal, the higher the level of effort (mental or physical) it will need. Effort is tricky because it needs to balance impact. If the impact is significantly lower than the effort, the goal won’t be worth it.
- Vision. Put company goals into context for your employees to understand. People use vision boards for personal goals because they help visualize goals and encourage people to bring their goals to life. Do the same with company goals. Set a vision that’s just broad enough to let employees fill in the gaps and achieve the goals in their own way.
- Consider a startup who says, “Once we’re making money, we’ll create a fun office atmosphere.” Great! But what does that mean?
- Compare that to: “Once we’re making money, we’ll have an office with a coffee bar, ping pong table, and four-day work weeks.” Awesome! Now that’s something tangible that everyone can picture. Employees may want to add onto that vision, but we have a starting point that everyone can visualize.
Types of goals
There are different types of business goals:
- Conservative or easy
- Moderate
- Aggressive or BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals)
Using a combination of all three goal types helps build belief and alignment.
How? Different types of goals impact your team differently. I’ll explain what that means for each type of goal.
Conservative or Easy Goals
These are good for newly-formed teams or those struggling to meet goals.
Even though they’re not very inspiring, it’s important to achieve these goals because they build belief. They show your team that they can win and accomplish what they set out to do.
Why you need them:
- Quick wins. Teams like to win.
- Achieving them builds internal belief
Be aware:
- Can be uninspiring
- Encourage minimal thought or effort
Moderate Goals
Moderate goals push your team and encourage them to solve problems.
They’re less intimidating than aggressive goals or BHAGs, and leave little room for cutting corners, unlike easy goals. Meaning they’re enough effort to motivate your employees, but achievable enough to make them feel like they made progress. They inspire your team to work toward something instead of just “doing their job”.
Why you need them:
- Inspire creative solutions and problem solving
- Push individuals and teams
Be aware:
- Growing goals not being hit
- Short term over long term
Aggressive Goals or BHAGs
These goals are what truly align your employees to your company. These goals are the destination, the roadmap for the company. They inspire your employees to get on board with the company vision.
Why you need them:
- Inspirational
- Align your team
Be aware:
- Might seem unachievable
- People give up and lose faith
That being said, these goals can be as intimidating as they are inspiring. Too many BHAGs and your employees will feel overwhelmed and burnt out.
You need to balance different goals with each other to align employees.
So, how can you do that?
- Set aggressive goals or BHAGs to inspire and align the team.
- Use moderate and conservative goals as milestones to build belief and create an atmosphere of creative problem solving.
You can align and inspire teams with a huge goal (BHAG/aggressive goals), but they also need to see some kind of roadmap (easy and moderate goals) to understand how they’re going to get there.
3. Celebrate success
Celebrating success is important to engaging your team. It builds trust, group belief and keeps everyone engaged.
Celebrations don’t have to be lofty or expensive. Team builders are great, especially if you can reward company success as well as team success. But you can also celebrate little wins.
Ultimately, you want everyone to see that connection: When the company wins, everyone wins.
4. Align employees to company purpose
Align every employee to the company purpose. This starts at the interview process, being careful who you bring into the building. But that’s just the beginning.
After that, it’s a matter of setting goals and meaningful milestones that both challenge people and help them win. Make the goals visible to keep them top of mind, so employees can see their impact and what they’re working toward.
When the individuals succeed, the company succeeds.
