How the Best Leaders Target Their Team’s Growth

Steven Hopper
The Startup
Published in
5 min readFeb 16, 2020

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Photo by Marc A on Unsplash

According to a Gallup State of the American Workplace survey, “78 percent of employees are not convinced their leaders have a clear direction for the organization.”

A lack of direction leaves employees not only feeling unsupported in their growth, but it actually causes even worse problems for leaders.

In fact, as researchers from four top business schools have discovered,

“Bad ‘side effects’ produced by goal-setting programs include a rise in unethical behavior, over-focus on one area while neglecting other parts of the business, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.”

This is why goal-setting plays a critically important part of any leader’s job.

So how do the best leaders set goals for their teams that promote the kind of growth and achievement they desire?

1. They provide direction, not the finish line

“We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.“ — Steve Jobs

According to a Gallup poll, only 30% of employees feel involved in their own goal setting. Yet

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Steven Hopper
The Startup

Stories of a former high school teacher, now business consultant. Husband. Travel fanatic. Obsessed coffee drinker. And all-around nerd.