How to set goals for your team members

Undoubtedly, setting goals, tracking them, and giving feedback are the fundamental responsibilities of each leader who wants to grow his/her team. In this article, I’m going to explain what you should consider when setting goals for your team members.

Align with your company’s goals

Usually, the top management of companies holds a meeting once a year to define their strategies and goals for the upcoming year. For example, growing sales, enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing return rate, improving delivery time, etc. These goals of the company and their weights (I said weights because companies usually prioritize their goals) will guide us in setting team goals. If your company does not provide its goals to you, there is a critical communication problem between top management and the rest of the company.

Let’s suppose that your company set a high growth goal for this year, and achieving this goal is critical for the top management. Nevertheless, your company set a goal for reducing the delivery time from five days to four days, and reaching this goal seems not challenging by the top management. In this scenario, a reasonable behavior should be setting a goal that contributes to the first goal and tracking the status of this goal in your 1–1s more frequently than other goals since the first goal needs more continual effort to achieve.

Follow your company’s socio-cultural environment

Each company has a socio-culture in its job environment. Sometimes, they are clearly defined by the HR department. However, they are secret in some companies, but they exist and they are felt by employees. If you, as a leader, want to enhance your team’s adaptation to your company’s cultural environment, the goals that you are going to set should follow your company’s socio-cultural environment.

Let me give an example from my current company; Trendyol is a data-driven company. Reports, metrics, benchmarks, and a/b testing are everywhere. Therefore, some of our goals are related to tracking and improving system metrics on the tech side, such as response time, error rate, test coverage, and bug rate. As a second example, continuous self-development is a socio-cultural rule in Trendyol. That’s why we have set goals for publishing articles and organizing meetups.

Use SMART technique for goal setting

SMART is a widespread technique used for goal setting. SMART is an abbreviation of the following terms:

Specific: Your goal should be on a specific subject. For example, improving code quality is not a specific goal. A specific goal would be improving code quality on the X project.

Measurable: Your goal should be measurable. To illustrate, a 10% improvement in test coverage.

Achievable: Your goal should be achievable. For example, improving the response time of the X project below 1 millisecond is impossible if your API has a dependency with other slow-running API.

Relevant: Your goal should be relevant to your current job. For example, growing revenue is not a relevant direct goal for tech people.

Time-bound: Your goal should be time-bound. E.g., improving the response time of the X project by 10% until the end of the first quarter of the year.

From company goals to team goals with SMART technique

Let’s assume that your company targets a 150% growth in sales at the end of this year, and you are an employee in the tech department. So, how can you contribute to this goal of the company on an individual basis? Think about how this goal affects your system. Basically, 150% growth means that at least 150% more load will come on your system at the end of the year. You have to be ready for this high load. You should review your system and determine which components of your system need to be re-platformed. If you set a goal for this re-platforming project, then this goal directly contributes to the company goal.

Your goal definition can be as follows;

Building a new checkout system which allows 1000 orders per second in 50ms response time by end of the September 2020

Specific -> Building a new checkout system

Measurable -> 1000 orders per second in 50ms

Achievable -> Nine months is enough to reach the goal

Relevant -> If you are a software developer then you can do it

Time-bound -> by the end of September 2020

You need to track this goal in your 1–1s frequently because there is a strict deadline for this goal. Therefore, this goal can be divided into monthly goals, such as releasing the display cart of the new checkout system by the end of May, and releasing the get payment of the new checkout system by the end of July.

Thanks for reading my first post! I hope you find this information concerning team growth useful. I am open to any feedback you will give, so please do not hesitate to criticize me. See you in other stories!