The side-effects of only having goals at team-level
As this publication is evidence, I have found goal-setting to be a powerful and effective tool. But setting goals is in itself creating incentives and incentives can lead to side-effects. I explored this in the following post:
A side-effect we will explore in this post is that only having team-level goals seems to reinforce teams working against their own interest, the interest of their peers and of the organisation.
My hypothesis is that an explicit understanding (possibly influenced by the level of power distance and other organisational culture issues) can actually diminish the feeling of responsibility for more holistic outcomes. I have witnessed numerous cases, both in organisations I have worked in or advised, where teams can be conscious of a contradiction with their team goal but persevere.
Investment in creating for them more context — organisational goals, vision, values and more seems to help reinforce that teams have responsibility for customer and organisational outcomes and critical judgement needs to be applied.
With reference to the above cartoon as our hypothetical example. It’s critical for the team to know:
a) The broader context — in this case, that they are in a boat (it’s surprisingly easy in a large organisation, with teams oriented around their skill sets rather than what their purpose is, to lose sight of this),
b) What problems the collective faces — in this case, there is a hole in the boat and we are sinking, what they could do to improve the situation, the relative importance of what they were doing versus other opportunities.
For instance, maybe now is not the time to row if the leak could be patched with enough bailing of water. Or maybe all should be rowing to reach land before they sink — each of these scenarios would alter the response.
Join our Discord community! Are you in an organisation that has only established team-level goal-setting? Have you witnessed the side effects described here? Any other observations? Share what your experience has been in the comments.
Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com.
