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Hey there, Maureen Chiana here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast, a show designed to equip you with knowledge to understand the science of how your brain works so that you can unlock your leadership potentials with the tools to rewire your brain for you to flourish, excel, and achieve high performance in every area of your life. I'm so thrilled to be with you today because today we're following on with the topic we started last week on goal setting, but our focus today is on team goal setting. Why is it important for teams to set goals? So without wasting any time, grab your cup of coffee, put your feet up, and listen in. So our topic today is how to achieve your team goals. Let's start with a quote from Zig Ziglar. It says, you can get what you want by helping others get what they want. With many employees not fully understanding the organization's business strategies and what they actually specifically need to do to help achieve the goals of the organization, it's become clear that many companies need to do more for their business aims to be efficiently worked towards and achieved. Building a team is building strength. It takes a team of people to accomplish great things, not one single individual. So building and maintaining mutually supportive relationships is essential if you as a leader want to achieve your team goals. The power of a team comes from bringing many people together who collectively have diverse skill sets to achieve the shared goals of the organization or team. Each person contributes his or her unique and necessary skills to the team effort. As a leader, having people around you can give you diversity of thought, enabling you to gain from that wisdom and experience and get further along rather than if you surround yourself with everyone who have the same level of experience and people who think like you. Successful teams you find that individuals complement each other. They have a plan for confronting and solving problems. They don't spend their time firefighting. They have a plan for evaluating and measuring progress as well. Despite the enormous time and energy that goes into strategy development in most organizations, many have little to show for the effort that they put in. Research suggests that organizations on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance that their strategies actually promise. Even worse, the causes of this strategy to performance gap tend to be invisible and unknown to top management. Failing at the task of effectively setting team goals which link to the wider organization aims is detrimental to the productivity of your employees. If they don't know why they are being assigned a given task or they are unclear where that task fits into the larger organization vision, they are actually less likely to be motivated to do it. When I speak to a lot of managers and ask them why they don't bring in the team into planning projects or planning goals or having these shared goals, a lot of times they feel them doing it themselves protects the team from doing the work. But the point is that when you speak to team members, which I've done in so many instances, the team members actually feel that management don't value them or don't value the opinions. That is why this is so important. And don't make the mistake of just asking them or doing this goal setting exercise, but then going to do something else which I've seen so many times. For them to buy into it, they need to be part of it, and they need to feel that they're being heard and their opinion is also valued. So let's look at some benefits of setting team goals. Goal setting in itself not only enhances talent, processes, productivity, but it also increases performance through focus and concentration of the people involved. It increases strategic, motivating, and tactical development, it increases mobilization of effort of everyone, and it also increases perseverance so that when things go wrong, people don't say, Well, it's nothing to do with me, and kind of hands off. Because they were part of the initial process, they have a stake in it, so they persevere and find their way through as long as they have the right tools and techniques to do it. And you find that all of these are necessary for an organization to excel. This will help your organization achieve its objectives, it will boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention by ensuring that every member of your team understands their role in the overall strategy. Ultimately, this will save you time and improve efficiency. So, looking specifically at these benefits, one is communication. Setting team goals creates clarity for everyone, and each person then understands what their responsibility is and the responsibility of other team members. It really helps to eliminate any feeling of being unfairly burdened with too much work. Another benefit is what I call condition. The process ensures that employees have an understanding of the organization's wider strategy and it gives them a clear purpose of what they are doing and why they are doing it. It also gives them a perception of importance where they feel that they are valued and it gives them an appreciation of the value of their work outside the actual task that they're undertaking. This boosts motivation levels and encourages people to achieve more. Another benefit is connection because team goal setting creates a sense of belonging as individual goals become wrapped up in the team's goals where they end up subconsciously seeing each other as being in the same group, so it's like being in that in-group. And when this happens, you find that they are more likely to work collaboratively to get results rather than adopting a more ruthlessly competitive mindset. The fact is that when you treat someone as a competitor, the capacity to empathize drops significantly. Now looking at examples of effective team goals. The first thing is boosting work performance. Setting goals at work is undeniably important, as we've seen. Setting specific and challenging goals inspires higher performance than setting non or even setting goals like do your best, which really don't push people. Team goals are also key for keeping everyone aligned and working towards the same aims, whilst also allowing people to have autonomy over their work. A challenging goal assigned by a manager or team leader is only effective if the team members accept it as their own, and that's why they need to be involved in it. The first step to achieving this is to identify the various elements that affect the quality of work as a team, such as expectations of the senior leadership team, internal and external challenges that could have an impact on the goals that they've set. The team can also collaboratively pick up a particular problem to tackle together and solve collectively. Looking at commitment and participation, setting clear goals must be followed by a commitment by everyone to do the work necessary to achieve those goals. And this can be achieved when everyone comes together initially to do the process together. A key goal that every team needs to possess is to meet deadlines of task. There are many factors that can affect a team's performance, and one of the most common ones is procrastination. Procrastination affects the whole process along with its results, and creating a lot of stress and pressure on other team members and that have to then take on the work of the people procrastinating. It's therefore important to practice proper time management through the process. Creating goals that teams and organizations will actually accomplish isn't just a matter of defining what needs to be done. You also have to spell out the specifics of getting it done. And that's because you can't assume that everyone involved knows exactly how to move from concept to delivery. You've got to really break it down so that people understand exactly what the expectations are of them and the steps that they need to do to carry it out. And one of the ways which I mentioned in last week's was using the if-then technique to express and implement your group's intentions, this actually can help significantly to improve execution of goals. Goal specificity and difficulties is another important one. Breaking goals down into smaller chunks, where each member is allocated, or even picks a specific task that contributes to the wider goal is important because vague goals can generate too many outcomes and lead to a lot of ambiguity concerning what actually constitutes efficiency. It also helps to identify problems quickly and direct problem-solving activities to that area before it gets too late and you end up firefighting instead of actually following the process through. Goal difficulty, on the other hand, is the amount of effort and persistence involved in achieving a goal, which is equally important because people adjust their effort to the difficulty of the task, and ultimately this will help people grow and develop better. Goals are meant to harness your team's motivation. So goals that only focus on the end result don't work, and they end up decreasing performance. Goals that are focused only on the outcome may indeed motivate some members of your team, but you find that it will create a climate of fear, helplessness, slow decision making, and fragile confidence for many others. The key to setting team goals effectively is to cover three main things. For everyone to understand the end result that you expect of them or that you expect as a team. The things that will tell everyone that you're on a winning path and the attitudes and behavior that you need to develop in order to achieve your desired end result. So we're looking at the why, the what, and the how goals. On the growth mindset culture transformation course that I wrote, this is a key element of actually being able to change and embed a particular culture. And I'll drop the link into the description if you want to have a look at it. Measuring the success of your team goals is important, as we've seen here, because if you don't measure your goals, then there's no way of knowing you've achieved them. What then happens in people's brain is that all they are computing is that they're doing, doing, doing, doing, and they're not actually getting results. So they feel as if they're in a loop that, okay, one minute we're doing this, the next we are doing this. And I see this a lot in organizations. Okay, we'll try this now. Okay, no, we'll move on to this now. Without actually stopping to say, okay, has the first one worked? Okay, now we're moving on to the second one. If people can't see any form of progress in what they're doing, they end up discouraged. And the fact is that in some cases, that actual initial project might have worked, but because you don't stop to evaluate and measure the progress, people don't know how much they've done or how successful or it was, or if there was anything to learn from it before starting something else or moving on to another project. So it's important to be specific about what you want to achieve or what you want to improve when you're carrying out team goal setting. Choose a specific area on which to focus your goal improvement. And you can look at things like rewarding intangible goals. For example, changing things like aim for more satisfied students or patients and rewarding that to reduce students' complaints about workload or reduce patients' complaints about aftercare. This makes it more specific so that the focus is looking at students' complaints or patient complaints related to aftercare, and you can start breaking that down further into how you will measure it. So it's really important to be that specific. Have review points for measuring progress. Assess the current performance of your chosen improvement target or goal. This identifies the starting line for your goal and take your time to measure progress, but also celebrate successes as they come in. So as people complete aspects of the project, make sure you stop to celebrate them and celebrate the process and celebrate the results as well. This is so important to keep motivation high. Another aspect to look at is how much you actually want to improve. So set an attainable target for improvement of your goal. Your target should be realistic and achievable, but it should also be a stretch target. It should be something that stretches you to ensure that there is growth. Setting a target that is much higher than your current capacity can end up being counterproductive unless you identify that gap and fill those gaps before it becomes a problem, which might include things like upskilling, training, or even bringing somebody else into the team or giving it to somebody else to do it. It's important that in setting the goals, the right people are located the right tasks, and they're also given the right support. Goals that are attained create motivation. Unrealistic goals can be very discouraging. So it's important that the goals are achievable, but you need to stretch people in order for growth to occur. Then the question is the time scale. You need to set a deadline for accomplishing your goal. The deadline also should be realistic and it should be attainable. Don't set goals that make people feel that they've been set up to fail. Depending on your target, breaking your deadline down into periodic review dates will definitely help your progress and will help you in monitoring progress and it will make those stretch targets more manageable. It will also ensure that if there's anyone who is struggling along the way, it's picked up quickly before the end, and then finding that the person is still way behind, and then it has an impact on what everyone else has done. So, in summary, setting team goals sets the bar high for everyone. Breaking down these goals into more manageable chunks and assigning them to individuals is a fantastic way to keep people on the same page, to keep people motivated, and it also allows everyone to maintain autonomy over their own work. So, as a leader, your role is to translate vision into reality, and using team goal setting efficiently and effectively is a great way to turn your vision into reality. And if you want to know more about the if-then technique, have a look at my previous podcast. But I'll just give an example here. Suppose your direct reports have been missing a lot of deadlines in terms of submitting possibly weekly progress report, and you ask them to set goals to enable them to keep you better informed of what they're doing. Now, we know that people might have good intentions, but when things get busy, they can forget. I remember once I wanted managers that I work with to give me a weekly report for their area every Friday by 3 p.m. And I found that every single week I'll have at least one or two people that were missing it. This is what I implemented and it worked perfectly. So I got them to create an if-then plan. If it's 3 p.m. on Friday, I will send Maureen an email with my progress report for the week. Now the cue is that at 3 p.m. on Friday, this becomes wired in their brains to then take action. So once that if part of the brain is detected, the mind then triggers the then part to come into play. They started executing the plan without even having to think about it because it's now gone into the subconscious brain that once it's 3 p.m., I've got to carry out this action. So when the clock hits 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon, they basically reach for their computer and send off the report. This is a great way, one for them to keep on top of their own task and what they need to do, and for you as the manager leader to be in the picture and know how much progress is being made, for you to then be able to celebrate people, celebrate the team as a whole on the progresses that they are making. So I hope you found this really useful. Put it into practice and send me comments, make a review, and let me know how you feel or if it's worked, and you know, if you had challenges and what challenges those were. Thank you again for tuning in. It's such a pleasure to be with you each week. I'm trying to do this every week now, just to help you with any challenge you have as a leader, but to help make your role as a leader in your personal life and in your professional life a lot easier. You can send me an email, and if you want to know more about what I do, you can visit my website. I'll put the link below. It's morinciana.com. If you've not subscribed, remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to it so that you do not miss any episode. There's a topic that you want me to talk about in the future, let me know as well. If you've already subscribed, I would love a review from you on iTunes to keep bumping up my ranking and spread the message of conscious leadership to help other people. So I look forward to seeing you next week in another episode. Do have a fantastic week wherever you are. Bye for now.