This is the season when planning and goal setting for the next year takes up mindshare for both leaders and team members.
Setting individual goals to be achieved in the next calendar year sets expectations for team members and keeps them centered on their personal performance and development.
Goals are the lifeblood for enhanced performance, and good leaders use them to measure progress.
The best goal set stretches team members and pushes them to expand their skills and results. A well-crafted set of goals asks a team member to think beyond what they do now and to make significant progress on issues and outcomes that matter.
Setting these goals is as much an art as it is a science, and good leaders spend the time to ensure the goal set is both motivational and challenging. Great goals encourage team members to make real strides forward.
Unfortunately, too many leaders design, propose, and direct team members by setting goals without their input. They don’t trust team members to create the kind of goals that will make a difference in results and performance. As a result, the goal set they create is rarely internalized by team members, nor does it hit all the right notes for true improvement.
The best leaders ask team members to craft their own goal set with an eye toward three distinct goals.
They use what team members propose to begin a dialogue around what it will take to elevate performance. They co-create the final goal set to achieve a higher commitment and focus.
By asking team members to create the initial goal set, leaders learn how they view their own development and what drivers they see as essential for their continued progress.
In the hands of a good leader and team member, goal setting is a learning process that highlights what it means to be effective.
The ideal goal set has three distinctive types of goals: outcome, performance, and process.
Outcome goals, as the name implies, are the results team members want to attain. These are the most common goals identified in planning sessions.
They are typically measurable and time-bound, which makes it easy to tell whether they have been achieved or not.
In most cases, team members need other things to go right to attain the desired end state proposed, which is another way of saying that outcome goals are commonly influenced by external factors.
So, by themselves, outcome goals are not enough to make a difference.
In contrast, performance goals are the big actions that lead to outcomes but are within the control of the team member.
They typically focus on a standard of performance or how team members will achieve the outcomes they desire.
For instance, for the outcome goal of increased revenue, a performance goal might be the number of products produced, or the number of customers spoken to in a given period.
Accomplishing performance goals is entirely up to the team member. Their skill, commitment, and effort determine whether the goal will be realized.
Process goals are the specific actions and skills that give rise to performance. Think steps or behaviors that contribute to progress, making performance and results possible.
Unlike outcome goals that focus on the end result, process goals focus on the journey and the controllable activities that get people there.
People require all three goal types to make significant progress, whether they are athletes, artists, or team members. Without all three goal types, people often fail to make the strides they should.
The three different goals allow them to focus on both the short-term and long-term to mark their advancement.
Depending on the performance and process goals agreed to, leaders can measure progress monthly or weekly, without waiting for longer-term outcomes.
Far too often, outcome goals dominate the planning process and leave team members faced with figuring out what they need to do to achieve them.
Good leaders flip this script and ask team members to propose a tight set of all three goal types. They then work with them to produce a robust plan of action and focus that all parties find motivational.
As motivational speaker Zig Ziglar liked to say, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.”
