What does success look like for your team?

The beginning of the year has seen me sit in with many different organisations and their teams as they map out the year ahead. There are big audacious goals being thrown around and plans that spur everyone on to get excited about the year. It’s always a motivating time of year but in amongst all the planning, there can be a question that gets overlooked: How will we know if we succeed?

It seems simple on the surface. If you have a New Year’s resolution to improve your fitness this year, you’ll know you’ve succeeded when you consider yourself to have increased your fitness.

But this process is missing a crucial part of the goal-setting process: measurement.

Don’t forget about SMART goals

It’s an oldie, but a goodie. Whenever you’re setting goals – in your personal life or in the life of your team – all your goals should follow the SMART acronym: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based.

‘Measurable’ is the way you can identify success. Measuring the progress of your goals is important because it allows you to place markers or milestones that help you to understand if you’re moving in the right direction.

Factor measurement in from the beginning

Crucially, these milestones need to be in place at the beginning of any plan. While they can be seen in hindsight and you might even identify different milestones as you progress, measurement needs to be factored into the plan for your team from the get-go.

To continue our earlier analogy, the person who wants to improve their fitness may decide that success looks like being able to run a marathon. In order to run the marathon, they may give themselves milestones of running 5K, 10K, 20K and so on. They may add a time measurement to this, wanting to run X kilometres in X minutes. They’ll know they’re moving in the right direction because they will steadily progress from one milestone to another, spurring them on to keep going forward. They may also recognise that to reach one of their milestones, they need to work on a different skill. Perhaps they struggle with their breathing technique, so they add another milestone that sees them incorporating a new activity into their routine that helps them to hone this skill – this milestone may have its own milestones.  

Goals are constantly unfolding into smaller goals and this is what makes them achievable if you follow a robust goal-setting approach.

Measurement and communication go hand-in-hand 

For teams, some organisational goals might seem more abstract and this is where communication comes in. There’s nothing worse than disappointing a manager or letting down the team because no one stopped to think about what success looks like.

If you’re a team member, ask your manager what success looks like for them to understand the expectations.

“How will I know if I’m succeeding in my role?”

In return, managers should be able to clearly articulate their expectations of success for any of their team members. It doesn’t mean that it will always be as simple as making X sales or conducting X amount of customer conversations, but communicating the measurements of success will go a long way in ensuring your team knows how they will fulfil your organisation’s plans.

Want to build measurement into your organisation’s goal-setting? People Make the Difference can help. To find out more, visit www.pmtd.com.au or call us on 0412 333 415.