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Key Takeaways
- Goal setting provides team members with a clear vision of success and a path to achieve it.
- Benefits of goal setting include enhanced performance, collaboration, accountability, and motivation.
- Successful goal setting hinges on developing trusting relationships within the team, fostering collaboration to reach a common purpose.
- Involving team members in the goal-setting process supports a positive and productive work environment.
Test Your Goal-Setting Skills
Goal setting turns ideas into reality by providing a clear vision of success and a roadmap to achieve it. Well-formed goals enhance team performance, collaboration, accountability, and motivation, distinguishing great managers and their high-performing teams.
We’ve used research from the Mindtools Impact and Insights Team to create a 17-question assessment tool, to help you assess how well you set goals with your team.
Your Self-Assessment
Coming up are 17 questions that ask you about your goal-setting skills. To answer them, consider your experiences over the past three months.
Be as honest with yourself as you can. There are no right or wrong responses, and you’ll have a chance to review and change your answers before you submit them.
Look at the statements below and choose how much you agree with each by selecting the most appropriate answer.
When you have completed the diagnostic, press “Calculate My Total.”
Your Result
Take a few moments to reflect on your result. Does it surprise you or confirm what you already know? Now give yourself a few minutes to think about what you’d like to get out of this experience.
Perhaps your result indicates that you could spend more time helping your team to create relevant, ambitious but realistic goals. Perhaps you scored well in this assessment. Either way, this resource will help you to make improvements in your goal-setting capabilities.
Let's Act
Having reflected on your score, pick one of the following areas to take action on in the next week or two:
- Focus on creating clear goals that can be measured. (See questions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)
- Identify and introduce strategies to encourage feedback and team participation in goal-setting processes. (See questions 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.)
- Explore ways to delegate effectively, connecting individual goals to relevant development opportunities for team members. (See questions 14 and 15.)
Take Your Learning Further
Make your goals SMART enough
SMART goals are ones that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (or sometimes referred to as relevant), and timebound. This is a foundational concept for all goal-setting activities, and will enable you to create clear goals that are realistic, while still allowing room for development.
Develop trusting relationships with your team
Successful goal setting hinges on whether or not your team trust you and trust each other. If people don't trust each other, or have poor relationships, they won't work well together to achieve common goals. Blanchard's ABC Model is a useful framework to help you build trust with those you work with.
Delegate effectively
You don’t want to overload your team with unrealistic goals they don't have capacity for. And while you want to stretch them to develop their skills, you don’t want to give them something they can’t actually do. Knowing how to delegate effectively will ensure you avoid these issues.
