Goals

A team without a goal is a social club.  Goals and objectives define the team and help establish roles and define success.  Poorly determined goals can doom a team to failure.   High quality goals can provide a team with focus and cohesion.  To develop high quality goals, five elements must be present.

Challenging – Goals that are challenging push the team to a higher level of accomplishment.  Goals that are easily attained or meaningless don’t require much teamwork.  If your goals don’t require much teamwork you won’t have much of a team.

Commitment - The entire team must be committed to doing their part.  If team members are committed to their little part of the puzzle rather than the success of the group, you won’t have much teamwork.  Team members must be committed to the success of the group.

Realistic – Nothing can destroy commitment faster than unrealistic goals.  The balance between realistic and challenging is essential.  Not challenging enough and teamwork deteriorates.  Unrealistic and members throw in the towel.  Leaders must monitor their members and continuously motivate them.

Understood – Everyone must be on the same sheet of music.  Not only the goals must be understood but the progress toward reaching them as well.  Team members who are losing heart can be re-invigorated to the cause by learning about the successes of others on the team.  You just can't commit to the unknown.

Flexible – Early successes and failures may require some goal tweaking.  It’s good for team members to understand what conditions will warrant a change in the goals.  Should early failure cause the team to work harder or re-evaluate goals?  Should early success be a cause to relax or to bump up the level of challenge?  Team members should know why goals are being adjusted.

It’s impossible to put together a worthwhile team while violating these principles of goal-setting.  When you violate these principles and your “team” devolves into a social club be sure to have enough milk and cookies.