Team Engagement Journey > Team Engagement Toolbox > Achieving Milestones

Achieving Milestones

A TEAM TOOL: COMPETENCE & PERFORMANCE

Identifying and delegating goals and tasks is the engine that moves a team along. Use this tool to develop a process in your team for setting and achieving milestones with clarity and direction.

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Purpose

This tool helps teams set goals to get everyone aligned and motivated to achieve their milestones.

Typical scenarios

  • Setting goals for your team
  • Setting goals for a project
  • Implementing a simple performance management system
  • Implementing a simple project management system

Why this is important

All teams are pursuing some form of goal together. Most teams write their goals down, but few teams have a shared clear understanding of the priority of the goals or the specifics of each objective. On top of that, few teams have developed the skill to craft objectives that are specific, meaningful, measurable and relevant. This tool will help teams put objectives together which drive performance.

The process

Steps for developing a good action plan

The goal here is to clarify a small set of achievable goals for the team. A goal-setting process should start with thorough analysis, research and brainstorming, resulting in a list of ideas. This list should then be filtered into a smaller set of action items.

Using the Pareto principle as your guide — the idea that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes — look for those items which will produce a bulk of your desired results. It is important to keep your final list small — we recommend less than 6 ideas — to help your team maintain focus.

Through this refinement process your team will start gaining clarity on what needs to be accomplished and the order of priority the tasks should be executed in.

People are more likely to put effort into a task if they understand how it links to the bigger picture. The WHY of the goal should bring meaning and purpose to the objective, which you can achieve by sharing context for why the goal was prioritised, and how the goal links to the team or company’s direction and strategic objectives.

If responsibility for a goal is not assigned to a person, it is likely to get lost. Using the Roles and Responsibilities model, be sure to only assign one champion for each goal.

The champion will be the person driving the action item forward and making sure it gets done. They are not necessarily the person who will do most of the work — others can be delegated for this — but the champion of the action item is the one who keeps the team and themselves accountable for completing the action item.

It is important to define by when each goal needs to be achieved. Don’t write down when it needs to be worked on; just define the due date of the item. This creates clarity and a higher level of accountability.

If it is a goal with multiple subtasks, make sure you estimate time for each task and do a rollup according to your team’s capacity to ensure the due dates are realistic.

This step should answer what success will look like if this goal is achieved. 

A few common mistakes we’ve seen teams make during this step are:

  • Stating outputs rather than outcomes. An output is something you do, an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of what you do. Teams often define the deliverables (a report, a document, a meeting, etc.) rather than the outcome they are ultimately striving for. “I’ve had a meeting with a client” is an output. “I’ve closed a deal” is an outcome. 
  • Shooting for the stars vs. too easy to motivate. “If we shoot for the stars and miss, at least we will land on the moon” doesn’t motivate everyone. Be careful not to make the goal impossible to achieve. Conversely, making it too easy will also not drive the right behaviour. The aim here is to find a challenging but achievable balance which will motivate the team, so create metrics which will drive your team forward. It is also important to frequently review your success measures, so that you can quickly recalibrate if a goal is too ambitious or too easy.
  • Too objective or too subjective. Make the metric as objective as possible. This often requires lots of administrative work to analyse and monitor the exact progress and to make it as objective as possible. A good objective metric is numerical; i.e. it should be either a percentage or an amount. If the measure is too subjective it can result in many discussions of the fairness of the objective, but be careful not to spend too much time trying to get the exact measure. Aim for the right time-benefit and cost-benefit balance.

After creating success measures for each action item, it is time to specify where the team is tracking. If it is not measured, it will not get done. Before each meeting, this step needs to be updated so that the team will know where they are on the scoreboard. If you don’t know whether you are winning or losing, it will be difficult to strategise the best next move. Use a colour scheme like green, yellow and red to indicate how successful you are in achieving this action item.

Clarifying Roles & Responsibility Sample Spreadsheet

WHAT WHY WHO WHEN SUCCESS MEASURE WHERE WE ARE NOW
Increase client satisfaction It boosts sales and keeps our clients as the key people we serve Sally in the Sales Team End of each month 95% 96%
Increase design turnaround time It allows for more clients to be served Marc in the Design Team 7 days turnaround time 7 days 4 days
Incorporate discussions around our values. We believe values impact the right behaviour and shapes our culture Sam our Manager Weekly 4 times per month 3 times per month
Develop new product Address the real needs of clients and allow for new sales markets Kevin in the product team By end of the month 80% 55%

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