WORKING FOR THE FUTURE (4): SETTING TARGETS
Targets are vital to the whole teamwork process. They ensure that a product is delivered to the satisfaction of the customer, schedules and budgets are adhered to, and that standards are met. They are also the yardstick on which rewards can be based.
Using Targets to Motivate a Team
Successes, training, and learning are all highly motivational, and the same should be true of the way in which you communicate your expectations to your team. Motivate your team to reach specific goals by describing the ultimate set of targets as challenges that can be met through their own combined skills and effort. You can also increase team motivation by allowing members to form their own targets. Give them the opportunity to debate their aims in detail and discuss between themselves how aims can be met and possibly exceeded. It is highly motivational to set targets and succeed in outstripping them.
Stretching Targets
The greatest challenge that you can present to a team is the “stretch’ goal. This means setting a target that can be achieved only by using skills that exceed the previous capabilities of the team. Even an already successful team can outperform its previous standards, as long as you provide them with appropriate back-up. Set a stretch target with concise, well thought-out, practical, financial, and economic aims. This will provide a whole set of subsidiary targets which you should then break down into individual goals and tasks.
Modifying Targets
A target, stretch or not, involves a plan. If the plan is failing, and the targets are likely to be missed, find out why. Set up a meeting with the whole team to analyze the issue until you have pinpointed the problem. As a team, decide how to solve it, then do just that. Set new targets in line with the new situation. This may be more motivating than any previous plan, both because the team is solving the problem together and because, sometimes, the second-try plan improves on the original.
TIPS
- Involve everybody in target-setting to foster teamwork and consensus.
- Motivate teams by allowing them to decide how to meet targets.
- Ensure that team targets enthuse team members, and change them if they do not.
- A team without stretch goals will under-perform one that has them.
…………………………………………………………….
