Create an explicit link between the bigger picture and your day-to-day activities.
This exercise is in our Teambooster App, one of many tools to help your team work towards great teamwork, while working. The Teambooster App guides your team with small steps and many tools and exercises, just like a work-out, to build towards a strong team.
When to use this tool?
Your work needs clarity on different levels. Clarity on each level makes you more productive. At which level do you need more clarity as a team now? Your daily tasks, weekly projects, initiatives for the month, quarterly goals, yearly aspirations, or your long-term perspective?
How does it work?
Step 1: Explain the horizon levels.
Write them all next to each other on a board. And share examples with each level:
* Daily tasks
* Weekly projects
* Initiatives for the month
* Quarterly goals
* Yearly aspiration
* Long-term perspective
Adjust these horizon levels so they work for your team! Create a picture that represents the context of your team. You might use different terminology. Are daily tasks your actions? Are initiatives called projects? Is a long-term perspective your mission or your purpose?
Why do you have each level? Is your purpose meaningful, and does it create a reason to be part of the team and give it all your energy? Are quarterly goals helping you to prioritise and say no to other topics? Are your weekly deliverables helping to know where you can help each other and plan your own week? Are daily tasks creating clarity in what you ask from each other?
Step 2: Agree on where to improve.
If we were to become better at a horizon level, which one is most important to improve right now? Each team member can give 2 votes. Then discuss the different perspectives in the team based on the votes.
Step 3: Improve your horizon.
We suggest you create focus. Don’t try to improve every level, but choose one or two as a start. Then work together or in small groups on the highest voted levels. Make it practical to a level you can really use it!
Examples for each level:
* Daily: action log/issue list
* Weekly: Schedule your core activities
* Monthly: a backlog that shows the priority of initiatives you want to pick up
* Quarterly: the goals you have and what it takes to achieve them
* (multi-)Yearly: your aspirational themes, market conditions, your business case, key trends, your mission or purpose statement
It also takes real practice to become better at a goal horizon. Do schedule a retrospective in 1-2 months. And if you get a level to work you are ready to choose another level to improve!
What do you need to get started?
Bring your current (and past) goals to the workshop. You might also want to bring company-level or any other goals that you relate to. And some flipcharts (or large paper sheets) and pens. You can do this virtually of course as well with a digital board and breakout rooms.
Another way to do this exercise:
Start small, then go bigger.
So in the first, you try to improve your daily productivity prediction: at the start of the day, can you set your goals for the day? And do you achieve them? What do you learn from how productive you are daily?
And then, with your insights about daily productivity, can you set goals for your week? What are you able to deliver every week? What type of goals are those?
And then onward to months, quarters, goals and longer time horizon. With daily/weekly, you of course get frequent feedback, with months/quarters/years, the feedback gets less. So by doing the exercise in this way, you first build a strong foundation of achieving goals in the short term using your feedback loop before you move to the long-term goal setting.
This exercise is for:
- Team size: 2 to 13+
- Team development phase: Forming, norming, performing
- TEAM framework: Mission
- Difficulty: average
- Duration: 15-30 min
Related Tools in teambooster.app
You can find these related tools, and many more, in the Teambooster App. Go to teambooster.app, create a free account and explore if it’s something for your team as well.
Source: Exercise written by Teambooster.
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