A team day to set your goals
How to hold a full-day workshop to align your team goals
It’s goal-setting season. In this how-to guide, we illustrate the ideal goal-setting day with your day. You have lots of flexibility to create focus on one of the topics. So this isn’t a one-size-fits-all workshop. But we will argue that the 6 parts are instrumental to any goal-setting workshop:
Context
Ambition level
Options
Choices
Set up
Teamwork
Intro
It’s good to emphasize that the actual goal setting only happens in step 2. Because we believe goal setting is much more about what you do with the goals than actually setting them.
Goal setting works best if you choose a good period for the goals you like to achieve. Most teams/organizations are tempted to choose a yearly period. But please think twice. A full year is really hard to predict. So there is a big chance you will create vague or unrealistic goals. And it is far off from what you will actually do.
We highly recommend choosing a shorter goal period. Let’s say quarters or trimesters. Then you have a period for which you can set ambitious goals and know you will celebrate successes.
Goal setting is all about being able to celebrate successes
So choose your period length wisely. Most important is to choose it so you can celebrate successes frequently with your team.
Context
Before we can set goals we have to understand where we stand, i.e., understand the landscape around us. Typically do it with one or more short presentations. Great if you could do it with a consistent format that you can repeat every quarter. Tell your team the real insights about your customer, the market, your product development, the company strategy, what happens at other teams, etc.
And ensure you are all aligned, and create the most joined intelligence you have together.
2. Ambition
Now it is time to work on your actual goals. propose goals, or have a conversation about which goals you choose for the coming period. And a second conversation about the ambition level you set.
You can use for example an “Objective and Key Result” (OKR) format. Where the Objective describes why you have the goal and the Key Results measure what you have achieved with the goal. There are many more goal-setting methodologies, but this is a nice combination of the aspiration of the goal together with an ambition level!
3. Options
After you have set an ambition level it is time to get creative. What are all the options you have to achieve this goal? So as a team brainstorm freely on how you could achieve your goal, what you need, which initiatives you could work on.
4. Choices
This is the hardest step of goal setting. Which choices do you have to make? Most teams have too much to do. You can prevent that by making choices. Tough choices. Choices that make clear what you will no longer do (most important), and what you will do.
Keep doing that till you feel the goal is achievable, and you all agree on how you will get there. So this 4th step may make you backtrack a bit to step 2 or 3. But that’s OK!
5. Set up
Now it is time to connect our goals to how we work. Goals are supposed to create a link between vision (strategy) and what you do on a daily and weekly basis. So don’t stop with just setting the goals. In this step, you are the “architect of your own garden”. Set up your task board and put all the agreed tasks and initiatives on it, create a dashboard with the right metrics to measure progress, and agree on a meeting rhythm to present and discuss progress as a team.
A great way to also do this in your meetings is with a confidence vote. All of you vote (scale 1-5, so you can do it with the fingers of your hand) how likely you feel it is to achieve our goals.
This step in the workshop is ready when you feel you can get to work right now.
6. Teamwork
The final step in this workshop format is to talk about teamwork. How are you as a team going to work together to achieve your goal?
We recommend you take the Teamradar in Teambooster. It uncovers your most important team improvement topic.
A team conversation about good teamwork. A set of norms you all agree with that make you all perform at your best, and that create that amazing team feeling. Make how you do your teamwork just as clear as the goals you are going to achieve.
And create a direct link between what you want to achieve and how you as a team then want to work together.
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Happy goal setting! We hope this workshop format inspires you to engage your team. And to truly collaborate both on setting your goals as well as working on your goals.
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