5 Silly Simple Mistakes Leaders Make When Setting Team Goals
If you’re like most, you have moments where you get frustrated when team performance misses the mark.
It’s never been more critical for your team to stretch and win. In this season, it’s also never been more challenging.
Many teams feel disoriented, which makes missing targets or objectives even more likely. How do you even know what to shoot for in a swirling environment as confusing as ours?
All of these are great questions, and fortunately, there are answers.
After leading teams for three decades, here are five mistakes I’ve made and want you to avoid when setting goals with your team.
The solution for many of these issues is a framework I call “Results-Based Leadership,” which I outline in-depth inside the Lead Team Institute {LTI}.
5 Silly Simple Mistakes Leaders Make When Setting Team Goals
1. No clearly owned mission, vision, and set of values.
Your mission, vision, and values decide how and in what direction your team runs (with or without you). Most organizations know enough to throw a mission statement and set of values on the wall, but it usually doesn’t make it into the hearts of the team.
What’s on the wall often isn’t owned down the hall.
It’s the same with cultural values. Many leaders love envisioning the culture they want, but often there’s a big gap between the culture they want and the culture they have. In addition (and from testing this out), most staff members couldn’t name more than one cultural value their organization has embraced.
So, how can you tell if your team owns your mission, vision, and cultural values?
Here’s a little test:
During your next Lead Team meeting, ask your team if they can sketch out your campus values, mission, and vision without looking them up.
If they can’t, you know there’s work to do in the front office before your DNA can scale throughout the rest of the system. When mission, vision, and values aren’t owned by your Lead Team, your other teams will move in a thousand different directions and might not progress much of anything.
If you would like to experience the simple 3-step process I use to create better cultural value statements, you will want to consider the
Executive Team Quarterly {EQ}.
Defining your values is the first step to having your team own them.
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2. No clear strategy.
Mission, vision, and values should have a long shelf life.
Strategy, not so much. And that’s critical because your strategy is how you plan to accomplish your mission.
Here’s an example that’s probably fresh on everybody’s mind: For almost every campus system, COVID threw a wrench (or nuclear bomb) into strategy. And a return to your old strategy likely didn’t work.
As much as you didn’t have certainty during that season, it was vital to have clarity.
Part of my strategy before the pandemic was speaking and training exclusively on campuses. When COVID shut down travel, my team and I pivoted (overnight) to become a 100% digital Executive Team Coaching practice.
- Faith communities moved online.
- Schools and campuses delivered virtual instruction.
- Restaurants moved to takeout and outside patios.
The mission of serving your people stays the same but the strategy changes.
In fact, in times of rapid change, quick pivots in strategy preserve the mission.
If you haven’t clarified your strategy recently (even if it’s a strategy for the next 30 days), block a 2-hour session with your Lead Team and do it. Soon!
No team can own and commit to what it doesn’t understand.
3. No clear goal.
Once you decide how to accomplish your mission, you must determine how much.
Many leaders naturally answer that question by telling their teams that they want ‘more’—more enrollment, grants, community partnerships, retention, and graduates.
Having more as a goal demotivates your team because you’ll never hit it.
You can’t hit more.
Eventually, your team feels like the kid who brings home a straight-B report card, only to have the parent say, “Why not A’s?” And returning the next semester with As and hears, “Do they give A+’s?”
Who doesn’t want to say, “I quit” in that environment?
So, define it. What does
more
look like?
One person? 100 people? 2% growth? 20 growth%? 200 growth%?
Then when you hit it, celebrate it.
4. No focus on lead measures.
Leaders are easily lured into focusing on measures they cannot control. These are the system’s lag measures (i.e., graduation rates, enrollment numbers, and expenses).
- Get the numbers.
- Say they’re not quite good enough.
- Tell their team(s) to do better.
While these measures are great for telling you how your organization has done or is doing, the challenge is that you can’t change them. Your lag measures represent your historical data that cannot be changed.
A better option is to look at lead measures. Lead measures are elements within your control that ultimately impact the performance of your lag measures.
Lead measures might include focusing on response times to inquiries from prospective students, the number of formally guided campus visits each week, or program partnerships secured each semester.
Your team will never crush its goals if it focuses on what it can’t change. Instead, Higher Performance Teams a savvy to understand the dynamics between their preferred lag measures and the most impactful lead measures that influence their growth.
5. No one is accountable.
Of all of the strategies on this post, this is the one that’s the hardest for most leaders but also gives the most significant return. I know because I’ve been on both sides of the challenge—not wanting to hold people accountable (and doing it poorly) and then learning how to do it well.
When a team member misses an expected goal, leaders tend to utter two phrases that create a complete lack of accountability.
- “That’s okay.”
- __________ (nothing at all).
Mature leaders know it’s NOT ok that a team member missed the goal or deadline. Stop acting like it
is ok.
Not saying anything when someone missed an expected goal is a pretty good tell that the leader:
- Didn’t know.
- Didn’t care.
- Were too afraid.
Both responses are toxic to team health.
Ironically, holding your people accountable (I prefer the term ownership) in a healthy way motivates them rather than demotivates them. Guess what else?
Your best leaders love being a part of teams where every member owns their work.
- On-time.
- On budget.
- As expected.
Leaders who fail to hold team members accountable will end up with B and C-Team players because your A-Team players are leaving out the back door.
Transform Your Future | Lead With Clarity | Grow Your Performance
You aren't alone if you've struggled to find clarity in leading your team forward.
Teams function at less than 60% of their performance potential and community trust is at an all-time low.
Simply put, leading people and systems has never been more complex.
The Lead Team Institute {LTI} will equip you to break through your growth barriers.
Whether it's leading results-based teams, communicating with success, improving your engagement, increasing influence, refreshing your vision, building trusting communities, or many other challenges we face as campus leaders, you'll know exactly what steps to take to generate momentum for your community.
If you want to build an irresistible campus brand, you will want to join the waiting list to enroll in the next Lead Team Institute {LTI} Campus Cohort.
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- Communication
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- Alignment
- Capacity
- Execution
- Culture
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