How to Build a Team Goal Without Telling Them What It Is

One of the biggest problems that my leadership teams that I work with have is where they don’t get along. Where the relationships are dysfunctional. Often I get called in because there’s a complete absence of a singular team goal that the team care about. What the leaders often trying to do is they’re trying to say,

Okay, you know what? I don’t want them to work on their individual KPIs. I want them to work on something that they collectively own.

The biggest problem with doing this is that most leaders just tell them what that goal is and that doesn’t work. If you want a process to help the team discover what the goal is and to help them buy into it, stick around, I’m going to talk through about what that process is so that you can implement it with your team.

How to Deal with the Problem

I’m going to talk through the problem, a model for how to deal with the problem, and then an action plan of how you can put it in place to create a team goal for your team. If in your team you don’t have a collective team goal, what you do have then is everyone looking out to the external world and going,

You know what? What they expect of me is for me just to deliver my own KPIs. At the end of this 12 months, I’m just going to focus on that.

And what often happens is that in parts of those KPIs, they’re kind of conflicting with one another because they’re competing for the same resources or the same amount of attention from their superiors. So what that creates is conflict and disharmony. You as a leader, you’re the one who has to deal with that and hear all the stories and all the drama. You know exactly what I mean.

So what we need is, instead of them just having an individual team goal, we need to have something that they can do together and a set of goals they all need to contribute to. What this does is completely shift the energy away from what I want into what we want, and it has the whole team moving forward together.

The Clarity and Teamwork Model

This is the model – The Clarity and Teamwork model, and you will have seen me talk about this before. This is how I work with leadership teams. What is our destination and how are we going to work on it together? The trick is on this clarity side, which is in developing this team goal, what we do is take it from two perspectives, the outside and the inside. The biggest trick here is realising that the reason that your team will buy in to the collective goal is not because at this point they care about the people in the team. It’s because the outside world requires something of them that they need to do together.

Peter Hawkins, who I follow a lot, who’s written the bible on systemic team coaching, talks about the outside commission of the team. What’s their mandate? If they buy in to this external thing that they have to do together, we use that as the basis for the strategy and the collective goal of the team. And then what we do is then help them develop clarity of their strategy of how they’re going to actually execute on those goals together. That then produces the clarity basis for teamwork.

So how are you going to do that in your team? This is the way I do it. if you need help, just send me a message and I can talk this through in more detail, but if you want to have a crack at this yourself, these would be the three steps. The first one would be I’d get everyone to sit in the chair of your various external stakeholders. Your customers, your suppliers, your partners, the environment. All those various people that your team impacts and serves. And then as they sit in the chair of those external and internal stakeholders, collect what comes up in a discussion, which is things that they can collectively own. Sift the the output from the team to look for things that only you can do together. Then once everyone buys into what those things are, develop the shared team strategy around those themes.

Summary

If you’ve got disharmony in your team, it’s because people are focused on what they want and not what the team can do collectively together. The trick is not to focus on the disharmony, but to focus on what the world requires of them. We do that by getting people to sit in the chairs of what’s expected of them from the external stakeholders, and then developing that into a strategy that the team all buy into. If you need help doing this, just get in contact with me. If you have a go at this yourself, I would love for you to leave me a comment.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch

When your team sat down and did this process, what was the change in energy for them? How did they shift from being very insular looking to very external looking, and what did that buy-in mean for you as a leader? Leave me a comment or get in contact. Talk to you soon on The Reason & The Road.