6 steps for tracking team goals — because your team needs it
This is Part 3 of a three part series (Part 1 on operational success is here; Part 2 on defining company culture here). In this piece, I describe my process for tracking progress towards our team’s goals.
As a manager, my highest priority is helping my team be successful. Even as I was setting up our systems, crafting protocols, and strengthening our culture, I paid close attention to my team’s needs. The one question at the top of my mind: How do I help my team continuously improve?
Our company writes goals on a quarterly basis. Each team lead is charged with understanding the company’s objectives, communicating these to their team, and writing sub-goals that will help us to accomplish the high-level tasks. My team – Program Success – writes a mix of personal and professional goals so that we both fulfill our duties and make our work more fulfilling.
I’ll skip the process we undertake for writing goals (there are a lot of places offering excellent guidance for goal writing) and jump straight into what we do once we have our list.
- Meet often.
One of the first mistakes I made as a new manager was asking about progress too infrequently. I made the mistake of believing that this was how I would build trust — I never wanted to micromanage. I proposed to my team a straightforward approach: setting goals at the start of the quarter and reflecting on progress at the end of it. If someone fell short of their goals, the end-of-quarter meeting was a time to investigate why and commit to writing better goals for the next quarter.
This approach didn’t work: I often had no idea where anyone stood on their goals and I was discovering challenges too late to intervene. I switched after one quarter. For the last year, my team and I have met every two weeks for 15 minutes to only discuss our goals. We’re a small group of three, so we each take five minutes to update one another on progress. The meeting is short but it’s powerful. Everyone shares what is most critical and has an opportunity to ask for what they need, encouraging accountability and surfacing roadblocks sooner.
2. Have a consistent agenda.
As equally important as how often you meet is what you share in the meeting. I’ve moved away from asking a broad “How’s it going?” to asking my team to reflect on their own progress and what they need to continue it.
We each answer three questions in a shared spreadsheet before we meet:
- What progress have you made since our last meeting?
- What area are you focusing on until we meet next time?
- What is your plan of action, and what support do you need from us?
These three questions get at the heart of what the process aims to do: hold ourselves and one another accountable, state an achievable goal, and commit to taking action. Sharing our answers ahead of time also encourages reflection, without which we may omit details during our short meeting.
I want to underscore that I am not the one asking each person these questions. Each team member is responsible for sharing and asking for help when needed. As a result, we see our progress and our success as a team effort even if we have independent goals.
3. Encourage cross-team collaboration.
Once our goals are set, I work with each person on their plan of action. I always encourage my team to seek guidance from others and collaborate where possible as part of their goal work. Working with other teams has a broad positive impact. It lends visibility into our work, increasing knowledge sharing within the company. It encourages collegiality between teams, which has become critical in a Zoom-dominated world. And it invites new perspectives and approaches to thinking that often improve our outcomes.
A more direct approach is to intentionally write cross-functional goals. When our team aimed to reduce our response time to tech issues, we understood that we needed to work with the Engineering and Product teams. To ensure we all resolved escalated issues immediately, a product manager and a member of my team rewrote our escalation process, with each team leading a separate half of the goal. As a result, we have identified a few cracks in the process where wait times would widen. By filling these in we have been able to make significant progress, cutting response times in half.
4. Establish a soft deadline before the final one.
We take our deadlines seriously. But even if you are tracking your progress closely and committing to new work every week, you may fall behind. Things come up, and I see it as my job as a manager to help my team fulfill what they set out to do.
Two weeks before the end of the quarter I ask, “What do you need in order to meet your goal by the deadline?” (This applies only to any goals that have not yet been met, of course.) The answers are always useful:
1. I learn what resources my team needs to cross the finish line.
2. I understand how my team is responding to pressure.
The timing of this check-in is key. I aim to give my team enough time to craft a plan in the remaining weeks and to ask for any help they need while keeping the final deadline close enough that we can sustain effort towards achieving it without burning out.
5. Reassess and revise goals if necessary.
If it’s clear that someone has bitten off more than they can chew, I follow up with a second question: “How might you revise the goal so that you still feel successful by the deadline?”
I like this question because I rarely hear that we should stop wherever we are. Instead, I see my team apply a creative lens to the problem, thinking through what else can be done to get as close to our original target as possible within our constraints.
Revising a goal does not mean to accept the goal as a moving target. We are not trying to undersell ourselves or feel content with “good enough.” This is an opportunity to evaluate one’s current bandwidth and resources against what is still required for a successful outcome. We do this only once, during the pre-deadline check-in, and never with targets linked to critical business goals. This is about personal progress as much as it is about team success.
Once we have a new goal and a plan in place, I ask a final question: “How will you write your goals differently to avoid this in the future?” I want to learn what went wrong and how we can avoid it. We may not have an immediate answer but this question becomes an important jumping off point for the next goal-writing process.
6. Share the results widely.
Again, accountability is key. A couple of weeks into the new quarter, I email the company with a summary of our team’s goals and successes. As a team that often sits behind the scenes, I want others to see what our team is doing to achieve our mission.
There are few things I do when I write the email:
- Avoid lengthy descriptions. I stick to the following: What was the goal and what did we achieve?
- Use data. If I have visuals that illustrate my point, I add them in with a brief summary.
- Be specific about the impact. What does this goal mean for the company? Why should anyone care?
- Thank everyone on the team. They deserve recognition for the work they’ve done.
Having done this for almost a year, the process is now second nature on our team. We think about our goals often, discuss them with fluency, and reach out to one another as soon as we need something. And aside from the progress we’ve measured from hitting our goals, the payoff is much bigger: the transparency of the process has facilitated camaraderie, psychological safety, and appreciation among our team in ways I did not expect.