As we continue through our series on ‘Creating goals that teams will actually accomplish’, I want to share today about another crucial foundation to the goal setting framework:

ACT 

The actions and behaviours leaders and individuals need to embody to accomplish the goal most effectively.

1. Delegate control through facilitating performance

I believe one of the biggest detractors to employee performance at work is passivity. Leaders and managers who learn to become great ‘coaches’ and direct their staff in how to ‘steer the ship’ instead of rushing to take control all the time, design and encourage their teams into being proactive leaders instead of passive followers.

Encouraging individuals to have short conversations early on with team leaders or managers to assist in facilitating their performance is one of the most crucial conversations they can have. When we work to replace employee’s passive questions (what should I do?) with a proactive coaching conversation (what is it that you would like to achieve here?), we empower them to take responsibility for their own performance.

Possible challenges:

- Lack of presence, active listening skills and a coaching framework to be able to guide employees through a results focused conversation

- Outdated leadership mindset - leader-follower, command and control approach

2. Focus on what can be influenced

Communicating an idea or outcome is pointless if we don’t actually know how individuals and teams can take action with it.

Imagine walking around with a campaign sign promoting what you stand for and what you want to tell the people but not actually informing them of how they can take action to get this outcome. 

I believe the nature of goals are quite similar, we can have great ideas and plenty of things we want to execute as a team or organisation, but if a goal is not influenceable, the best we can do is to hope that each week we get a little closer toward achieving the goal.

I have a friend who is focused on achieving a weight loss goal. He looks at the scales every Monday morning hoping that the number he sees has decreased, even by a fraction of a kilo - empty campaign slogan! He knows what he wants to achieve but what actions is he focusing on to make the goal influenceble?

When an individual or team sets a goal, they tend to focus on the results not on the steps to that result. This is because it’s usually easy to measure and it’s a direct indication of whether the goal has been met or not. Here’s the problem, it can’t be influenced.

Taking action on the processes and the behaviours that can be influenced, focuses a team and suddenly the goal becomes influenceable.

Possible challenge:

- Actually figuring out the most effective, influenceable behaviours that create the most leverage towards accomplishing the goal; the bigger the ‘lever’ the bigger the impact.

Would love to hear some of your thoughts from today’s post…