Today we bring together the final piece of our goal setting series:

Evaluate- How are we going in our commitment to our top priorities?

This requires teams and organizations to:

1. Review progress regularly

Having a system in place to know how we are doing in reaching an outcome, gives us a goal that is now measureable. We need a regular reality check of where we are and where we should be to maintain engagement.

The Importance Of An Effective Meeting

Meetings for a lot of people equal a source of vast frustration. For one there may be no agenda, leaders get lost in the details or there is actually no value being placed on setting aside time to hold a weekly meeting.
To avoid these problems I believe it’s important for leaders to structure meetings with a core theme or purpose. This achieves 3 crucial things:

1. When we keep the big picture at the forefront of each meeting’s agenda, we avoid the overload of hot topics or unnecessary distractions that are not relevant; these distractions need to be discussed in a different setting.

2. Everyone is pointed back to some form of ‘team’ scoreboard to see current progress towards goals and outcomes (this is different to how a leader may be tracking results)

3. Teams are mobilized around what is most important. A healthy form of ‘checking in’ which involves every team member, yet starts with the leader communicating their key areas of commitment

In an age where employee’s time is being pulled in every direction, structuring effective meetings achieves the most crucial aspect to a team’s performance - great results! Effective meetings keep the team focused on the important despite the vacuum of the urgent!

Possible challenges:

- Having a plan or system in place where the whole team and not just the leader can recognize if they are winning or losing.

- Knowing how to communicate effectively when individual team members don’t keep their commitments. Too much power comes across as dictatorial while too much warmth from a leader can easily be taken advantage of. Both have their problems so it’s important to know how to lead and manage difficult conversations.

2. Always encourage achievement

All human beings have specific needs, not just desires but actual needs, which they are seeking to fulfil on a daily basis. One of these is significance or a sense of status; the need to feel important or valued in who they are and in what they do.

The brain recognises ‘status’ as an intrinsic reward. Anytime employees feel their ‘status’ increasing, so will their levels of serotonin – a chemical released when a sense of pride emerges or when they perceive that others, their leaders perhaps, like and respect them. In turn, this flood of serotonin raises accountability and responsibility to the company and leaders that support them.

A 2-step formula you can use to embrace encouragement:

- Make it a priority

Create the environment of a meeting to be one that celebrates progress not focuses on what wasn’t achieved. It’s easy to be focused on problems but it doesn’t lift a team’s resourcefulness toward solutions.

- Be succinct and be generous

Be clear in your intentions. “Good job Tim… Thanks!” is nice but you need to be specific in the actions they took and stretch it out i.e.…

“Tim I really appreciate the extra hours you put in to make ‘this’ happen on the project this week, you clearly demonstrated a core team value ‘….’ Your approach has helped to facilitate obstacles with Sam and Jesse who have adopted a similar approach to the one you took. Thank you for your commitment to this goal, looks like you are really making an impact around here.”

Imagine one of your employees hearing something like this?! Succinct and generous appreciation will do wonders for your employee engagement strategy.

I'm curious, what would it take to double your results and team engagement?