Do you have a clear vision for your business or department? The second key for a winning team is to have a common goal. To win the game as a team, it is essential for everyone to share a clearly defined target, and it is the responsibility of the leader to effectively communicate that goal to the team.
Once you have a strong leader that has the respect of the team, the next logical question is "Where are we going?"
In the Action Coach world, we speak of the importance of Destination Mastery. A winning team will have a clear Common Goal and plan of action to achieve it. Great goals are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results oriented, and have Time frame. A SMART goal has the ability to focus the team on a specific, defined outcome. It needs to be believable, and direct the team toward the ultimate vision of the organization.
The effectiveness of a strong goal is more in what it DOES rather than what it IS. Many people hesitate to set powerful, challenging goals because of a fear of failure. This fear is based on the false belief that the team must respond in disappointment if a goal is not completely realized by the allotted timeframe. The way to defuse this fear is to logically take it apart. If a common goal brings the team together, gets the team focused, and improves overall performance and team spirit, then why should the team choose disappointment just because they fall short of complete attainment of the goal by a certain deadline? The leader needs to encourage the team to instead celebrate the progress and learning that has been attained, followed by the establishment of a new goal. The focus should be the progress and the learning and the adjustments that need to be made based on current results. Bigger dreams and goals create better questions, which lead to superior decisions, actions, and results.
So as a strong leader, the challenge is to get with your team, and set a strong, common goal to bring you together. It is the second key to a winning team.
No comments:
Post a Comment