Setting Goals for your Team that Resonate in your Organization
The start of the New Year has culturally become a time of reflection, refocusing, and reevaluating what is important to you and your team. Naturally, this lends itself to be a time for setting new goals and planning a strategic vision for the year to come. Without a clear vision, it may be hard to align your team’s goals to the root of what is important to your whole organization’s success.
Creating goals as an individual is one thing but creating goals that deeply resonate within your team is a different task entirely. From leadership down to every team member, let’s walk through why cross-functional alignment is important and how you and your team can contribute to the overarching goals of the organization.
Why Alignment is Important
If your organization has a set mission and vision, this is something that should be frequently referenced in goal setting sessions at the team level. Ultimately, each team plays a part in achieving the success that an organization has, so why not include it in your strategy? For example, if your organization has a mission statement that mentions “patient and provider satisfaction with every interaction,” then a goal of yours may include finding a way to measure that to collect data that backs your mission.
Ultimately, meaningful goals should positively impact team motivation, organizational culture, and long-term growth. The goals you set should all point toward the North Star for your organization and support the bigger picture.
Components of Effective Goal Setting
- Specificity: A common mistake when setting big goals is starting off too vague. This lack of clarity can cause your team confusion on where to begin. To make your goals actionable, you need to be more precise. If you’re on the credentialing team, rather than simply saying, “I want to have a smoother process,” you may shift that to look like, “We will implement a new credentialing software to create uniformity and one source of truth for the team.”
- Measurability: Another focus area is making your goals measurable, or traceable. Essentially, this looks like providing data points or quantitative components to your goals so you can track progress. If you’re on the enrollment team, instead of hoping for, “onboarding more providers faster,” you can make this measurable by saying, “We will onboard 100 providers over the next 10 months.”
- Flexibility: The two previous pillars are important, but arguably most important is being flexible in your goal setting. Understand that when you have several people working toward a common goal, there will be a lot of moving parts. Adapting your goals as circumstances change can be a superpower to avoid burnout and accomplish what you’ve set out to.
Five Steps to Set Goals that Resonate
Step 1: Reflect on Past Performance
Take time to review what went well and what was challenging from the previous year. Allow yourself to get in the weeds if necessary here, all reflection is helpful to be able to make well-informed decisions for the future.
Step 2: Engage Everyone
Involving all the people on your team in the goal setting process allows for a wide range of perspectives. Diversity and open mindedness often naturally come with collaboration.
Step 3: Prioritize High-Impact Areas
Back to the through-line of your organization’s values, you want to ensure that the goals you are focusing on first are ones that drive the most impact on your team’s position. Think, “what action can my team take that will not only have reach but also deeply impact us in a positive way.”
Step 4: Communicate Clearly
After having clarity while setting the goal, you want to continue that into how you communicate the goal with the team. Share your goals in a way that inspires and informs. If the idea is presented clearly, there will be no confusion as to how they can act to make it all happen.
Step 5: Implement Accountability
Delegating responsibility across your teammates to accomplish your newly set goals creates built in accountability. With everyone knowing the role they should play to make the vision a reality, they will also be able to hold their colleagues accountable.
Ensuring Success: What to Avoid
When strategizing for your annual professional goals, there are a few things you want to be sure to avoid so you can obtain the goals you’re setting together.
- Setting too many goals at once. Without clarity and being concise in your planning phase, things can go overboard. Remember we’re focusing on quality, not quantity.
- Not including enough voices in the conversation. Be sure to gather input from as many employees on your team as possible, then synthesize the requests.
- Failing to track progress. This is where that measurable component shines. To celebrate your milestones, you need to track progress along the way.
Conclusion
As the year begins to unfold, the clarity and execution of your team’s goals will shape the path ahead for your organization on a larger scale. Collaborating on goals that resonate with the voice and vision of your team is imperative to inclusion and success. When objectives align with your values, they become more than just tasks to complete; they become a shared mission that inspires.
By fostering alignment within your team and committing to creating meaningful, measurable goals, you set a precedent for the year ahead to be the best one yet. The best time to turn your intention into action and make this year impactful, is now. MD-Staff sends the best of luck to you and your teams in the year ahead!
