Are you preventing your team from achieving their biggest personal professional goals as you strive for your own?
In 90% of the studies, specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals, "do your best" goals, or no goals. Goals affect performance by directing attention, mobilizing effort, increasing persistence, and motivating strategy development.
But these benefits are only seen for the individual setting the inspiring goals. This can be a stumbling block for leaders wishing to encourage greater performance by their teams. So, how can you help your team benefit from the brain power of challenging goals?
Jermaine Edwards, Founder of Irreplaceable Advisory Group, frequent KAMCon speaker, and someone I deeply admire, spoke about doing this very thing at KAMCon 2023 in his presentation titled, “22 Questions to Change Your Year, Your results, and Your Relationships.”
“What would need to be true for us to have the year we always dreamed of and what are those things that we need to begin to really think about more deeply?” Jermaine asked. Then he continued, “To achieve your big goals, you need to think differently about some of the things that you are doing to capture the real possibilities that are there. This is how we can get the same results in less time.”
How to Think About Your Biggest Goals
Jermaine recommends that as you start considering your biggest goals, you ask yourself these questions:
- What is the personal professional result you most want to achieve this year?
- Who do you need to become to achieve this goal?
- What things would need to be true in your life for that to be accomplished in areas like your relationships, results, and skill sets?
- What do you want others to experience consistently around you as you pursue that goal?
- What do you want to help your team, teams, or people in your life accomplish as you achieve your goal?
For example: “One of the things that I wanted to hold as a high goal for myself was to help my teams accomplish the goals that they want in their life in pursuit of my own business outcome,” Jermaine explained. “So, for example, I have somebody on my team who wanted to buy her mom a house that would cost about $250,000.”
“To accomplish that, the business needs to be doing this for you to go do that,” Jermaine continued, “As a leader, then I want to be able to achieve this year is to have the business do X so everybody in my team can buy a house for their mom. I worked back from that. I said, what would need to be true for those things to be in existence? Who do I need to become? What would my team need to accomplish for that to happen? Thinking about those things together.”
So, we’ve got this big picture thing that we’re pursuing, the thing that we want most, the experience that you want people to experience, and what other people will accomplish as you achieve your goal.
This exercise gives you a frame to start with the end in mind. You’re defining the context of the conditions that need to be true for these things to come to fruition.
Consider The Impact on Others
The challenge is that we often don’t think about the impact we have on other people as we pursue our goals. That’s why it’s so important to consider the experience you want other people to have with you as you pursue it. Because it’s going to define the conditions you put on yourself relating to not only what you will do but also what you aren’t going to do as you work toward your goals. The idea is to avoid compromising your team’s experience.
As you begin to pursue your goal, others will either get better, get worse, or stay the same. That’s why you need to consider the question of what the people around you want to accomplish, so you don’t negatively impact their ability to achieve their goals. Instead, you want to help them as you help yourself succeed.
I see this in leadership all the time as we push for a specific goal. For example, I said that performance and accountability are important. Then the process is that I’m going to push you to the point where you tell me you can’t be pushed anymore. The way I was doing it was just not the right way to go about doing it because I hadn’t thought about my team members’ personal goals or the experience I wanted them to have with me as a leader in pursuit of my goal. So, that is why it’s important to consider that aspect.
It's critical, as you’re thinking about the goals that you want. If you’re not thinking about the experience other people have with you in pursuit of that, it’s likely you’re going to compromise some things along the way. Instead, you want to be thinking about how other people can get better in pursuit of this thing as your teams, your families, and others around you. So, keep that in mind.
Get Clear on Where You Are Starting
As you start to consider what you need to accomplish your goals, you must be real about what your skill set is, where your resources are, and where your relationships are. You need to be super honest about that. If you make assumptions about where you are, what you’re doing, or what you think your team’s experience is with you, you will have the wrong data to make a meaningful difference.
It’s about getting clear about where you are so you can achieve your goal faster. It may be that you need to make some judgments on things that you need to do, but oftentimes it’s thinking about how you do that with other people.
You’ve got to know where you’re heading and who you’re trying to become and then have a game plan.
Looking for a game plan to help your team achieve their biggest personal and professional goals? Register for KAMGenius PLUS. The next cohort starts next week - October 12th.
