4 Steps for Clarifying Team Goals

Brief 

Create clarity for your team by constantly communicating the company’s priorities, ensuring employees understand them, identifying behaviors that achieve those goals and finding ways to eliminate obstacles, write Karin Hurt and David Dye. “Creating clarity helps accelerate performance because people focus their time and energy on what matters most,” they write.

Insight

Your team can’t achieve breakthrough results if you don’t have a shared understanding of what success looks like. Creating clarity is one of the most important competencies we teach in our human-centered leadership development programs.

So today, we’ve pulled together some of our foundational clarity tools and techniques to give you four practical, strategic activities you can do with your team right away.If creating clarity is a challenge for you, we encourage you to use these strategic activities in the order we offer them here.

Or, if there is one aspect of creating clarity that is the biggest challenge for you, start there.Create Clarity for Courageous CulturesWhat Does it Mean to Create Clarity?

Creating clarity means that everyone on your team has a solid, shared understanding of what success looks like.They know what matters most and why.High-performing teams are not only clear on their strategic direction, but they also know the short and long-term strategic initiatives that will help them get there.

They’ve also spent time identifying the strategic behaviors that lead to success.Here’s how you know if you have a solid foundation of clarity on your team.

1. You have defined your 3-4 strategic M.I.T. (Most Important Thing) leadership priorities.
2. Managers consistently communicate these M.I.T. priorities, and why they are important.
3. Your team initiatives align with these strategic M.I.T. priorities.
4. Employees know the behaviors that directly contribute to these M.I.T. priorities.
5. You regularly track, report, and communicate our progress toward these M.I.T. priorities.