What do you do if your employees have conflicting goals and it's affecting productivity?

Often, people don't remember what leaders told them. They remember how leaders make them feel. While trying to understand the issues that cause your employees to have conflicting goals, what might be most helpful in providing support and resources to your team members, is to be proactive in creating time to listen to individual or small group members. One of the 7 habits of highly effective people, is to seek first to understand and then to be understood. I would argue further. Additionally, seek first to listen and then speak to share your opinions. Remember to make your team members feel cared for. This will facilitate better comprehension of your team members' conflicting goals and know how to align their goals with yours.

* One-on-one discussion with them * Starts with the Organisation's vision/goal into the department's vision/goal and individual vision * Big picture of vision and goals. * Showing a safe environment * Set clear priorities * Provide Support and resource * Monitor Progress and Adjust * Address the Performance Issues

To address conflicting goals among employees, facilitate open communication to understand individual perspectives, prioritize shared objectives, and encourage collaboration to find common ground. Establish clear expectations, provide guidance on aligning goals, and foster a supportive team environment to enhance productivity.

When conflicting goals among employees hinder productivity, swift action is necessary. Initiate open discussions to grasp each employee's objectives and concerns. Foster empathy and understanding among team members. Clarify roles and responsibilities to minimize misunderstandings. If conflicts persist, mediate discussions to find common ground and promote collaboration. Provide necessary support and resources. Monitor progress regularly, adjusting strategies as needed. Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and celebrate successes to sustain morale and motivation.

If employees have conflicting goals that are impacting productivity, it's crucial to facilitate open communication and collaboration. Start by understanding each employee's perspective and the reasons behind their goals. Encourage them to find common ground and align their objectives wherever possible. Foster a culture of compromise and mutual support, emphasizing the importance of team goals over individual ones. Implement clear guidelines and priorities to guide decision-making and ensure everyone is working towards the same overarching objectives. Regular check-ins and feedback sessions can also help address conflicts proactively and maintain a positive work environment.

Showing them the Big picture of the Organisation's vision will drill down to the Department's vision/goals and further into individual goals. * Giving platforms to set their goals and track them accordingly.

You have to bring them together and discuss their productivity issues. If you dont have shared team goals, create them. But the productivity issues have to be addressed.

It is important that as a leader we are able to align the team or individuals to the corporate vision or goal and understand that we need to align ourselves to the key objective at all times and also make an effort to resolve any differences for the betterment of the organization. We need to educate and make employees realize that the corporate agenda is more important than individual's personal agenda's and we need to clearly demarcate what our responsibilities are, organization's culture and the ways we respond to differences and be able to agree with each other to move forward in spite we me not agreeing to all what is put forward.

If employees have conflicting goals, something has gotten lost in translation from the overall business strategy and goals into team and individual goals. You have to revisit the overall goals, make sure the employees understand the end-to-end journeys that support them and their specific contribution to it. Then you can re-translate into team- and individual contributions and align all goals to the overall targets.

When employees have conflicting goals affecting productivity, introducing a prioritization matrix can be a highly effective strategy. This matrix, often called the Eisenhower Box, categorizes tasks into four quadrants based on urgency and importance: 1. Urgent and important (tasks to do immediately). 2. Important, but not urgent (tasks to schedule for later). 3. Urgent, but not important (tasks to delegate to someone else). 4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks to eliminate). Leaders must ensure teams focus on high-value tasks and protect them from low-impact activities. Promoting an environment where fun is encouraged and fear is absent not only enhances job satisfaction but also drives a healthier, more productive team dynamic.

As a visionary leadership style, I must follow the below 3 techniques below. * Inspiring them * Empathy with them * Let's Visualize the dream

Facilitate communication to align your goals well with deadlines. Productive communication and aggressive listening will work wonders here where you can spot on the needed inputs by reading between the lines.

Trust is paramount when facilitating a conflict. * Have ground safety guardrails up so everyone stays in the set lines. * To build trust, leaders should model humility and vulnerability. * Balance expressing empathy and respecting privacy. * Be clear about your values, provide stability, and stay consistent. * Avoid jargon and use words everyone can understand, especially in medicine. * Kindness goes a very long way. As leaders, we need our teams to be safe and tell us what they are experiencing and what their feelings are so that we can make improvements. Listen and watch your teams during these meetings to know whom you must follow up with after the meeting. There is a lot to learn when your team becomes silent.

Being able to active listen and facilitate a dialogue which is transparent and open would be key to build trust among the employees and leadership. We should never be biased towards anyone and be able to point out to the problem and not the person. It is important that we extract the problem out of the people and address it as a different element. This makes people feel comfortable, and enables them to actively contribute towards resolving the issue.

If I want to wear black shoes and my wife wants me to wear brown ones, the compromise would be one black and one brown shoe which is not ideal unless we pretend that it is a very unique and quirky fashion statement. As Jeff Bezos said, we can disagree and commit, as long as one option makes more sense, although that requires the presence of clear and transparent communication on both sides so the same situation could be seen from different perspectives. That is a skill most people need to learn, some are naturally gifted in it, I certainly had to learn it the hard way unfortunately. Everything makes sense from a certain perspective based on what someone knows (or assumes) so let's find out what that is.

Every team needs to know what they’re aiming for. What's the equivalent of your team's championship? This overarching goal should align with your organization’s vision. Every team member must understand not only what the goal is but also why it matters. This shared understanding is the foundation of a unified team. Diversity in skills and perspectives is a strength, not a weakness. Once you understand each team member’s personal goals and strengths, think about how these can complement each other towards achieving the team goal. Like assigning roles on the soccer field, ensure each employee's goals contribute to the team's success.

Check-ins aren’t just for tracking progress; they’re also opportunities for team members to reconnect to the shared vision. These meetings can serve as mini time-outs, spaces for recalibration, and encouragement. They reinforce the notion that, while individual efforts are valued, teamwork is paramount.

It is important as leadership to understand that we will need to support the employee or teams who are facing the issues. There could be instances where we need to facilitate mentoring, training or coaching session based on the issues. This could help the relevant people who are facing the issues to overcome them and move forward.

A recommendation: don't fall in love with the solution. Before you check the problem out, start monitoring if the solution works. Track pre-established KPIs (quantifiable metrics tied to each goal) to assess individual progress. Remember to encourage open dialogue to gauge employee sentiment and identify unintended consequences. Keep analyzing team dynamics - are silos forming? Does collaboration suffer? Finally, revisit the original goals – have they become outdated? This is an iterative approach that will expose progress, foster transparency, and ensure solutions remain aligned with evolving needs. If something needs to be fixed, don't be discouraged and reiterate the process to find a new solution.

Have a conversation. The goal needs to be clear and people need to know it and want to reach (exceed it) The routes to get there may be different AND that’s potentially OK. What to do? Have a a conversation. Not a serious one… a series of conversations and clear adjustments. Let’s keep this simple. Assess | Address | Adjust… repeat forever more.

Excellent Matthew. Alignment - when it’s out, it snowballs. What do you see prevents people from having conversations about shared goals?

I have learned that your role is to guide, inspire, and mediate. Yes, you’re the one setting the strategy, but the execution is a team effort. Be open to feedback and willing to adjust the game plan if it’s not working. A good coach knows when to lead and let the team take the reins. When your employees have conflicting goals, think of it as a challenge to your leadership and an opportunity for growth, both for you and your team. Just like a soccer team learning to play in harmony, your goal is to foster a sense of unity, where individual goals support the team’s victory. It’s about turning a group of star players into a star team. And when that happens, productivity isn’t just restored; it’s taken to a whole new level.

Yes to all of the above. A mistake I've seen many managers/ leaders make is to ignore the problem and hope it will go away. Then often do it out of a lack of courage to have a difficult conversation. By being able to have difficult conversations and disagree while being respectful the leader sets an example and shows how it's done. They can then encourage and teach their people to do the same and learn to solve their issues together.