?? Motivated teams set clear and compelling goals

This is WorkMatters #336 for Week 48, 2024. It was originally published as an email newsletter on Nov 29, 2024. For more, please see www.andreasholmer.com.

File this under #customervalue.

This is the second artcile in a series exploring the essential building blocks of team design. The first article explored Richard Hackman’s concept of “real teams”, highlighting the need for stability and cohesion (see #345). This week, we look at the importance of goal setting. Our goal? To answer one of the most important questions for organizational success: How do you design high-performance teams?

Clarity is one of the most powerful drivers of team motivation. It creates a shared understanding of what teams aim to achieve and why it matters. Clear, compelling goals provide direction, energy, and purpose. They transform abstract aspirations into concrete outcomes while building both commitment and accountability.

Key Elements of Compelling Goals

Effective team goals aren’t just a list of tasks — they are purposeful, precise, and motivating. Richard Hackman’s Five Factors (see #340 for an overview) emphasizes that the best goals are:

• Clear. Teams need to know exactly what they’re working toward. Ambiguity saps energy and breeds misalignment, while clear goals define success in specific terms.
• Challenging. Goals that push teams beyond their comfort zones trigger creativity and resilience, unlocking untapped potential.
• Consequential. Goals meaningful to the team, organization, and broader stakeholders inspire deeper commitment and engagement.

When teams align around objectives that are clear, challenging, and consequential, they develop a shared sense of ownership — driving both individual and collective success.

Additional Considerations

Goal clarity is as close to a universal factor as we can find in team effectiveness research. Nearly all major frameworks highlight clear objectives as essential for success. Much of this research is summarized effectively in the SMART goals framework:

• SMART Goals (Duran). George Duran proposed that goals should be Specific (clear and focused), Measurable (quantifiable to track progress), Achievable (realistic and within reach), Relevant (solve a pronounced need), and Time-bound (set within a defined time frame).

While SMART provides a strong foundation, three elements from related frameworks add depth:

• Shared Understanding (GPRI). The Global Performance Research Initiative (GPRI) stresses the need for teams to collectively develop and understand their goals. Clarity on paper is not enough — internalization fosters alignment and reduces miscommunication.
• Results Focus (Lencioni). In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni emphasizes prioritizing outcomes over mere outputs. Goals should drive meaningful impact, ensuring team efforts contribute to larger successes, not just task completion.
• Temporal Segmentation. David Allen’s Getting Things Done, McKinsey’s Three Horizons, and JD Meier’s Agile Results all advocate setting goals across different time horizons. Another popular approach involves focusing on 1-week and 10-year goals, skipping everything in between.

Together, these elements reveal that setting clear goals is deceptively simple. Temporal segmentation, in particular, challenges teams to align efforts across different time horizons for meaningful progress.

Real-world Applications

I’ve chosen to work with Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) for the above reasons.

OKRs are inherently SMART. They emphasize clarity and specificity while prioritizing outcomes over outputs, as Lencioni suggests. They also foster collective understanding, as emphasized by GPRI.

But OKRs are difficult to get right. That’s why I’ve created OKR+ — a coaching model designed to help teams get the most out of their OKR practice:

Explore the OKR+ Coaching Model

OKR+ is a work in progress and currently consists of seven discrete steps, with the final step — Review Schedule — tackling the problem of temporal segmentation head-on.

Product teams often run in two-week sprints. Sprints are excellent for driving immediate progress but also risk losing sight of the bigger picture. OKR, with its quarterly cadence, provides a critical counterbalance. A quarterly timeframe is long enough to drive meaningful results while maintaining focus.

Quarterly goal-setting isn’t unique to OKRs, of course. Frameworks like Wickman’s Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Moran’s 12-Week Year, and the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) processes used at Amazon, Microsoft, and others all emphasize quarterly goals.

This convergence is significant — it validates the effectiveness of quarterly planning cycles.

By combining two-week sprints with quarterly OKRs, teams can balance short-term execution with mid-term goals — ensuring they can effectively navigate both forest and trees.

Conclusion

Clear, compelling goals are the cornerstone of high-performing teams. They align efforts, spark motivation, and unify teams around a shared purpose.

Setting effective goals isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort. Tools like OKR+ can make the process more manageable.

That’s all for this week. Until next time, make it matter.

/Andreas

How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly email newsletter called WorkMatters. Back issues are marinated for three months before being published to Linkedin. This article was originally published on Friday, Nov 29, 2024. Subscribe at www.andreasholmer.com to get the next issue delivered straight into your inbox.