 What to get your team working on is super important as a manager or leader, possibly the most important thing. Your team's time and effort is limited, so using as much of it as possible on the most value-creating areas is the difference between great and okay team performance. Choosing valuable team goals is a vital part of getting your team working on the most profit-creating activities and projects. Goals create focus and direction. Goals provide understanding to team members about where they are now and where they need to get to. Goals unite groups of individuals around a common purpose, helping to build true teams. Goals create engagement and with it, increased team performance. Finding valuable team goals is not as straightforward as most managers hope. I often ask the leaders and managers I coach, how does your team create the most value for the business in which you work? About 10-15% can give me a clear, understandable answer in three sentences or less. 80% plus of managers don't really know or are not able to easily describe their most valuable activities. It is no wonder that around 90% of strategy implementation and 70% of all projects fail. How would you answer the question? Choosing the right team goals at work is critical for your team's success. To help you, we are going through four key actions to choose valuable team goals. Firstly, alignment, purpose and value are all huge. Second, focus on what you can control and influence. Third, dig to find the most valuable work. And fourth, create different levels and types of goals. The valuable team goals are rarely financial goals. Finding valuable team goals takes curiosity, knowledge, a bit of work and an open mind. The knowledge is in the business and the rest are 100% in your control. Towards the end, I explain the different levels and types of goals to maximise team engagement and ownership. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here, Enhance.Training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching you how to build high performing teams. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as the video timestamps so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Alignment, purpose and value are all huge in choosing valuable team goals. Highly aligned companies have almost 17 times higher employee engagement. They grow revenue 58% faster and have 72% higher profit margins per an LSA global survey. We all instinctively know that if everyone in the group is working in the same direction towards common goals, the group will do a lot better compared to everyone doing what they think is best. The stats quantify what we instinctively know. When choosing valuable team goals, understanding the company goals is not enough. You need to understand the priority of each company goal. Speak to your boss and the leadership team, read the strategy documents and ask enough questions to figure this out. Then you can prioritise your functional or business unit goals. Then you can prioritise your team goals to align with functional and company goals. When you get goal priorities right, you clearly understand how valuable each goal is. Less than half the working population know their company goals. Even fewer can connect what they do at work to the strategies and tactics behind those goals. Prioritising goals and communicating these to your team easily puts you in the top 50% of managers. When you understand the priorities and can explain the purpose of each goal, team members will be happier, feel more valued and will do a better job. Go a step further and explain how each goal is valuable and what contributing to achieving that goal will mean for everyone and each individual and you'll have a team a lot less reliant on you in selecting the most profitable team activities to work on. Second, focus on what you can control and influence when setting the right team goals. There is little point in targeting goals that the team has little influence or control over. You and they will quickly feel demotivated and undervalued. Understand what you as a team have significant control or influence over. For example, if the top priority of the company was revenue growth, the finance team might have goals focused on pricing and generating as much cash from debtors as possible to fund growth. These goals will be aligned and within the team's significant influence. If you are a customer services manager, you might have goals focused on driving repeat purchases or product accessory sales, again aligned, valuable and the team controls the activities to achieve these goals. Be really clear on what you have substantial control and influence over and choose valuable team goals within these areas. Choosing goals you directly influence is a lot more motivational and increases team engagement, both of which increase team performance. Third, when choosing valuable goals for the team, dig to find the most valuable work. Our brains are designed to work with patterns which reduces the energy the brain needs to use. It is easy to fall into established patterns, do what has been done before or maintain the status quo as a result. This leaves opportunities for those who are prepared to look for them. In my experience, every business has serious value-creating opportunities, though most of them are not obvious. Be curious, stay open-minded and ask a lot of questions. Challenge the current thinking, be courageous. In what tasks and activities can you find within your sphere of influence that will directly or indirectly help the business meet the most important goals? In fast growing, turnaround and smaller less established businesses, you should be able to find loads of opportunities and the challenge will be deciding which to prioritise. In larger, more mature or well-run businesses, the opportunities will be less but they will be there. Use your team's knowledge and experience, they are at the coalface more than you. Use financial and other performance data, speak to stakeholders of your team. Great opportunities come about through joining the dots that others haven't spotted yet. Great places to start are, firstly, problems being experienced by the team. Secondly, areas where the company or the team has become lazy. Third, activities out of alignment with the company or functional strategies and goals. Fourth, processes and approaches that don't make sense or seem to be outdated. Fifth, activities where the person can't explain why they are doing them. Sixth, areas where there is little focus or activity compared to the importance of the outcome needed to meet functional or company goals. There may not be one single opportunity, but lots of smaller opportunities. Make many small improvements and the collective overall improvement can be very significant. Fourth, create different levels and types of goals to get the team focused on its most profitable activities. Most companies produce financial goals, then cascade these down to team level and that constitutes their goal setting and planning. The business unit, function or team leaders are then expected to work out the tasks, activities and projects to meet those financial goals. Very few people relate to financial goals, so don't make these your main goals for communication purposes. The different levels and types of goals that you should use to maximise engagement and ownership are, firstly, the team's purpose. What is the main reason the team exists within the company? At a basic level, sales and marketing's purpose is to grow revenue. Operations is to make what is sold and finances to grow cash and profit. Communicate your team's purpose in clear everyday language and make it specific to your team. Secondly, for the team's goals, turn the financial numbers into the outcomes desired from activities and projects that your team will work on to achieve those outcomes. So rather than increase revenue by five million, the team's goals could be grow a total number of customers by 40, that's new customers, less customer losses, by the year end ideally increasing by 10 each 90 days. Secondly, retain 85% of our current customers and third, increase the average size of our customer contracts by 9% plus. These goals explain a lot more about how the team should grow revenue than a financial target alone would provide. Make the goals relatable to the team's purpose and activities. Asking the team to come up with the goals is a great way to increase ownership and team buy-in. Third, use team priorities to focus more of the team's time on the most valuable activities and projects to achieve the most valuable goals. Talk to tasks, activities, initiatives and projects with the team priorities you set. Constantly revisit the team priorities and communicate the priorities clearly and often. Fourth, create individual goals aligned to the team goals. Individual goals provide clarity, focus, engagement and other foundation for objective and fair performance assessment. Goals that are clearly aligned to the team goals and carefully explained to the team members create purpose and meaning for the work they do. Set valuable goals in terms of the tasks, activities and projects for each individual. And fifth, finally setting individual priorities helps focus more of the individual's time on the most valuable activities and projects rather than all the urgent, but not so important your emails, requests and tasks, etc. Constantly revisit the individual's priorities and agree or reconfirm the priorities regularly. So in summary, what to get your team working on by choosing valuable goals is one of the most important jobs you can do as a manager. There is only so much time available, so how it is used is a difference between okay team performance and great team performance. Setting valuable team goals and then selecting the most profitable team activities is a vital skill of a manager. In finding valuable team goals, the steps to go through are firstly, alignment, purpose and value are all huge. Secondly, focus on what you can control and influence. Third, dig to find the most valuable work and fourth, create different levels and types of goals. If you have any questions on what to get your team working on, choosing valuable team goals, please leave in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.