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Team Excellence First Ingredient - A Common Goal

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: Teams need a common goal to perform consistently at peak levels. This article gives some examples and technology for measuring whether there is a common goal on your team.

Team Excellence First Ingredient - A Common Goal

High performing teams do not just happen. They are planned and built in a way that optimizes performance. Numerous ingredients go in to making up a high performing team. I will outline several of these factors in separate articles in order to emphasize the particular item and highlight how to get it.

No team can function well over a long period of time if there is not a common goal. This is the glue that keeps people on the team pulling in the same direction. If people have disparate goals, their efforts will not be aligned, and organizational stress will result. If people on your team are fighting or showing other signs of stress, the first thing to check is if the goal is really totally shared by everyone. Often people give the official goal lip service but have a hidden different agenda. Eventually this discontinuity will come out in bad behaviors.

There are a number of ways you can check if your team truly has a common goal. One way is to check where each individual is on Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. Maslow posited that people have a hierarchy of needs as follows: 1) Need for survival, 2) Safety needs, 3) Social and love needs, 4) Needs for self worth, and 5) Self actualization and growth needs. Maslow stated that if lower needs are not fully met, we human beings cannot work on higher level needs.

This phenomenon often shows up in teams as individual differences. For example, if one person on the team is not feeling safe - level 2 (like perhaps is afraid of being fired) than that person is not going to respond well to teambuilding efforts that focus on social or level 3 needs. This person's goals will not be in alignment with other people who may feel perfectly safe and are working on higher level needs.

So, the first thing to check on a team is whether everyone is in a position where they are capable of sharing common goals with others. If not, then corrective action needs to take place there before trying to forge a common goal.

Let's suppose the goal of a team is to achieve a record level of safety performance. That can galvanize the team around that specific function in a way that encourages everyone to get personally involved in safety. The goal needs to be clear and unambiguous. Rather than setting a goal to have a "safer workplace," it might be better to state it as "to reach 500,000 hours of work time without a lost time accident."

Be particularly alert when conditions change if the goal may no longer be common to every member of the team. For example, if a football team has a goal to win 10 games in a season, that can be shared by all players and will result in a powerful common bond for the team. However, if one member is planning to jump to a different team for the next season and has a private goal to avoid injury at all costs, it will create tension. The goals are no longer aligned and the power is diminished.

When working with teams it is important to check often if the real goals of each individual are aligned with the overall goal of the team. When this happens, the goal is a powerful bonding agent for the team. When it is compromised, the team is weakened.

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Article Tags: goals, Ingredients, Maslow, Shared goals, Teams



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