Rachel Eleza provides five steps that drive commitment to team goals.

As a business leader, it is your sole obligation to ensure that team goals are met. While there are so many factors that may make it difficult for goals to be realised, here are five steps to ensure that members of the team commit to the set goals:

Brainstorming collectively

Commitment to team goals begins when you start working with your team at the initial stages of a new project or when you bring on board a new client. You will be surprised at the numerous ideas you will get having your team present when discussing the implementation process of a project or during a client pitch.

Your crew will appreciate being part of the process from the onset and your organisation will benefit from their varied ideas which will improve your project.

This strategy is multi-purpose as it works even with short- and long-term goals. As people tend to commit to projects they have a stake in, you can rest assured that when you involve your staff they strive to ensure that the set goals are met.

Having them engaged in solving an issue that arises in the process will make your team determined to see the project through.

There are several techniques of brainstorming that can get your team involved. The most effective include:

• Round Robin brainstorming whereby a topic is shared and people go round giving their input on the matter.
• Stepladder brainstorming where every team member is given a chance to give their opinion without them being influenced by their colleagues. With this kind of storming, you need to give members a topic or question before the meeting and have each one write their ideas down to share during discussions.
• Mind mapping where teams create a visual diagram consisting of ideas or solutions to a question asked. With this technique, a team leader may write down ideas on the whiteboard as they are being suggested by other members.

All these tools will get your team to come up with solutions.

Deploy visual aids

After you have given your team autonomy to make their input, the next step is to hold them accountable so that they put effort into meeting the set targets. The best way to do this is to use visual aids as constant reminders of what the team promised to do. These visual representations can be in the form of a progress chart that illustrates short- and long-term goals.

To ensure that your team stays committed to these goals, you can hang the progress charts on the common rooms in the office and conference room. Visual aids have a way of registering in the subconscious mind of people such that they never forget. You can also sneak in the company’s mission to this visual aid to constantly remind the team members of their commitment to their organisation.

Evaluate success

As a leader, you need to maintain your involvement with your team throughout, and you should identify a way to measure success in every stage. By so doing, you can identify strategies that are working and those that are not.

For the strategies that are not working, you should convene your team and ask about potential solutions to address the failing plans. Having them engaged in solving an issue that arises in the process will make your team determined to see the project through.

Stay on course

While each organisation has a vision and a set of goals, as a leader, you should constantly guide your team through the company’s goals and mission. As it gets busy in the workplace, it is easy to lose sight of these goals. Having your team aware of these goals at all times will make them commit to achieving them. This is how you keep everyone in check.

Have goals documented

When something is put in documented, it is unlikely that it will be forgotten. Therefore, you should encourage your team to individually document goals for each project and set times to revisit these goals regularly. In case you are managing many teams, you can delegate the team leader to prepare a detailed document of the short-term and long-term goals to be met.

The team representative can then circulate the document to the team members. While sharing this file, team leaders should be encouraged to convert to PDF word documents. The advantage of working with PDF files is that they support interactive functions such as hyperlinks, text notes, as well as markups, and file attachments.

You should especially encourage documentation if you have teams working outside of the country of your headquarters. If this becomes too challenging to impose virtually, you can partner with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO), that can recruit, hire, and manage your foreign workforce without you having to set up a legal entity in that country, or without having to directly deal with the barriers associated with unfamiliar labor market laws and regulations.

Conclusion

Committed people are also determined. When you’re committed to a goal, you will put all effort in for it to succeed. As a leader, you should be at the forefront in leading your team to devote themselves to getting work done.

About the author

Rachel Eleza is growth marketing director at Upsuite