Setting goals your team does not fully understand is like shouting into an echo chamber. Let me explain…

Last week, we met as a team for our quarterly all-hands meeting, where we discuss goals, targets and the past three months. In this episode of Inside The Studio, we speak about our last all-hands meeting in length. Watch the video to find out a little more about what we did on our Q4 away day this November.

As part of our Q4 meeting, we looked back on our 2019 goals and took stock of how we did.

Without spoiling the entire episode, we achieved about half of our goals – not bad, but room to improve.

Later that day, perhaps, more importantly, we spent an extended period of time looking forward to 2020 and setting goals for the year ahead.

From the early days at Steadfast Collective, we have tried to be as transparent as possible; this includes opening our financials. The whole team know our current turnover, break-even point, and turnover targets.

When setting our 2020 goals, I spent a long time agonising over each target to ensure they are ambitious yet reachable.

During our Q4 away day, I broke down each goal, and explained the following;

– How did I come to set this target?

– Why is it important?

– How can we achieve this?

Starting Q1, we will lay out how each team member can contribute to these targets, understanding their part and how they can help The Collective to reach these goals.

Here’s the thing, setting goals without explaining ‘the how’ and ‘why’ is problematic…

Let’s take your companies profit goal; why do you as an agency need a 25% profit margin? Is the sole reason to help your shareholders to make money?

I’m sure there’s more to it than that. That profit margin helps you build a financial runway and gives you the ability to grow, but have you explained that?

Do you want to increase your customer retention? Why?

Well, increasing your customer retention takes the pressure off of your new business team and lets your creative team build meaningful relationships so that you can make a real impact. These may be obvious to you as a business owner, but are they clear to every member of your team?

Much smarter folk than I have researched goal setting, but I thought I would explain our basic foundations for goals and targets at Steadfast:

1. Understand why we are setting the goal
2. Think about how the goal benefits the company
3. Individually consider how we can all help to reach that goal
4. Tell everyone the goal and update regularly

Using these four goal-setting concepts, we hope to set out targets that are well understood, realistic, achievable, and owned by the whole team, not just the one or two. Here’s to 2020!

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