Twenty minutes into a weekly leadership team meeting at a large non-denominational church in Tennessee, I knew I was watching something special. Spread out on a couch and comfortable chairs roughly arranged in a circle, the team engaged a voracious discussion — a deliberation, really — on what was most important for the church to focus on during the next year.

The executive pastor, the one leading the meeting, argued their primary goal should be assimilating new people to the church, but the lead pastor disagreed: “We should focus on volunteer recruitment, development and retention because everyone is under water with volunteers. If we focus on assimilation, we just put everyone under water with more folks to serve without volunteers.”

For nearly 60 minutes, this team bantered back and forth, seeking to determine the most essential goal to guide their next season of fruitful ministry. As I sat there, I smiled inside. This was a team that “got” it. They knew that setting meaningful goals as a team was crucial. They knew that discussions of goals must go far beyond making sure they are S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound). They knew that focusing on the wrong things — and then achieving those goals — would cause deep trouble for an already overwhelmed staff. They knew their goals would have to drill down their lofty images of vision (such as “let’s start 100 churches in 10 years”) into concrete, actionable steps. They knew that clear, elevating goals would jolt their staff out of their everyday routines and help them focus on the strategic big picture. And they knew that once they set their goals, they’d have to stay the course and routinely measure those goals rather than reinvent success targets every few weeks based on the latest, greatest church leadership fad. Most importantly, they knew their goals would not only enable and elevate their team’s performance, but they would also build their work group into a true team. Because that’s what good goals — and the ensuing work that teams engage to pursue them — do.

In their seminal work The Wisdom of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explain, “a common set of demanding performance goals that a group considers important to achieve will lead, most of the time, to both performance and team.”

In other words, when teams set meaningful, strong goals and then diligently pursue them, really good things happen in both what the team produces and what the team becomes.

That’s why it is essential to cultivate your ability to develop, measure and hold your team accountable to outstanding goals. That’s what I’ll try to do here.

Setting Outstanding Team Goals
How’s your team doing? Does your team possess the kind of goals that drive exceptional performance and gel the group together?

Outstanding team goals exhibit some key characteristics. As you read, take a moment to measure your team’s goals against these principles.

Great goals align with organizational vision and strategy. Because every team exists within an organizational context, team goals must connect to the broader strategic goals of the organization. For instance, if your church is focusing on developing leadership capacity to support multisite growth, it would make sense for each ministry team to set appropriate goals for leadership development for each area. Furthermore, just as your church’s vision must be God-inspired, so must your team’s goals. Invite God into the process of establishing your team’s objectives, and watch Him show up.

Just as your church’s vision must be God-inspired, so must your team’s goals.

Effective team goals flesh out the team’s overarching purpose, or mission. In our book Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership, coauthor Warren Bird and I propose what we call a 5C purpose that sets the tone and aspiration for any team.

A 5C purpose is clear, painting a clear picture of value; compelling, drawing people in by addressing something that truly matters; challenging, requiring each team member to contribute in a meaningful and interdependent manner; calling-oriented, providing a space for team members to accomplish God’s specific calling on their lives; and consistently held, illustrating how each member of the team understands and remains committed to the team’s purpose.

Once you know the purpose of your team, you are ready to establish key performance goals. These performance goals transform the broad purpose into specific and measurable performance challenges. When you accomplish those goals, you will know your team is fulfilling its mission.

Good goals balance long-term strategy with short-term execution. Effective teams both articulate long-term (multi-year), strategic goals and spark immediate action with short-term (next week or month) goals. Do you want to create some goal magic? Map your short-term objectives to long-term goals, and watch the sparks fly.

Solid team goals are articulated in a S.M.A.R.T. manner. Much has been written about S.M.A.R.T. goals, but using this phrasing encourages specificity and measurability, enabling you to know whether you are achieving your goals or just spinning your wheels.

Good group goals garner commitment from every member of the team. You know a good team goal when each team member is fiercely committed to it. Not only do team members talk regularly about the team’s goals amongst themselves, but they can easily recite them to people not on the team, and they take personal responsibility for seeing them accomplished.

Great team goals are framed as team goals, not individual goals. Effective team goals require interdependence and limit dividing and conquering. In other words, they must not be goals that a person could accomplish alone, nor can they be goals that are attainable by adding up the contributions of various team members. Yes, you read me right. Dividing and conquering is one of the great enemies of teamwork, as it really is just stapling together a bunch of individual efforts. If a task is achievable by one person — or the independent contributions of several people working in isolation — skip trying to make it a team effort. It’s not worth it.

Measuring Progress Against Goals
Too often we approach team goals like a Crock-Pot meal: set it, and forget it. But that doesn’t work. Instead, achieving team goals is more like smoking meat: good progress requires constant attention and care.

To increase the likelihood you will accomplish your goals, follow these easy steps.

Write down and post your team’s goals. Once you’ve documented your goals, post them in conspicuous places so your team constantly sees them. If you have a conference room where the team often meets, post them on the wall. Include team goals on meeting agendas. Give team members a card they can post in their workspace. One team I worked with started every meeting by having one person go to the wall and write the team’s goals on a flip chart, and then explain them to the team. That might seem like overkill, but it was obvious that team knew what they were trying to do as they met together over the next hour. The bottom line: Make your team’s goals visible.

Make your team’s goals visible.

Develop a data dashboard. You need a visual way to show the progress your team has made on your goals on a regular basis. Managers of fundraising campaigns tend to do this well, regularly indicating how much cash has been raised against the goal, in a graphically appealing manner. Church team leaders need to follow their lead. Even if you’re measuring leadership capability on 10 competencies, you can capture data and present it in such a way that your team can see the realities and identify areas needing further progress. Use what works for you: pie charts showing percentages, bar graphs indicating numbers, etc. But do something to show how well your team is doing.

Start simple. Indicate three points: where you were when you started, where you are today and where you need to be to accomplish the goal. That will help you engage some discussion on how you can effectively move the ball forward.

Distinguish between lead and lag measures, and focus on both. The fantastic book The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling lays out the difference between lead and lag measures. Lag measures indicate to what extent your key outcomes (goals such as attendance, giving, percentages of people serving, etc.) have been achieved. But lead measures are the levers you apply to influence the lag measures (such as the number of brochures mailed, type and quality of recruitment campaigns, classes offered, response time to inquiries, etc.). In other words, lead measures don’t tend to measure things that really matter, except for how they impact the lag measures. It doesn’t matter whether your team returns every email within one hour unless that somehow impacts an important lag measure. At the same time, focusing solely on lag measures puts your team in a “wait-and-see” mode, inhibiting momentum. Incremental adjustments facilitate continual progress on the goals.

So, what does this mean? You need to focus on both lag and lead measures. Make sure you know what your key outcomes are; those are your lag measures. But also spend time thinking about the key processes and actions you can take that you believe will influence that goal; those are your lead measures. And measure your progress on those lead measures so you can actually see what is making a difference in one way or another.

Celebrate every win, no matter how small. Many teams focus too solely on what they can improve rather than on what worked. Develop the discipline not only to identify areas that need strengthening, but to rejoice upon reaching important milestones.

Regularly identify action steps toward each goal. At a rhythm that works for your team (perhaps weekly or monthly), articulate steps your team will take to get closer to reaching your goal. Be sure to delineate what the team will do and what type of effect you anticipate it making. If you do that, you’ll later be able to assess the effectiveness of those actions.

Ask others to offer feedback on your team’s goals. Both in terms of what you are attempting to accomplish and whether they see you achieving them, this input is uber helpful. The information helps raise your team’s visibility and encourages accountability so the team can pursue important goals.

Blend individual and team accountability. Team performance is a combination of individual effort and teamwork. Accountability and performance reviews should reflect that reality. In Teams That Thrive, we suggests tying a portion of individual compensation (such as an annual merit increase or bonus) to the overall performance of the team(s) in which each person participates. This model offers a way to take into account the quality of the team’s work (in relation to its purpose and goals) and each individual’s contributions toward that work.

Your Next Step
So, what’s next? How do you put this into practice? I encourage you to keep it simple. First, engage a conversation with your team about what you are trying to accomplish long term and how that relates to what you are doing now. Then, identify one to two outcome-oriented goals (lag measures), develop dashboards to help you measure your progress against them and post those goals wherever you can to remind people of what you are trying to make happen.

Celebrate whatever wins you see as your team engages in these conversations, and then build on them by adding in some process-oriented goals (lead measures) and taking next steps to spur accountability among your team members.

In everything you do, remember that significant performance challenges, even developing compelling team goals, are what energizes teams and causes them to come together. The more you work on developing your team’s goals, the more you move toward becoming an effective, thriving team.

Ryan T. Hartwig, Ph.D., is associate dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences and associate professor of communication at Azusa Pacific University in greater Los Angeles, California. He is the coauthor of Teams That Thrive (IVP Books). 

This article was originally published in the December/January issue of Influence. For more print content, subscribe.