We are major advocates on team goals. Having each team member have individual, professional goals is a great way to keep each team member not only playing as a team, but growing individually. And the same goes if they don’t have balance in personal and professional goals.
We start a new team member with goal setting at their 30 day review. This provides enough time for them to have figured out the basics and at 30 days, they start getting overwhelmed at how much they don’t know and want to start feeling like their creating value. Setting goals of what they should be trained on, etc. over the next few months gives them something to focus on and see they are making progress. From there, a 90 Day, 6 month and then annual review is a great place to review and update your new team members goals. Creating and sharing their goals is always a great way to find that they each like a certain part of their job and then you can start training them and letting them grow into pieces of the job. That means they can then move up and grow into new opportunities as well. If we can’t free up some of our time, we can’t grow either! Knowing each other’s goals lets us all grow together.
Everyone working together on goals first and foremost, allows you to use all of your unique abilities to get something completed. You have talent, use it! Second, it allows your team to focus and work together which avoids a lot of “territorial” issues, such as the marketing department thinking they are more important than the accounting department. And the accounting department thinking the marketing department spends too much money on useless stuff. Team goals allow everyone to understand the purpose of an overall goal and how each person contributes to it. For example, if you set a quarterly revenue goal to meet, the accounting department might appreciate that the “fluffy marketing cocktail hour” the marketing department is hosting will bring in a flood of new client appointments to follow. They may offer to help prepare a budget since that’s what they are good at. The receptionist may offer to make outgoing confirmation calls in her spare time to help the event be a success. After all it’s not the marketing department’s event now; it’s a team event that benefits a team goal.
Incentivize!
Every single time we teach or meet entrepreneurs we are asked the exact same question – every time! “How do I get my team to implement when they are so busy already?” The answer is really, really, really simple. Pay them. It’s funny what we find time for when a bonus is attached to its completion. It’s usually not conscious. I rarely meet a team member that refuses to do something because they aren’t being paid extra for it. And they typically get offended when we recommend it, “I don’t need to get paid extra to do my job…I just simply don’t have the time.” But if you bonus a team member on the completion of something, that makes it stand out in the crowd of “to-do’s” screaming for their attention. It also lets them know it is really important – it draws their focus to what you consider most important for them to complete. We recommend:
1. Quarterly Team Revenue Bonuses – Always have a team bonus that focuses on bringing money in the door. Brinting money in the door makes sure that the company is profitable. We recommend quarterly bonuses. A month is too quick and a year is too long to run at a high intensity without reaping the rewards to get keyed up for next quarter and monthly is not big enough of a check (after taxes) to get very jazzed or committed to the goal;
2. Project Bonuses – these are group projects with one or more team member working together to implement or create something. A project can be an event, a new marketing brochure, a new website, a huge clean up in the office, remodeling….anything that is important to your business to be completed.
3. Individual Bonuses – Designed around the three most important things the team member does for the company so the company makes money. We hate to keep going back to money, but remember, a company without profit + out of business = you out of a J-O-B. And your clients will lose out as well.
If you give great client service, you can serve your clients and make money at the same time! Examples are: for a marketing or sales person, the bonus may be around # of appointments booked, new clients closed, money collected. For a behind the scenes team member, the bonus may be around billings collected, work completed before a deadline or cost cutting project on office supplies. Individual bonuses should be reviewed annually and adjusted as a team member masters how to achieve what you are incentivizing, move the goals so they grow and achieve.
For instance, begin with a bonus for number of appointments scheduled, and then adjust the bonus after a year to number of appointments that go forward and hire the company to encourage the team member to help close the deal by getting preparatory materials out in time and following up to close the deal.
It's tough leading. Learn to balance the needs of yourself with others needs of you. Remember that the stronger the team you build, the more they can support you and provide you the opportunity to grow as an entrepreneur and owning a business versus owing a job. If you let yourself be surrounded with mediocre team, you are boxing yourself into a corner where you can’t get out because you have no one to help you.
This information was shared by Molly Hall, co-author of Yes Chick. To learn more about team building
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