How to Help All Your Team Members Achieve Their Goals

One of the biggest pinpoints about being a manager or employer is taking care of your organisation’s most important asset – the employees. And if you manage a team, say in sales, HR, marketing, or any other department, your bottom line and overall success can take a blow whenever certain team members fail to reach their targeted goals, personal or professional.

But what do you do if this happens? How do you prevent it in the first place? Well, it all revolves around supporting your team members to achieve their goals as well as the company’s objectives.

Starting with why you should do so, let’s look at ways you can help your team members in achieving their goals as a leader.

Why Supporting Your Team Is Important

So, what’s the most significant reason why you need to care for your team? Well, that would be employee satisfaction.

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If your team members feel positive about their work and the overall performance at your organisation, they’re more likely to perform at their highest level.

Also, they’re less likely to walk out the door in search of a new role or simply quit the company as soon as they feel unappreciated for their hard work. To a supervisor, manager, or any other senior, supporting team members to achieve their goals would also have the best outcomes.

Ways To Help Your Team Reach Their Goals:

Clearly Define the Goals

The first and most important thing you need to do as a leader to help your team members is to make them aware of their goals.

Not just that, but you also need to guide them through their work as individuals and as a team in achieving those goals.

Nonetheless, having a target to chase will keep your team members on heels and focused on getting the results they deserve.

Set The Right Example

As a leader, you shouldn’t just have the company set the goals and tell your team members what’s expected. You should lead by example, especially when it comes to things like time management, collaboration, escalation, and so forth.

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Set clear examples to help your team members reach their goals. Make the right moves in accomplishing those tasks.

Keep Your Team Motivated

A motivated team member is more likely to perform well in the tasks assigned to them. Actually, tons of research shows that when employees have high morale, they are more likely to not only achieve their objectives and goals, but they can also exceed them.

And of course, there’s a multitude of ways in which you can improve motivation in the workplace.

Some of these include:

Rewarding effort and stellar performance
Recognising career and personal milestones
Encouraging engagement and teamwork
Equipping each team member appropriately
Offering lucrative benefits to those who deserve it

Assign The Right Tasks to The Right Person

Getting it right on recruitment and onboarding processes can go a long way in ensuring that an organisation gets the right person on each team. However, different team members may have different skills, talents, and capabilities.

Being a team lead usually means acknowledging this and in turn, trying your best to assign meaningful tasks, duties, or responsibilities to each team member. It also means making sure that the tasks assigned are achievable by the individual or team in question.

This is a good way to support team members in achieving their goals at the end of every month, quarter, or financial year.

Track Progress in A Measurable Way

How do you really know that a particular team member needs correction or extra support? Well, the best way to do so is through progress tracking, preferably in a measurable way such as using a spreadsheet.

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While there are many ways to track employee progress and performance, spreadsheets beat the rest in that they are mostly free to use and come with numerous functionalities. Many features might take some getting used to, but the internet is full of guides to help reveal the wizard in you.

Let’s take, for instance, this post from Acuity Training, about calculating percent difference in excel, which can really help in progress tracking. All you need to do is enter a simple formula in a cell or cell range, and excel automatically does it for you after following a few more steps.

Besides spreadsheets, other tools you can use to track team members' progress include:

Desktime
Basecamp
Zimyo
Reflektive
And pretty much more!

Inspire Action from Your Team

Asking team members what they want helps them feel valued and respected. It’s a great way to keep them motivated enough to improve performance and achieve their goals.

You can also involve them in decision-making, perhaps by asking for feedback, ideas, suggestions, and views. This can go a long way in developing leaders, managers, and highly successful teams that can function well and solve problems effectively.

Offer Mentorship and Training

Building a culture of productivity can be difficult and tedious. However, mentorship and training can help you train your people to achieve results. On top of that, you can also offer training to existing and new employees.

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With training, your company will save time, money, and resources. The same case should apply to departments that rely on remote teams for some of their daily processes and operations.

Encourage Teamwork and Collaboration

We all know that productivity improves when you get several people working on a specific task. But doing so requires thinking beyond traditional working hours. Asking your team members to work on the task even after office hours can help them stick to a specific goal.

Teamwork, right?

Spending time together, in team-building events, for instance, increases trust, and trust helps in achieving results. Training in teamwork and collaboration can really help in developing your team and creating an environment for continuous and effective operations.

Motivating and encouraging your team members to meet their goals can help them perform at their best, in turn generating returns for your business.

This tends to work best when employees feel understood and supported in achieving the goals set by the company as well as those of their own. The above are just some of the many ways you can support your team members to become better at reaching their goals as a leader.

This may interest you: How Successful People Set Goals And Follow Through