If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!
All teams miss goals! If your team never misses a goal, then it’s likely you aren’t ambitious enough with your goal setting or aggressive enough with your expectations for your team. Goals should be hard to achieve but not impossible.
However, if your team is constantly missing goals you have a problem. If your team can’t hit goals, then you can’t lead your team. Setting goals is a big part of leadership, but if your team never achieves them you aren’t really leading them.
As a result, one of the most common complaints I hear from leaders is that their team can’t seem to hit any of the goals! Even if the goals aren’t overly ambitious, missing goals becomes commonplace.
My response is always the same: “What happens if your team misses a goal?”
Almost always the answer is “nothing”. If there are no consequences, you can easily see how teams can start to take goals as aspirational and not real. “Oh well, we tried our best!” When goals are no longer a mandate, then it’s not surprising that teams miss them.
When we talk about consequences your first thought might be to fire someone. Firing people is definitely a consequence! But, it’s a consequence you can only use once and preferably not very often.
This is the challenge faced by most leaders, they don’t know how to create consequences for failure. Firing cannot be the only consequence! If you really want to push your team, you need a wide portfolio of consequences that you can use in a variety of different situations.
Here are a few categories of consequences and examples of how you might use them:
Ownership. It’s one thing to miss a goal that someone else sets for you, but it’s another to miss a goal you set for yourself. Including the team in the goal setting process increases the chances they will achieve their goals simply because they own the goals. This doesn’t mean goal setting is a democracy, as ownership can come from simple input or having some discussion. However, you do it there are no excuses for missing a goal you helped set yourself.
Peer Pressure. You do not always have to be the bad guy, often the other members of the team can be very effective consequences. For example, when a group misses a goal and has a post-mortem you can have them present the results to the entire team (or company). Post-mortems are not about assigning blame, but even so presenting failure to a large group of fellow employees is never a fun experience. The spectre of having to do that can be a powerful deterrent to missing goals as the presentation itself becomes the consequence.
Rewards for Success. It’s always a good idea to reward success, but it can also prove to be a powerful consequence. The most obvious example is promotions! If your team sees people get promoted after achieving goals, everyone will want to achieve their goals and get promoted as well. Even smaller scale rewards, like praise at an all-hands meeting, can work as well since it stings when teams miss out on that praise.
Competition. Goals can seem abstract, but if you ground them in the competitive market then they can become very real. When setting a goal, make it clear the cost to not achieving the goal and how the competition will start to win. Realizing that the goals are not just yours, but shared with competitors, will make them seem as serious as possible.
There are, of course, countless more consequences you might use! This is just a starter list to show you how many consequences exist beyond firing someone. Be creative and think about the proper consequences for your team.
Whatever you choose, remember that consequences are not punishments. The goal is not to embarrass or humble your team, but to ensure they understand the goals you set are serious. I meet plenty of teams where the leader screams insults at them when they miss goals, and those are not teams that you want to work on.
There need to be consequences for missing goals, and it’s up to you to make sure your team understands them.
For more on Leadership, see: