Most of my leadership and career coaching sessions in 2024 were linked to navigating a challenging reality of constant change and restructures. The challenges included: communicating the change, team motivation, managing emotions, workload, driving career growth in an ever-changing organisational matrix, preventing burnout or looking for a new job as a result of organisational restructure. In the context of 2025, effective goal setting for your teams has become more critical and complex than ever before. If you are a leader and working parent, setting clear and meaningful goals can help you navigate uncertainty, empower the team, ensure their focus and success as well as directly influence your well-being and presence at home. In my latest blog, I would like to share a few points to help you approach effective team goal setting.
1. Consider Business Strategy and New Business Context
If I had been writing this article a few years back, I would have recommended that you start by setting long term business goals alongside strategic yearly goals for your team. However, times have changed and it doesn’t seem to be enough now. As the world is shaped by transformative changes of AI integration in every industry and economic pressures to do more with less are causing constant change and restructures to stay competitive.
As a leader, I encourage you to reflect on:
- AI integration opportunities in your team to increase efficiency with repetitive tasks or idea generation as well as the use of data analytics to improve decision making,
- Handling uncertainty with flexibility. While you are setting the goals with your team, allow enough space for flexibility and changes of priority.
- Being mindful of your team’s wellbeing and engagement as handling change can be challenging, therefore you may want to create opportunities to build relationships as a team and between individuals.
Aligning your team goals to a wider business strategy and the reality we live in, can allow them to deliver great results despite challenging circumstances.
2. Strike the Balance Between Realistic and Stretching Goals
Understanding business goals as well as knowing your team’s capabilities, resources and ambitions can help you set the balance between realistic and stretching goals. Realistic goals can build confidence and stretching goals can push your team out of their comfort zone, encouraging growth and innovation. However, if you set too easy targets for individuals that may lead to complacency, whereas too ambitious goals can lead to disengagement or burnout.
In preparation for your team goal setting for 2025 meetings reflect on the following questions:
- What are your business and team priorities this year?
- What could be a specific and realistic goal for your team in the next 3, 6, 9,12 months?
- What could be a stretch goal for your team?
- When you think about individual members, what do you know about their ambitions, interests, personalities and personal circumstances? Would you need to encourage them to consider more ambitious goals or shall you support them more in prioritising their goals as they tend to take too much on themselves?
- What could be future skills or capabilities that you need to develop as a team or individual member and how can you include this development in your goals?
3. Engage your Team
Once you have completed your reflective questions, engage your team. Use your team meetings and 1:1s to communicate business priorities, brainstorm and calibrate goals. You can have a chance to notice any reservations unknown ambitions or interests. Engaging your team in goal setting is going to increase their motivation and commitment, allowing you to get to know their perspective. During your 1:1s, you will have a chance to discuss personal goals in detail, using your organisation-specific method. You may want to also refer to my blog from last year regarding setting SMART goals for further insight.
4. Communicate and Support
2025 will certainly bring its challenges and being a leader means supporting your team through that. Therefore, I would like to share a few final tips to keep your team motivated:
- Communicate the priorities for your team to support focus and alignment.
- Appreciate the impact of the team on the business results to enhance the feeling of purpose.
- Recognise the team and individuals for their small and big victories
- Use coaching to support reframing mistakes as lessons to learn from.
- Have regular 1:1s to stay connected to your team.
- Be a role model of flexibility (don’t confuse it with being perfect), share your ways of balancing priorities, using relationships in the organisation, staying organised and focused.
If you feel you need more support in goal setting for 2025 and supporting your team as a leader while maintaining work-life balance, please book a discovery session to discuss how coaching can help.