The majority of problems within teams and organizations comes from unclear goals. Once the Goals are agreed upon and known, developing the Roles and Procedures can happen.

Without the Goal you will have a failure, or if the work does get done it’s late, over budget, below quality standards, and people are angry and demotivated.

I recently led this Team Development activity with a company of Environmental Consultants, and it created a great discussion about the knowledge and lack of knowledge about the goals of the Organization and the people who work there.

TeamWork and Communication. Create-Learning team building & Leadership www.create-learning

What’s The Goals of the company & how do you fit?

Objective
  • Complete quality work on time, within standards
  • Create a discussion about the companies overall goal
  • Clarity of why the company is in business
  • Enable employees to make decisions that are aligned with the Organizational goals
  • Employees to discover how their work, is aligned with the goals of the company
Materials
  • Flip chart paper
  • Markers
Group Size
  • Works best with teams of 6 or less
Preparation
  • Take some time and research the company see if you can determine their goals. You can find some version of this on their website and materials.
  • Make sure you have flip chart paper and plenty of markers
  • If you want to get fancy, you can have the questions written beforehand or on a power point slide
TeamWork and Communication. Create-Learning team building & Leadership expert michael cardus
Instructions or Guidelines
  1. Break people into teams of 6 or less there are a variety of ways to do this. I suggest you try to mix people who don’t work together; that will create a richer discussion.
  2. This is a 2 part activity, in their groups, they are going to answer the following two questions. Then create a shared visual/ metric/ representation of all your responses as a team. The shared information must be visual with no words or letters.
The questions.
  1. What is the Goal of the company? The larger organizational goal, why we are in business.
  2. How does your role within the company contribute to this goal? Create a shared visual/ metric/ representation of all your responses as a team.

Allow for ~15 – 20 minutes of discussion and drawing. Walk around answer any questions and listen to the discussions going on.

After the 20 minutes ask the teams to take turns sharing their responses to the 2 questions. Facilitate any question and answer time – then tape the flip charts to the wall so everyone can see the answers.

Connections and Concepts

TeamWork and Communication. Create-Learning team building & Leadership www.create-learning (36)Goals drive everything a company. Many believe that people ‘should just know’  the goal.

Having a discussion and hearing from the employees what they see as the goal and how they think their work contributes to this goal will strengthen the work that everyone does.

Keeping it visual will also keep it simple. The goals should not be too complicated the visual representation will keep people engaged in the discussions.

The power of this activity is in the discussions that happen, keep them talking and gather the information for people to use later.

 Learning & Application

Now that everyone has shared, and you have the images hanging on the wall, it’s time to see what we can do with this information. Here are some discussion questions.

  • In your small teams, how did you reach agreement on the goal of the company?
  • In your small teams, how did you reach agreement on how your work contributes to the company goal?
  • Looking at these representations, what commonalities did we discover?
  • If we all knew, with certainty the Company Goal – how would these images be different? How would your contribution to the goal be different?
  • What about this activity was useful to you?
  • What about this activity was useful to the company?
  • What is one step that the management can take to make the goals clearer?
  • What is one step that you can adopt to understand the goals better?
  • How will we know that this has happened?
  • When can we go-and-see?
  • Once those steps are accomplished, what will be better about your work?
  • Once those steps are accomplished, what will be better about the company?
  • What is already happening that shows up progress is being made?
 Variations

Instead of the company ask about the Department you work in, the project you are working on, the people you work with, etc