Qoreboard Supercharges Team Performance with Micro Goals

Industry: Apps & Software

What if you started every morning at work with a win? What effect would it have on your attitude and outlook of your job? Think about it. You would be fired up to get up in the morning and go to work. You would also find yourself sharing your excitement, motivating your team and driving your peers to hit their goals. Are you ready to make that happen for your teams?

Katy, TX (PRUnderground) September 16th, 2019

What if you started every morning at work with a win? What effect would it have on your attitude and outlook of your job? Think about it. You would be fired up to get up in the morning and go to work. You would also find yourself sharing your excitement, motivating your team and driving your peers to hit their goals.  Are you ready to make that happen for your teams?

Forget yearly, quarterly, or even monthly targets. I want you to start thinking smaller. Why? Setting micro-goals can lift team morale, increase productivity, and help everyone perform better.

Smaller targets, or micro-goals, are the way to motivate teams to make the most of every day. Micro-goals not only unlock your overall objectives but lead to macro-changes in your team culture and attitude.

What Are Micro-Goals?

Over a thirty-year Sales and Marketing career, I’ve set and received more goals than I can count. In most cases, KPIs focus on big-picture targets: quarterly, mid-year, and annual goals. Even when targets shrink, they are rarely granular enough to feel meaningful to anyone outside of the boardroom.

I want to challenge you to do things differently – to work with micro-goals.

Micro-goals represent your bigger goals but in the smallest possible units attributable to an individual. You can use them in training, target setting, performance management, and almost any way you can think of when there’s an end goal in mind.

Here’s a good example:

You are a sales manager, and your sales team consists of 50 frontline agents. Your annual sales target is 100,000 units. Saying “We have to sell 100,000 units ” only offers up a number – it doesn’t say how you’re going get there. Today’s technology makes it possible to break down that massive target into something as small as hourly targets precisely because we can track it.

Your micro-goal is 385 units a day which is only one sale per agent per hour. See how much easier that is to think about? Anyone can get their head around one sale per hour. You transformed a far-off and insurmountable target into an achievable and measurable number.

It also allows you to see where you stand every hour of every day. Knowing when you fall behind will enable you to take action to improve before it’s too late.

Apply it to your whole organization, and you won’t just hit big numbers but produce confident, empowered employees who perform every hour of every day.

How Micro-Goals Make Macro-Changes for Teams

Setting micro-goals doesn’t just apply to sales. It can make any goal more manageable to both understand and achieve.

Here’s why:

When you set micro-goals, you create opportunities to celebrate success every day – or even every hour of every day. Those successes become the fuel for employee engagement and the type of inspiration that can change people’s lives.

Think about a typical performance review with an analyst. Generally, supervisors walk through a long list of accomplishments and improvement opportunities. They point out all the things that went wrong over the period but rarely offer actionable direction on specific behaviors to change or particular actions to take.

What happens?

Without specific guidance, the analyst doesn’t know what to do to fix all the issues identified. They fall back into bad habits, and little changes.

Trying to accomplish the macro goal of perfecting the analyst’s role stands in the way of making a meaningful improvement.

Giving people coaching on one or two improvement opportunities and allowing them to focus on them until they perfect those things is another form of a micro-goal. It’s tangible, achievable and in addition to boosting their productivity, it nurtures their confidence when they experience the benefits of the change.

After they master each improvement opportunity, you move to the next and take that one on, and so on. You address each part of their daily activities piece-by-piece, and until each becomes an ingrained part of their job.

Micro-Goals Boost Long-Term Productivity

Working towards micro-goals doesn’t just lay out the process for annual or quarterly targets, it also makes progress sustainable by harnessing your team’s productivity. Productivity ebbs and flows naturally. The key isn’t to fight productivity levels but to acknowledge and build a platform for sustainability.

How does this happen?

Sustainability comes in part because achieving a goal is a circular process with two distinct phases: goal striving and achievement.

The goal striving phase is the motivating phase. It’s where we push hard to cross the finish line because we see it in the distance: there’s one goal, and we have our eyes fixed on it.

Micro-goals keep the same momentum going because crossing the finish line comes with positive achievement-related emotions like joy, pride, and interest in our work.

In other words, we reached the finish line and reaped the benefits. We’re motivated and ready to go again.

Those positive emotions are the other key to creating the sustainability we need to go after macro-goals successfully. The joy, pride, and excitement that comes with celebrating the completion of a smaller goal spur us on to do it again and again and again until we’ve surpassed even our most aspirational goals.

Find Ways to Celebrate Success Every Day

Celebrating your success is too often reserved for annual sales meetings, end-of-year office parties, or annual performance reviews.

Take the time to recognize when your team is on the right track, acknowledge the accomplishment, and then hit the ground running again.

Characteristics of a Life-Changing Micro-Goal

Micro-goals aren’t busy work. They contribute directly to goal attainment by completing a specific task that takes you one quantifiable step closer to the finish line. It doesn’t matter if it’s a soft skill or a KPI, it needs to be concrete.

Examples of specific goals might be:

· Make one sale every hour

· Sell $1,000 an hour

· Take five phone calls an hour

· Say the customer’s name on every call

Irrelevant micro-goals look like this:

· Convert more customers

· Sell more

· Make more phone calls

· Improve your VOC (Voice of Customer) score

Your goals also need to be attainable. Remember that sustainable productivity comes from the positive emotions we experience when we cross the finish line. The joy and interest double down on the motivation and prepare us to go again.

Some schools of management rebrand unattainable goal as “aspirational.” When people believe that their “aspirational” goal is not realistic, they give up before they even start.

But your most important job is to remember that your team is made up of real people. As people, they experience failure with no emotion at best and defeat and burnout at worst.

How do you know if your goal is attainable? Start by making sure it’s measurable. If you’re not assessing, you’re guessing, and guessing – not ineptitude – leads to unmet targets.

Micro-Goals Can Change Your Life

When I work with teams chasing big, “aspirational” goals, I see people come into work, try to survive the day, check the box and go home. Building skills are not at the top of their priority list. More importantly, few people are motivated or having fun.

When you set micro-goals, the first hour of the workday isn’t a warm-up. With a single goal in mind, you can hit the ground running because you’re looking right at an achievable target.

Success sets up your entire day and makes mornings not just worthwhile but magical.

Are you ready to make massive changes by setting small goals? Learn how Qoreboard can help your business develop Micro-Goals to better their employee success rates. Send your questions to: mike.midgett@qoreboard.com

About QOREBOARD, Inc.

QOREBOARD will accelerate performance and drive profit in your organization.

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