Abstract

The establishment of a goal is one of the most important processes an individual team should perform. It gives the team a sense of direction, and brings the individual members together for a common purpose. The goal gives the team a reference point. They can measure their progress, and their success, based on where they are in relation to reaching the goal.

This paper will examine team goals, starting with a discussion of goals, what they are and what they do. We will look at the broad goal setting process, from the goals established by executives, down through management, and the final goals established by the teams. A look at the influence of the individual team members have on goal setting, and finally, we will see how goals can be used as a yardstick to determine of the measure or failure of the team.

The Importance of Goals to the Success of Work Teams

The Pareto Principle states that eighty percent of problems arise from twenty percent of the causes. The vital few and the trivial many. Setting clear team goals is one of the vital few. Teams require and deliver many different forms of information. Katzenbach and Smith (1994) provide an excellent chart (see Figure 1) covering team basics. The chart illustrates the relationship between the many areas variables that have to be taken into consideration for a team to be effective. This paper will concentrate on only one of these many areas -- goals.

What is a Goal and What Does It Do
Katzenbach and Smith (1994) define an individual's goal as an ideal. It is a desired place toward which people are working, a state of affairs that is valued. A team's goal is a future state of affairs desired by enough members of a team to motivate the team to work toward its achievement. Team members share an ideal and unique image of the future accomplishments when they work together. This image tells team members how their values and interests will be served by the accomplishments they are striving to achieve. The goal of the group creates a vision that focuses their efforts.

In a team setting, the goals of both the team and the individual exist, and the group goals must be relevant to the individual goals of the members. Team members usually try to achieve both individual and team goals. The degree to which they can accomplish this has an effect on the success of the team.

Goals perform several functions. The accomplishments of a team are evaluated by their attainment of the goal. The goals must be clear and there must be a system to measure progress being made toward the goal. With a clear goal, the inevitable conflicts within the team can be more easily resolved if everyone knows what they are trying to achieve. The conflicts can be resolved with the goal in mind.

Probably the most important function of a goal is that it directs and motivates the team. Without a common goal, the individual goals, each unique, will have to be followed, since there is no other guidance. Each team member will attempt to accomplish individual goals in order to fulfill a need for personal satisfaction.

According to Harrington (1994), goals do more than just give a team a sense of direction. As shown in Table 1, the characteristics of a team with a goal is what every company seeks. This table clearly illustrates the desirable characteristics of a team, along with the undesirable characteristics that should be avoided. Many other factors will contribute to these desirable characteristics, but a goal will have to be established.

Lack of goals produces unnecessary frustrations for the team and individual members. Katzenbach and Smith (1994) describe some of these frustrations as illustrated in Table 2. As with the good and bad team characteristics discussed above, these frustrations should be avoided since they will always hinder the teams' productivity.

The Broad Goal Setting Process
A team must have a goal. The goal must be consistent with the stated and demonstrated goals set by executives and managers. To arrive at group goals, we need to look at the overall corporate goals.

The Executive Council of Florida Power and Light (the first American company to win the Deming Prize in 1989) spent four grueling meetings to produce the following twenty-seven word corporate goal: "During the next decade, we want to become the best managed Electric Utility in the United States and an excellent company overall and be recognized as such" (Walton, 1990, p. 30). This goal is concise, clear and can be measured to verify when and if the goal is reached.

Executives have broad values to consider when establishing their goals, as opposed to the individual employee teams. These values are outlined by Fisher (1993) in Table 3. This table illustrates the many considerations that must be taken into account by executives, and why their goals must be broad. They can not set specific goals as this would limit the goal setting process for managers and teams in different strategic business units.

Executives tend to identify large problems and goals (Cupello, 1995). These large goals must be broken down and examined by managers. Here is where the strategic business unit goals are formed. Goals such as "Reduce the cost of poor quality for the X product line by fifty percent over the next five years," or "Reduce the cancellation rate of job contracts by fifty percent over the next two years," are developed (Juran and Gryna, 1988). Managers must be certain their goals are the same as corporate goals.

With well established goals at the corporate and middle management levels, individual team goals must be set. Team members must redefine management's broad goals, keeping in mind that the team's goals must support the goals of executives and managers. If the team was formed for a specific purpose, a vague goal will already be present. However, this vague goal must be carefully examined by the team members, so they will have clear expectations. Juran and Gryna (1993) list a variety of resources available to a team for use in developing their goals. Among them are:

• Pareto analysis and fishbone diagrams of repetitive alarm signals.
• Proposals from key insiders -- managers, supervisors or professionals.
• Proposals from employee suggestions.
• Field study of users' needs and costs.
• Data on performance of our products versus competitors'.
• Comments of key people outside the company -- customers, vendors, journalists, and critics.
• Findings and comments of government regulators, independent laboratories, academic researchers, and reformers.

For the team to be most productive, management should give the team members the training and skills to utilize these resources. Many of these resources require "people" skills for effective extraction of the desired information.

Several considerations should be kept in mind during individual team goal establishment. Fisher (1993) gives the following:

• Meeting customer needs is our obsession. Their needs drive our actions.
• Our work should create wealth for customers, stakeholders, and employees.
• We balance short-term business needs with long-term business strategy.
• Everyone is a business partner.
• We eliminate artificial barriers so that each individual can make their maximum contribution.
• We take courageous actions.
• We add value and eliminate waste.
• We keep things simple and use common sense.
• We are antibureaucratic. We manage systems, policies, and methods and are not managed by them.
• We are quick, flexible, and responsive.

These considerations describe more than individual team goal establishment -- they are also a plan for the team. If they are incorporated into the goal, an effective format for the team's plan of action will already be developed and in place.

The teams' goals must support corporate and business strategic unit goals, as well as management expectations. Management must ensure goals are reasonable. While management should view their job to lead, not manage the team (Byham, 1988), they should have a good understanding of how teams will set their own goals. Both Johnson and Johnson (1994) and Zander (1974) suggest that a team goal is more important than the individual team member's goals. However, they also state that the team's success might be more important than the success of the company as a whole. The team will strive to achieve success even if their goal accomplishment may not be the best for the company. Managers must ensure the goals of the team are the same as corporate goals.

Research by Zander (1974) shows that managers tend to set unrealistically high goals for their employees. This process forces employees into failure. Regardless of the goal a manager sets, the team will develop goals of its own. By setting the "official" goal too high, managers may actually induce the teams to set their own aspirations below the level they are capable of attaining.

The simple solution to prevent this from happening is to include the team members in the goal setting process.

Influence of Team Members on Establishing Goals
The make-up of individual team members will have a tremendous influence on the goals established by the team. Zander (1974) developed a model to explain this relationship. He said that most managers consider an employee to be a self-centered striver, and his interest lies principally in taking care of himself. When an individual has the opportunity to set goals for himself, his decision depends on two opposing emotions -- his need for achievement and his fear of failing.

Basically, the two opposing emotions work like this: People with strong motives for success tend to choose goals that are challenging. The goals are not so easy as to make success certain, since that would not be much of a challenge, nor so difficult as to make failure certain. People with strong motives to avoid failing tend to choose goals at the extremes of difficult -- either so easy that they will be assured of success, or so difficult that they can say there was never a chance of success anyway. Any goal reached will be a compromise of these two conflicts.

Teams, according to Zander (1974), operate in a similar manner. When the members have a strong desire for the team to succeed, they tend to choose realistic goals and work hard for them. When the members have a strong desire to avoid failure, they tend to choose either very easy or very hard goals, and may not work as hard. As with an individual, teams with a low desire to succeed do not perform as well as teams with a high desire to succeed. Teams with a strong desire to avoid failure do more poorly than teams with a low desire to avoid failure. To say that an individual has a strong desire for team success means that he/she will feel satisfied if his/her group accomplishes its' goal; a strong fear of failure means he/she will feel embarrassed if his/her group does not succeed.

The main difference between individual goal setting and team goal setting is the assumption that individuals with similar goals will carry these goals with them into a team setting. This is not necessarily the case since the desire for team success is not evident at the inception of the team, but develops from the goals of the individuals. In a team setting, the particular circumstances may not be present to encourage the development of high goals if the individuals do not have high goals.

Measuring the Teams' Progress Toward Goal Attainment
It does little good to have goals if there is no way to measure progress toward attainment of these goals (Walton, 1990). Juran and Gryna (1988, 1993) developed a list of criteria to be met by those who establish goals. The top of the list is that goals must be measurable. There must be some way for the team to check their progress toward attaining the goal, and to know if the goal has been reached.

Historical performance is widely used in the manufacturing field as a basis for measuring goals. A goal for the printing department to "Reduce scrap by ten percent within the next two years," could be easily measured by existing waste reports. Using historical performance is usually met with the least resistance, since systems are generally already in place for gathering and reporting the information. There would be an economic benefit in having such a system already in place.

If there is an existing flaw in the system that is gathering date to use for historical performance, this flaw will be retained and used against the team. Many manufacturing companies will try to "hide" waste in order to appease upper management. If a team did reduce waste by ten percent, and the waste figures were already distorted by ten percent, the goal was reached and nobody will ever realize it.

Current performance is also used as a basis for measuring goals. A goal to "Reduce the tolerance of plate thickness to +/- .001 inch," can be checked by physical testing and inspections. A nontangable goal of "Improving the quality of our product by one hundred percent," can be verified through customer complaints, returned products, field rework, or direct customer contact. The team will have immediate feedback on their progress and be reasonably confident of the accuracy of the data. A new system may have to be developed or a different procedure put into place to obtain the necessary data.

Another basis for measuring the progress of goal attainment is to use the market. The practice of benchmarking is widely used today for comparing one's company to another, or one department to another, etc. If the team's goal is to become the quality leader in the marketplace, the members should look to the quality of their competitors for a reference standard. While many industries have standards representative of all companies, it would be difficult to obtain specific information about a competitor. An alternative would be to ask your customers directly how your product compares to the competition. We have all received telephone calls from a market research company wanting to know what we think about a breakfast cereal, or our favorite brand of soft drink. This information might have been used for a team to check on their progress toward attainment of their goal.

Success or Failure in Goal Attainment
Finally, we need to take a brief look at what happens when a team reaches its goal, or does not reach its goal. Traditional wisdom says effective managers will ensure goals are clear, and appropriate consequences will be forthcoming, if the goal is not reached (Brewer, et al., 1994). But is this the best way to approach team performance evaluation?

Walton (1990) describes a system typical of many companies. They use a form of policy deployment known as Management by Objectives -- a performance rating system for managers in which a person sets goals in consultation with his manager and is rewarded a bonus based on the extent these goals are fulfilled. Management by objectives leads to vague or low goals, since everything is based on achievement of the goals. If managers set an unobtainable goal, or a vague goal that they only can evaluate, we have the effect of a team with no goal (in addition to a demoralizing work atmosphere). A better system is needed to determine "who merits an increase in merit," (Deutsch, 1979).

Bridgestone was one of the early companies to develop a goal setting reward system that did not punish team members if the goal was not reached (Walton, 1990). If a team follows a plan and does not achieve results, they are still looked upon favorably, if they had a good plan. The shortcomings of the team are a trigger for analysis and countermeasures. Efforts are made to determine why the team did not reach its goal. Several possibilities exist, among them the fact that management did not do an adequate job of forming the team, or they did not provide adequate resources for the team to reach its goal. Whatever the reason, the team is not punished.

An environment is maintained that encourages teams to take risks. New ideas are introduced, considered and pursued without fear of failing. Nobody ever fails. Management knows that the employees will set high goals for themselves, if they have no fear of being punished for setting such high goals. As mentioned earlier, teams that strive for success perform much better than teams that try to avoid failure.

According to Zander (1974), one of the surest ways a team can develop a strong fear of failure is to have failed often in the past. Repeated failure leads team members to see themselves and others as less helpful, to feel less responsible for their team's outcome and to say it is less important for them to belong to a team. All these effects tend to decrease a teams' desire to succeed and increase their desire to not fail. A team can sometimes work themselves out of this cycle by lowering their goals. But teams that have their goals established for them and have nothing to do with setting their own goals do not even have this option.

As opposed to teams with a high desire to succeed, members of teams trying to avoid failure tend to work longer hours, enjoy their job less, have less pride in their organization, blame others to a greater degree, and care less about success. These teams set very high goals and do not care about reaching the goal. Since they could not meet their goal, motivation fell and efficiency dropped, contributing to another poor performance, another cycle of failures (Zander, 1974).

Conclusion
Goal establishment is critical for the success of the team. Without it, the team is almost assured to perform at less than their potential. Implied goals, or goals handed down and accepted without consideration by the team, will also produce less than desired results. An environment that encourages teams to take chances, set high goals, will develop successful teams. Clear goals are one of the vital few.

References

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Byham, W., and Cox, J. (1988). Zapp! The lightning of empowerment. New York: Ballantine Books.

Cupello, James M. (1995). The gentle art of chartering a team. Quality Progress, 28, 84-85.

Deutsch, Morton (1979). Education and distributive justice: Some reflections on grading systems. American Psychologist, 34, 391.

Fisher, Kimball (1993). Leading self-directed work teams: A guide to developing new team leadership skills. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Harrington, H. James (1994). Of tails and teams: A fable for children and ceo's. Milwaukee, WI: ASQC Quality Press.

Johnson, D., and Johnson, F. (1994). Joining together: Group theory and group skills. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Juran, J. M., and Gryna, F. (1988). Quality control handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Juran, J. M., and Gryna, F. (1993). Quality planning and analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Katzenbach, J., and Smith, D. (1994). The wisdom of teams. New York: HarperBusiness.

Walton, Mary (1990). Deming management at work. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Zander, Alvin F. (1974). Productivity and group success: Team spirit vs. the individual achiever. Psychology Today, 8, 64-68.