Step by step guide for setting, communicating and achieving objectives

As a leader, you’d think one core part of your role would be straightforward: making sure your team knows what to do, and that they can do it.

But anyone who’s been in charge of a team can tell you within those two points lies huge potential complexity. What makes an objective fair and achievable? How can you be sure you and everyone in your team is on the same page? What does your team need — and not need — from you to do their jobs?

The detailed answers to these questions vary widely depending on your specific situation. But there are simple tips and processes that can help you solve them in your role. Here, with help from public servants and experts, we run through some key steps in the process.

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How to set objectives that work

Andrea Migone, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto and a former director of research and outreach at the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, said that it’s important, firstly, for middle managers not to accept their resourcing or other circumstances as immutable.

“You shouldn’t be shy about trying to figure out how [your] team needs to be augmented or modified to actually achieve” the goals you’ve been given from above, he said.

Public servants don’t operate in a vacuum: your objectives need to gel with the overall goals of your organisation.

As such, It’s crucial, too, Migone said, to look for links with other teams who may share the same aims. Ideally, this would mean building genuinely cross-departmental or cross disciplinary teams. But for a middle manager, it might just mean building informal networks across other teams and understanding how your objectives gel with theirs.

Ingrid Bergmann, a coach working with senior and emerging leaders in the Canadian public service, calls this “situational awareness”.

She recommends starting close by, within your office, and ensuring you’re regularly checking in with different colleagues to understand what they’re working on. You might then look to gradually advance to finding out who your counterparts are in other ministries, before moving further afield — for example, someone in a regional government might look to another province.

How to communicate these objectives effectively to your team

“The most important thing that you can do is stop giving orders to your team, and [instead] give them intentions,” said Migone.

Members of your team, Migone said, are going to have specialisms, and will often know more about the detail than you do yourself. That means setting clear intentions, and then letting them figure out the details according to their particular knowledge.

Part of this, he added, is negotiating with your superiors to ensure your team has the proper spread of expert knowledge for the task at hand. “If I need to do a legislative change, and you don't give me any lawyers, that’s going to be a problem, right?”

Bergmann echoed this. She said that a well-versed piece of advice repeated to her by senior public servants runs thus: “I tell people roughly what it is I want done, the time I want it done by and then I release them and ask for regular check-ins to keep the project on track as things evolve.”

A deadline is important for defining the scope of the task, and managees need to get the overall intention. But the detail can often be left up to them. For Bergmann, this is linked to the importance of delegating tasks, even where you might have expertise in them.

“If you become a key person,” in the carrying out of a specific task, she said, “none of your people are going to be able to carry on without you.

Empowering your team to achieve objectives

For Migone, in a public service environment where levels of accountability can be scary and lead to risk aversion, an important role for a team leader is to take responsibility and give the team cover — while then celebrating their successes.

“An important characteristic of successful leaders is that they don't care about the fairy dust,” he said, “you take the bullet for your team.”

Meanwhile, he said, a leader has a “storytelling” role. You can keep the team looking “upwards and downwards”, beyond their day to day tactical view, and “keep them excited”.

Meanwhile, for Bergmann, coaching and mentoring your team — whether doing it yourself or bringing in outside help — is crucial. And to do that well, you need to set yourself up with a coach and other supportive relationships.

She recommends establishing for yourself both a coaching relationship — someone who can ask you the right questions to help you work through a situation — and a mentor, who can provide you with some of the right answers from their own experience.

Meanwhile, you need to find a person or people who can serve as your confidant and someone who can serve as a contrarian — who will “kick the tires” on your ideas.

Having established these relationships for yourself, you can help to establish them for each member of your team.

Key takeaways:

• When defining objectives for your team, always consider how they connect with broader organisational goals
• In order to communicate these objectives, give your team “intentions” rather than orders — trust them to work out the details of how to reach the objective themselves
• Coaching and mentoring your team is key for bringing the best out of them, whether you do it yourself or seek outside help
• Leaders should use their “storytelling” role to keep teams excited and encourage them to look beyond the day to day

(Picture credit: Unsplash)