An essential element of team design is goal structure. How are you going to structure the goals in your team, thus far in team design. We've talked about how big your team should be team size. We talked about composition in terms of diversity surface level and deep level diversity. Now we're gonna talk about goal structure. Now, if you had an opportunity to engage in our inspiring and motivating individuals course, we talked extensively about goals. We talked about how to set smart goals. We talked about the advantages of smart goals. We talked about the disadvantages of smart goals. Some of those same themes will show up here. But what we're learning probably over the last five to ten years, is that what's true for individuals, what works for individuals in terms of goal setting Is not always the same that works for teams. And so we're gonna spend a little bit of time thinking about and talking about what is the best optimal way to design and structure goals in the team so that my team performs at its best. I wanna start with reflecting on and thinking about your own teams. So think of the team that you're working in currently, or if you're not working in a team right now, one that you've worked in most recently. And the question that I want you to answer is first, what are the goals, not necessarily the individuals within the team, but for the team? What are the team goals for this unit that you're working in or that you recently worked in? And then in your opinion, based on your experience, are those team goals effective? Why, or why not? Let's start with that reflection. I want you to go to the discussion forum. Share your experiences. Read and learn from other classmate's experience. And try to figure out what is it about the goals in the team, what is it about how those goals were set that either enabled the goals to really be effective and help to drive team performance. Or maybe in some cases the goals actually got in the way of the team's performance. Try to discern what makes for effective goal setting in teams. And then we'll come back and I'll share with you some of the insights, the tactics, the strategies that we are learning and teaching about how to set goals in teams. So that your team is performing at an excellent level above what even any individual team member might expect. Okay, so you had a chance to engage in the discussion forums, share with your classmates, learn from your classmates in terms of goal setting in teams. What I wanna do now is revisit some of the fundamental principles that we talked about in our course on inspiring and motivating individuals. I want to revisit some of those core concepts and share with you how, in some cases, we actually find differences when we look at teams and goal-setting in teams. One of the classic recommendations that we often give for setting goals with individuals is to ensure that the goals are smart. And what do we mean by smart? Specific, measurable, agreed upon, reasonable and time bound. And a question that we asked you in that course is how do we make our goals even smarter? In the last few years we've been doing research on smart goals and teams. In particular the specific dimension of the smart frame work. And what I want to share with you is some data that a colleague of mine, Jennifer Nargin out at Arizona State, myself, and a few others. What we discovered, when we looked at specific goals in teams and the impact on performance, and in particular the differences we found with regard to whether the team was performing what was a simple routine task or a complex, novel task. And differences we found of whether or not we were talking about a specific learning goal or a performance goal. So just to be clear a performance goal in this case might be to produce a certain number of widgets. A learning goal might be to learn something new wave about a particular aspect of the task. And we can set goals both for the performance and the outcomes, the outputs. We can also set goals for learning and in organizations and mini organizations around the world, we see that organizations have goals for performance. And we see that organizations have goals for learning as well. Developmental objectives, for example. If you have development plans in your organization. And so what we learned in this study is the impact of the specific aspect of the goal dependent both on the complexity of the task and what type of goal we were talking about. So what you you see here is team performance on the y-axis and than whether its a simple routine task and a complex task on the x-axis. But than you see two different lines. Not not surprisingly both lines have a negative slope. Meaning that as the task gets more complex teams on average perform worse. That's not surprising and here we have set the average of team performance at zero. And so you see the difference around that average. It's pretty intuitive that as the task gets more complex the team's gonna have a harder time performing that task. So that's why you see that negative effect. But look at the difference between these two lines. In particular, what we find is that if the team is given a specific learning goal, they actually perform worse than teams that are given specific performance goals. Now you might think that the reason for that is because well, one goal focuses on performance, and that's what we're measuring the team on. And the other goal focuses on learning. Well, what we actually find is that whether we look at performance, or whether we look at whether or not the team learns, we find the exact same effect. So why is that? Well what we find is that when we create very specific learning goals. So, an example of a very specific learning goal would be learn about x, y, z aspect of the team task, okay? Versus a more general learning goal which would be do your best to learn about the task generally. Something like that. Those specific learning goals, when in teams, focus individual team members attention on very narrow elements of their tasks. And in particular, they make the team members work much more individually than as a team, which means we see reduced levels of coordination. We see reduced levels of communication across team members. And we just see less teamwork generally which in that really complex task we miss opportunities for learning an innovation. Because it's in those complex tasks where we most need team members to be communicating, coordinating, really sharing their information, their diverse Inputs, ideas, backgrounds to really create that learning opportunity and innovation and creativity. It's in that complex task where that coordination communication teamwork is most important. But by having this super specific learning goal, we narrow individuals attention to their specific aspect of the task, thus missing out on all the value of the teamwork. And so what we are now recommending is if you're going to set a specific performance goal, perfect, fine. But if your focus is on learning you want in teams to set a more general learning goal. And not be as specific as we would if we were applying the smart framework to learning in teams. So that's one really important implication for you in managing your teams. Learning versus performance. Simple versus complex tasks. Specific versus more generalized goals. Now another element that we talked extensively about when we looked at goal setting with individuals, is goal difficulty. How difficult or challenging should we make the goals? And you'll remember this study that we shared with you. Where, when individuals accept the goal, when they're really committed to that goal, what we find is that as the goals get more difficult, we find that performance increases significantly with goal difficulty. So as the goals become a greater stretch, more challenging, when I'm really committed to that goal, my performance increases. But what happens when we take that to the team? What we actually find is it depends on the personalities in the team. So, for example, easy versus difficult goals. And here, I'm looking at the team's ability to adapt to changing conditions in their environment. What we actually find is that if the team is assigned or set really challenging difficult goals, that improves team adaptation and performance. Only if the team has what we call a learning orientation. Which is really very akin or similar to a personality dimension. Learning orientation is the team understands that it's gonna make some mistakes, but it's committed to learning from them. And has an open mindset to to taking risks, to trying new things, all in service of learning. When you combine that high learning orientation with difficult goals, you get team adaptation. You get better team performance in these dynamic situations. But if you combine those difficult goals with the absence of that learning orientation, you actually see worse team adaptation and performance. And that's akin to what we find when we look at the counter to a learning orientation, again, very much like a personality dimension, performance orientation. This is when the team as a whole is focused on proving to other people, maybe the boss, how well it can perform or avoiding making mistakes, the antithesis to a learning orientation. When you have difficult goals, combined with a really high performance orientation, you actually find the team is less able to adapt and perform. What's the impact or implication for you? If you as a manager or leader of your team, if you want to improve performance by setting difficult, challenging stretch goals, you better sure that your team is cultivating and embracing a learning mindset, a growth mindset, a learning orientation, as opposed to that performance orientation. Where they're trying to avoid making mistakes, or avoid looking silly, or trying to prove to other people how good they are. You want them to be focused on taking a few risks, experimenting, being open to new ideas, and focused on learning, if you're really gonna stretch those goals, make those more challenging. Now, when we talked about goal difficulty previously, we also talked about what happens when individuals reject their goals. They're not as committed to those goals, and what we find is that when your not as committed as goal difficulty increases, that goal difficulty actually decreases your performance. Not too surprising. We find something similarly interesting in teams where when the team is committed to its goal, performance generally at the team level improves. But what we find is that is especially true when team members are extremely interdependent with one another. Interdependence is something you'll talk at length with Maxim about in one of our future upcoming sessions as interdependence in teams. What we mean is I can't get my work done without you. If we are really interdependent on one another, we can't get our work done without each other, okay. The extent at which your team is highly interdependent makes it ever more important that everybody in the team is highly committed to that goal. If you want goals to drive performance in you team.
