How does a leader get his team members to engage in the team’s mission? From my experience this comes in different forms and processes. If you are in the military, like I was out of college, you learn that the leadership team gets it’s orders from the top and passed down to the team. There really is no collaboration with the team members to define the mission, the how to accomplish the mission has been trained over and over again till every member of the team can do it in their sleep and they usually are given all of the details. This top down approach probably worked in the old days of corporate life, but today I don’t think so.
Developing this team mission should not be something that the leader does in a vacuum and presents it to the team. The leader must involve the team. Helps with engagement of the team to follow the mission. The team mission statement should be one of the first things a leader should do in team building session when the team is first set up. The team is going to have to live the mission every day, so it better be something that they are committed to.
What are some of the key components that need to be considered:
- Reason for the team
- Identify the team’s “value add”
- Provide the focus of the team
- Identify the team’s purpose
The next step of insuring that the team is still engaged in the mission is to tackle the team goals, teams need goals for many reasons:
- Identify the results to be achieved
- Outline the actions need to accomplish results
- Draw up a road map for the team
In order to get to the goals, is for the team to work on identifying success criteria. Using those same teambuilding sessions – time to brainstorm on, “What does success look like for our team?” With that list the team should be able to turn them into meaningful team goals. Define them into short term and long term goals for the team. Be very careful to tackle too many goals. No more than five should be the starting point. Make sure that the goals are measureable and be able for each team member to track. Having goals and tracking them are not the end. There is the monitoring and course corrections along the way that the team should always be engaged in.
You know have now worked with your team to develop the mission that they are set out to accomplish, you have goals that they can track and with all of this the team should be very engaged in the team’s mission.
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