Dear Liz,

My business is growing. Everyone still reports to me, but I have a couple of lead people who supervise a lot of our activity.

In the past I’ve set company goals; individual employees haven’t had formal goals. I’d like to have goals for everyone in 2012. How should I proceed with that, keeping things simple but still involving the team?

Thanks,

Nathan

Dear Nathan,

It’s fantastic that you’re planning collective goal setting for 2012. I’d start by talking with your team leaders and perhaps others in your group, and architecting a simple goal-setting process with them.

You’ll start by outlining your overall goals for the company, for 2012; you could do that in a town hall meeting or via video, podcast or a memo. Then, you’ll ask each employee to set his or her own 2012 goals, giving some guidelines to help people construct good goals.

Here’s an example:

Hi folks -

Now that you know what we’re trying to achieve company-wide in 2012, I’d like you to set three to five individual 2012 goals, as well.

You might set product-development or sales goals (“I’m going to get the x15 documentation finished by March 15″), and some could be back-end infrastructure goals (“I’m going to revamp the way we organize marketing brochures, by July 1.”) One goal could be a professional development goal (“I’m going to teach myself RubyOnRails”).

If you’re stuck, come see me, Jesse or Sarah and we’ll help you come up with ideas. If you can have your three to five goals ready to talk about by Dec. 28, we’ll be able to meet in groups in early January to refine and finalize the individual goals, and put the company-wide and individual plans to bed by Jan. 31.

As fun as it is to set ambitious targets, let’s be as realistic as possible and keep our goals achievable, by focusing on things that will best help us meet next year’s company goals . Your goals can be measurable (“I’m going to increase traffic to our site by forty percent by 12/31/12″), or not — some things are hard to measure but still vitally important.

One of my goals next year is to participate as much in our recruiting efforts as it takes to fill all of our 2012 job openings within 45 days from the new-hire approval (measurable) with a person whose presence makes a noticeable impact on our success (not so measurable, but we’ll know it when we have it). Everyone on our team is a huge contributor to our success, and we’re not going to back away from our hiring standards as we grow.

Let me know if you have questions about our goal-setting project, and enjoy your weekend.

Best,

Nathan

The awesome thing about group goal-setting is that you get solid, useful goals and a ton of team building as well. Stay close enough to make sure your trusted supervisors aren’t running the process; if you’re going to ask your team members for their ideas, you’ll want to honor those as much as possible, and only revise them after thoughtful discussion.

Happy goal setting!

Best,

Liz