Good leaders and managers set goals for their teams and create an accountability structure to manage and measure results. Exceptional leaders take that idea one step further by allowing the team to set its own goals, which will let them feel more ownership and more accountability toward their accomplishment.

A team-driven goal-setting process can work as follows:

• Conduct a team planning meeting where you focus on two objectives:
  1. Ensure the team understands the organizational vision and strategic goals or If your organization does not have a vision and a set of strategic goals or initiatives, create them before moving forward.
  2. Ask your team to work together over the next week to identify four to eight key metrics that will drive the team toward the accomplishment of the organizational goals (i.e., number of sales meetings, number of new clients, number of referrals, customer retention rate, ). For each metric, they should also work together to set team and/or individual goals.

• Conduct a follow-up team planning meeting to review the metrics and goals your team has come up Push back if you’re uncomfortable with either the metrics or the specific goals. Make sure your team is aggressive, but not unrealistic. Just because your team is setting its own goals doesn’t mean you shouldn’t provide strong guidance when necessary.