Welcome to lesson four in Building a Goal-Oriented Team. So far, we’ve talked about setting priorities and choosing metrics that align with those priorities. Then we covered how to share and communicate your company priorities, metrics, and goals.

The final step in building a goal-oriented team is like a sanity check for your company. You’ll want to rinse and repeat it indefinitely.

Step 4 for building a goal-orientated team: Review and optimize both your metrics and activity

Reviewing and measuring what you’re doing is essential for continued growth. Carve out time on your calendar to routinely ask several review questions. At Geckoboard, we do this quarterly.

  • Is this (process, metric, activity, etc.) working?
  • Is it helping achieve our team and company objectives?
  • Why? Or why not?
  • Was this goal unrealistic?
  • How could this be improved?
  • What should we stop doing?
  • What should we start doing?

Brainstorm with your team using data as a starting point for the conversation. Always be sure to ask “What does the data show?” From there you can generate ideas for how to improve those metrics. You’ll quickly discover if one of the metrics you’re tracking is a vanity metric.

Or perhaps you’re just tracking too many metrics and losing focus. Maybe a particular channel didn’t generate as many customers as you expected - dig into the metrics and figure out why. Find out which metrics the team found helpful and which ones were too volatile to be helpful.

Take the changes or ideas you’ve identified and prioritize them in light of your primary company objective. The method and metrics used to accomplish your objective will change over time as you gain a deeper understanding of your company and your customers and ultimately, as your business evolves. And that’s okay - optimize away.

Remember to communicate any changes (whether activity or metrics) with your team repeatedly as you change course. Use iterative design to keep your dashboard relevant and actionable.

If little or no change is necessary, great! Keep doing whatever is currently driving growth and look for opportunities to amplify that growth even more.

Building a goal-oriented team is high effort and high reward. It takes time, persistence, and a lot of hard work. You’ll likely stumble on occasion. Not everything you try will work. But your relentless effort to learn and improve will pay off with a high-growth business.

Take a quick sanity check. What metrics or activities do you need to review and optimize?

Iterate and carry on.

If your first round was unsuccessful and you don’t know where to go, drop me an email and we’ll try and help you move forward! We know it’s tough, we’ve been through it!