Connecting Team Members to the End Goal
Loriana Sekarski
Loriana Sekarski is the founder and president of BONSAI, a consulting company that transforms leaders (and businesses) into the best version of themselves. Outside of BONSAI, Loriana serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University's graduate student program. Additionally, she's fine-tuning her passion project, TakeFlight, a program that addresses domestic abuse within the Christian community.
All too often, leaders of organizations ask their teams to do things without giving them the proper context or direction toward the bigger goal. It’s like asking your team to play the childhood game of pinning the tail on the donkey but hiding the donkey in another room. If you’re not familiar with the game, it starts with a poster of a donkey without a tail. Kids are blindfolded, handed a paper tail with a piece of tape on it, spun in circles, and then asked to pin the tail on the donkey. Sometimes people in the crowd shout directions to help, and you end up with tails taped all over the donkey and some not even close to it.
It’s a fun game for childhood parties, but it’s costly to organizations.
When our team members (paid staff or volunteers) don’t know the end goals or why tasks they’re doing are important in achieving the goal, their engagement level drops. Gallup found that managers are 71% responsible for employees having clear expectations, and helping your team understand how they contribute to the end goal is an important piece. They need to know where the donkey is and why he needs the tail.
If they don’t have this clarity, they may struggle to prioritize the tasks assigned to them. They aren’t likely to make suggestions and may only put forth minimal effort because they aren’t sure how everything connects and why what they’re doing matters.
Your job as a leader is to share the goals and provide the context for your team.
Do a Quick Check With a Few Simple Questions
This week, go ask each of your team members:
- What are your top priorities this week?
- How does what you’re doing connect to our end goal? What is that end goal?
- How does your role fit with the rest of the team?
If they can’t answer those questions, you know you have some work to do.
Share the End Goal
Your team can’t help you reach the end goal if they don’t know what it is, so make the donkey visible to everyone. The end goal is often obvious to us as leaders because we’re in meetings talking about it regularly or we’re planning strategies to achieve it. Because it’s second nature to us as leaders, we might overlook the fact that it’s not as clear to everyone else. You might know exactly where the donkey is, but if your team doesn’t, they can’t help you pin his tail back on.
"It’s a fun game for childhood parties, but it’s costly to organizations."
Connect Your Team to the Goal
This is the most critical concept. If they can see the end goal but have no idea how they contribute to achieving it, it’s like seeing the donkey but not having a tail to play the game. They see others playing, but they can’t join. In response, they might walk away in frustration or stick around but lose focus or interest in the game. If your team members know the end goal but not where their role fits in reaching it, they can end up frustrated and disconnected. They might have all sorts of ideas for improvement, but they haven’t been invited to play the game, so they stay quiet instead.
You need to show each team member two things:
- How they contribute to the overall goal.
- How they fit in with the team.
Here are some practical tips:
- Twice a month, share the overall connection that each team member has to the goal.
- Each week, check on their top priorities. Don’t tell them—ask them what their priorities are.
- As you delegate things, share why the task is critical and how it fits in with the big picture.
When team members know how their role fits with the team as a whole and how they contribute to the end goal, they’re more engaged overall. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to give them that context and communicate it regularly. If we don’t, we’re asking them to pin the tail on a donkey they can’t even see.
