Goal Setting Group Exercises

Group goal-setting exercises can be useful in many situations. From motivating an office's salespeople to improve sales, to motivating a soccer team's members to practice with extra fire and pay more attention to what they eat and how many hours they sleep each night, goals of a group have a power that shouldn't be underestimated.

Purpose

Exercises to bring groups together to set out a goal serve to coax people to share their beliefs, hopes and fears about a given topic. The Institute for Culture and Ecology--a nonprofit that conducts programs to foster strong interconnections in communities and ecosystems--gives this fresh perspective on the rationale for coming together as a group to set common goals: "Collaboration helps pool intellectual and physical resources, and converts potentially adversarial relationships into mutually beneficial ones." In other words, setting goals highlights common ground and then harnesses the group's energy to achieve a goal-related to this common ground.

Benefits

With a group goal, a team becomes results driven, according to the book "Teamwork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong." Team members are unified through their commitment. And through the goal-setting process, it is possible to build a climate of thrust through discussing values.

Exercise: Find Group's Purpose

Because your group is composed of individuals, your group goal-setting exercise will have to identify commonly held beliefs. Have everyone share why it is they are in the group. Ask, what motivated them to join and to remain. You'll get many different answers. After polling all group members and writing down all responses--with no names attached--on a large sheet of paper or whiteboard, ask people to vote on which one or two goals best matches with the group's mission. According to the Institute for Culture and Ecology, "If collaborations are to be successful, it is essential that all stakeholders reach a clear, explicit, mutual and preferably written understanding of the purpose and focus of their collaborative effort before proceeding further."

Exercise: Set Group's Targets

Once you all know why you're together, you are prepared to set out what you'd like to do together. Set two types of goals. First, discuss an overall improvement goal, which with enough hard work and dedication is within reach. An example of this kind of goal could be a soccer team's goal of scoring 60 goals during a season, or a company's goal of growing its number of customers by 20 percent. Second, discuss a benchmarked goal, where you state what position you'd like to hold against your field of competitors. For this goal you might choose you'd like to be rated by Consumer Reviews as the best widget manufacturer, or would like to win the state wrestling championship. The Penn Behavioral Health Management Assistance Program says setting goals "effectively energizes an individual to become more productive," so having goals that you can control as well as goals that compare you to your competition will capitalize on your individual commitment as well as your drive to be the best.