00 HBR Facilitators Guide Goals
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TEAMS AT WORK
REACHING OUR
TEAM GOALS
WITH
POWERPOINT
DECK
1 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
Facilitator’s Guide
Use this collection of Harvard Business Review content to help
your team connect their goals to specific actions and achieve
greater success.
Setting goals for yourself, your team, or an organization isn’t just a matter of
defining what you’re trying to achieve. Research shows that you can make it
much more likely that you’ll reach these goals if you articulate some specifics
about how you’ll get there. This is just as true for team initiatives like
“develop a budget for the next fiscal year” as it is for personal goals like “gain a
better understanding of data analytics.”
This Teams at Work toolkit will help you teach your team techniques that
make goals easier to implement, and it will guide you in actively developing a
plan with them to achieve the specific goals your team is aiming for right now.
THIS TEAM SKILLS TOOLKIT PROCEEDS IN THREE PHASES:
1. Prework. 5 min. You’ll share the short video included in this toolkit with your
team as an introduction to the concept of goal execution.
2. Team presentation and discussion. 1 hr. You’ll host a 60-minute meeting
with your staff to present the idea and start applying it to your team’s work
at hand. All the materials you need to lead this meeting are in this toolkit,
culminating in the Meeting Guide, below.
3. Follow-up. 20 min. You’ll reiterate the action plan that is the outcome of
the activity and provide further resources for team members to use going
forward.
NOTE
This product was designed for use in a team setting. The materials in the attached
zip file may be shared freely with your team members without the purchase of any
additional license. If multiple facilitators will be using this material with separate
teams, please visit HBR.org to purchase additional copies of the product.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction
3 Prework
5 Meeting with Your
Team
6 Meeting Guide
9 Follow-Up
2 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
INTRODUCTION
THE MATERIALS INCLUDED IN THIS TOOLKIT ARE:
0. Facilitator’s Guide (this document)
1. Video: “How Successful People Reach Their Goals,” Heidi Grant
(about 5 min)
2. Article: “Get Your Team to Do What It Says It’s Going to Do,” Heidi Grant
(7pp)
3. PowerPoint Deck: “Reaching Our Team Goals,” Heidi Grant (28 slides)
4. Tool: “A Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals” (Word document, 3pp)
5. Tool: “Scripts to Facilitate Productive Meetings” (PDF, 1p)
6. Email Scripts (Word document, 1p)
We recommend that you print out this document so that you can complete
the checklists for each section and use a physical copy as you lead the
discussion.
TIP
Use this document
to easily cut and
paste the suggested
communications with
your team.
WATCH THIS VIDEO
ONLINE OR OPEN
THE FILE INCLUDED
IN THIS TOOLKIT >
3 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
It’s best if you can introduce this initiative at a team meeting—
in person or in a conference call if your team is geographically
dispersed. Explain what they’ll be doing as part of this exercise
and why it’s important. Here is a sample script you can use:
Setting goals for yourself or your team isn’t just a matter of defining what
you’re trying to achieve. Research shows that you can make it much
more likely that you’ll reach these goals if you articulate some specifics
about how you’ll get there. This is just as true for team initiatives, such
as developing a budget for the next fiscal year, as it is for personal goals,
such as building a better understanding of data analytics.
I’d like us to take some time over the next two weeks to get better at the
critical skill of goal execution. To do that, we’ll be using some material
from Harvard Business Review to learn some new strategies and tactics—
and to apply them to some of the goals we’re working on today.
Once you’ve introduced the idea, share the video by emailing your team
the link (or attaching #1 in the zip file). Cut and paste or modify the following
email script to suit your team’s needs:
Hi everyone,
As I mentioned, our team is going to be working on our goal execution
over the next few weeks.
I’m going to set up a meeting for us to learn more about this topic, so
keep an eye out for an invitation. In the meantime, please watch this short
video—it’ll give you a taste of the kinds of things we’re going to talk about.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
[Your name]
Phase 1
Prework
TIPS
You can find this
text ready for you to
customize, cut, and
paste in the document
Sample Emails.
Share the video by
emailing your team the
link or attaching the file
included in the toolkit.
4 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
PREWORK
Finally, set up the discussion meeting itself. Ideally, you should hold this one-
hour session in person. If that’s not possible, set up a conference call using
software that also allows for sharing screens so that your participants can
follow along with the presentation and the activity. Also make sure that your
conferencing system allows for small-group work for discussion (if you have
more than 15 participants).
HAVE YOU:
Introduced the idea of this initiative to your team?
Sent the email describing what’s coming up, with the video link or file
attached?
Set up a meeting time?
Planned the logistics for screen sharing and small-group/pair work (if you
are holding the meeting virtually)?
5 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
PREPARE FOR THE MEETING
It’s important that you also watch the video that you’ve asked your team to
take on. This will help you lead the conversation—and you’ll learn from it
yourself.
Ideally, you’ll read all the other items in the toolkit as well, but if time is tight,
focus on the PowerPoint deck, skimming through the notes provided. You
can also customize the deck, adding your organization’s branding, including
material specific to your team’s needs, or adding to the talking points.
Next, consider your team’s goals—be they formal, annual targets or more
informal intentions that you’ve discussed together. Identify one goal that
your team has been struggling to achieve and have it handy for the discussion
meeting, during which you’ll lead an activity around the goal that will
improve your chances of successfully reaching it.
In the days before the discussion meeting, familiarize yourself with the
Meeting Guide below so that you know what to expect.
Finally, send a reminder to your team to make sure that nobody forgets and is
left out of the conversation.
HAVE YOU:
Reviewed the materials yourself?
Selected a team goal on which to focus the group activity?
Looked over the Meeting Guide below so that you know what to expect?
Sent a reminder to your team that they need to watch the video in
advance of the meeting?
Phase 2
Meeting with Your Team
6 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
Note that the times listed are only estimates. Depending on
the size of your group and their individual perspectives, you
may take more or less time for each part of the discussion.
BEGIN THE MEETING—5 MINUTES
Open the meeting by thanking your team for taking the time to watch the
video and to participate.
Remind them that this work will help them become better equipped to
achieve their goals.
PRESENTATION—15 MINUTES
Use the slides to present the concept of if-then planning, using the talking
points in the notes field.
GENERAL DISCUSSION—10 MINUTES
Lead a discussion about the concepts. Questions to ask and some suggested
answers appear below.
If your team has more than 15 members, have participants break into groups
of five or six for this portion of the discussion. If you are using small groups,
move from group to group to help prompt the conversation.
1. What goals have you set for yourself but experienced trouble achieving?
Think New Year’s resolutions, professional development goals, fitness
goals, or others.
• Participants will share their stories.
2. What organizational goals has our team struggled to achieve? Are there
some goals where we come up short year after year?
• Participants will share their perceptions.
Meeting Guide
TIP
For tips on how to
lead a discussion, see
Scripts to Facilitate
Productive Meetings.
TIP
Note that the times
listed are only
estimates.
7 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
MEETING GUIDE
3. Do you think if-then planning could help you achieve some of these
goals? Why or why not?
• Participants will share their opinions.
4. Are there any types of goals for which if-then planning might be
particularly helpful? Not helpful?
• If-then planning can be particularly helpful for general goals like “share
information more.” Those kinds of goals are hard to implement because
people are entrenched in existing habits and distracted by the work in
front of them. If-then planning can help make them more concrete and
reveal when the goal should be acted on.
• If-then planning can also be helpful for reducing groupthink. If you want
your team to make better decisions, lay out rules of the road in if-then
format: “If everyone agrees we should move ahead with a new product
idea, then we should still review the P&L together to understand the
risks.” “If we are ready to make a decision about a job candidate, then we
will review the positive attributes of the other candidates before moving
forward with the decision.”
• It can also be helpful for deciding which projects and initiatives to
abandon, getting beyond sunk-cost arguments and feelings of affiliation to
a project or the team implementing it. “If this project doesn’t yield results
by May, then we will take the perspective of a neutral observer who was
not responsible for approving the project to begin with.”
5. What are some instances when our team has failed to meet a goal
because we were striving for perfection instead of adopting a learning
mindset?
• In the video, Grant describes the shift in mindset needed to allow yourself
to achieve a goal by just trying something rather than perfecting it the
first time.
IF-THEN PLANNING ACTIVITY—30 MINUTES
If you broke the team up for the discussion, bring everyone back together.
Ask one team member to use the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals to
take notes and record the results from the following activity, projecting their
screen to the room and to any remote participants as they go.
TIP
Wear a watch or bring a
phone to the meeting.
It makes it easier to
closely monitor the
time and ensure that
your group completes
the exercise.
8 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
MEETING GUIDE
10 MINUTES:
Describe the team goal that you’ve chosen for this exercise. Ask the team
how they would break this goal down into specific subgoals. Capture these on a
whiteboard as you brainstorm, then select which three to five subgoals you want
to capture in the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals.
• See slide 18 of the PowerPoint deck for examples of specific subgoals.
10 MINUTES:
Ask the team to identify who/when actions for each subgoal. Again, capture
these on the whiteboard as you brainstorm, and then select which ones to
capture in the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals.
• See slide 20 for an example of a who/when action.
10 MINUTES:
Ask the team to convert each action to an if-then statement, capturing these
in the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals.
• See slide 22 for an example of an if-then statement.
As the meeting draws to a close, review the if-then statements you’ve created
and encourage the team to use the process on any personal or professional
development goals they might have.
9 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
Phase 3
Follow-Up
After the meeting, ask your notetaker to send you the Tool
to Help You Reach Your Goals, completed with your group’s
work. Send your if-then statements to the team, along with
further resources and a plan to check on progress around the
goal you’ve focused on.
Here is a script to use for your follow-up email:
Hi everyone,
Thank you again for participating in our program on goal execution. As a
reminder, here are the if-then statements that we’ve committed to:
[Cut and paste the list from the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals]
I’ve also attached the PowerPoint deck that we went through, our if-then
planning notes, a template that’ll allow you to do some if-then planning
on your own, and an HBR article that explains in more detail how if-
then planning works and gives some examples of how it’s been used
successfully for teams.
We’ll check in about a month from now to see how our if-then plan is
working.
Thanks,
[Your name]
ATTACH THE FOLLOWING TO THE EMAIL:
Article: “Get Your Team to Do What It Says It’s Going to Do”
PowerPoint deck: “Reaching Our Team Goals”
The Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals completed by your team
Blank version of the Tool to Help You Reach Your Goals
TIP
You can find this
text ready for you to
customize, cut, and
paste in the document
Sample Emails.
10 HBR Teams at Work | Reaching Our Team Goals
FOLLOWUP
Put a reminder in your calendar to check in with the team in about a month.
Use an existing team meeting or set up something separate. Has any progress
been made toward the goal? Have team members been “triggered” by any of
the if-then statements? Do you want to modify the statements in any way?
HAVE YOU:
Followed up with the team to send them the notes from the meeting and
other resources?
Put a reminder in your calendar to check in with the team in about a
month?
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