A team doesn't deliver a goal nobody ever agreed with it

The sentence that the team isn't delivering is most often said in companies as an accusation against people. It then sounds like a diagnosis of character: not enough engagement, not enough responsibility, someone needs to be pushed. When I sit down with a team like that, it almost always turns out we are talking about something else. About what was agreed before anyone started working.

From my practice, four areas come out that most often derail the delivery of a goal: the goal itself, the team organised around it, the picture of the quarter as a whole, and the rhythm of work. All four are painfully basic. And that is exactly why nobody deals with them, because it is hard to call a meeting in a company about something everyone considers obvious.

For a long time I was convinced myself that you can't start work on a goal nobody has written down. That it is so obvious there is nothing to talk about. Companies showed me otherwise: very often we work on things that have never been made precise, and then everyone gets annoyed that they aren't being delivered.

These four things have one unpleasant feature. You can take care of them at the start of the quarter, and by the middle it is too late. So I am not writing this text to take responsibility off anyone. I am writing it to move responsibility to where it really lies: with the person who orders the goal and builds the team around it. The question of why we aren't delivering is worth asking from that side of the table first.

A goal without a contract and a team that doesn't know it is a team

I call the first area context. A goal may be written down and still not exist as an agreement. The check is simple and you can do it this week: ask each person on the team to write down separately what they are working on and how they will know the goal has been achieved. Diverging answers mean there is no contract, even though there is a document. The other half of context is the reason: why we are doing this now and how it connects with the annual hypotheses and with the strategy. A team that understands this starts asking questions, and after a conversation like that the goal often has to be reworded or measured differently. That is a good sign, not a failure.

The second part of the contract is measurability, and this is where we most often stop halfway. Measurability is not one number at the end of the quarter, but a trio: a starting value, a target value and a way of tracking that value along the way. Something like let's win new clients says neither how many more nor from what level we start, so nobody can use it to settle whether we are satisfied. For a goal such as launching a product in a new market, the criterion might be a confirmed proof of concept, the first three versions of the product sold, or confirmation from the market that the target group will buy.

I sometimes hear that there is nothing to measure with, because the product doesn't have analytics yet. That doesn't excuse you from measurability. A measurable goal is an agreement between the person ordering it and the team about how we will recognise success, not a matter of sticking to a kosher metric, and its point is to cut out subjectivity, the situation in which everyone understands success differently. You can give the first month of the quarter to building the data and the next two to measuring. You can agree on a qualitative metric: a survey, a team confidence round, feedback from clients. As a last resort there are output criteria, and there is nothing to cry about if the agreement is clear. I don't have a ready answer for every goal, but I haven't yet come across one for which no criterion at all could be agreed.

The second area is the team, or rather the way it came about. In companies this usually happens by a round-up: whoever wants to, whoever happens to be around, or whoever looks like they have things under control. We rarely check beforehand whether the combined skills of the group are enough to deliver the goal on their own, without help from outside. A lack of skills then shows up in the middle of the quarter, when little can be done about it. It can be worse: the people assigned to the goal don't even know they are a working group. Someone drops in now and then, isn't contracted, doesn't know how much time they are meant to give it, and waits for someone to hand out tasks. That is not a team, it is a muddle of responsibility in which the owner holds together by hand what was meant to happen on its own. Then there is time, which companies treat as an organisational detail. We squeeze delivery of the goal into the gaps and count on the goodwill of people who are running several other initiatives at once. They simply won't do it, even if they very much want to. At this point I go back to those three deadlines from the start of the text, because this is exactly where they come from. The goal was written down, people were appointed, everyone nodded. Each person left the room with a different picture of what we were to do and by when. Agreement in a meeting can be silent disagreement, and it only shows when a result has to be presented.

What to do about it before the quarter gets going

The third area is the picture of the quarter as a whole, and this is the step teams skip most often. Before you start planning week by week, sit down with the team and talk about the whole: which areas have to be touched for this goal to be deliverable at all. Without that, weekly planning turns into a hotchpotch of good ideas. The team does sensible things, and no progress shows on the key results. The same conversation settles one more thing. Sometimes, while drawing the whole, it turns out the goal is simply too big and nothing people can think of will fit into a quarter. I then ask the team what, at the end of the quarter, would give us the feeling that we are in a good place, and from that answer we go back to the goal.

What this picture looks like depends on what you are building. For a physical product, a device or a piece of furniture being brought to market, it has to include design and engineering, prices and offers, standards and certificates, sales and marketing. For a digital product the plan can't be development alone: you need sales, training materials, customer support and the logistics of delivering the product. It is best to draw it, even on sticky notes, the way you draw a marketing funnel or a sales process from a client's enquiry to delivery of the product. Then, when you plan the week, you can see where in the whole you currently are.

The fourth area is the biggest and I call it rhythm. A quarterly goal needs a smaller loop inside it: every week or every two weeks we plan tasks, look at the values of the key results, hold a short retrospective, draw conclusions and plan again. The tasks for the next week then follow from the goal and from the conclusions of the previous cycle, not from collecting ideas ad hoc. Meetings without a regular cadence, one on a Wednesday, one on a Friday, one this month, one next month, won't give you that.

There is a second half of rhythm that is talked about less often: the quality of those meetings. Reading out task statuses gives you nothing and is a reliable way to put people off working on the goal. That is why we work with goal owners on facilitation skills, because whether a recurring meeting adds anything depends on them. Simply announcing a goal and asking the team to get on with it doesn't get the work going. Without a framework people stay at their desks, in their silos, and the owner holds everything together by hand and wears themselves out most of all.

What this checklist won't take care of

I don't want this to sound like a promise that once you tick off four points, goals will start delivering themselves. Random things happen: someone is ill, someone is away in a key week, something happens outside the plan. There are far more reasons for not delivering than four, and not every one of them lies in the system.

What I care about is something else. Before you put forward a theory about the team's engagement, check these four things, because they are cheap to check and costly to skip. If the goal isn't written down, if nobody agreed a date, if the team lacks skills or time, if there is no rhythm of work, then a conversation about engagement is a conversation off the point. Responsibility doesn't disappear, it just has a different address, and most often it is the address of the person who ordered the goal. They are responsible for the goal being written down and measurable, for the team existing for real and not just on a list, and for the rhythm of work being set up. After that, responsibility for the result goes back to the team, and then it is fair, because the team has been given what it needs to carry it.

And one last remark, to be fair. This is not knowledge that is hard to understand. It is hard to put into practice, because it takes a few uncomfortable conversations in a week when everyone would rather get down to work. Teams that have had those conversations look different afterwards. Not because they suddenly work faster, but because they know what they are working on and how they will recognise the end.