In a vibrant brainstorming session, a diverse group of young professionals collaborates passionately, exchanging ideas and strategies while surrounded by colorful sticky notes that bring their team goals to life.

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What is Your One Big Goal?

Jan 6, 2025 | Coach's Questions

After facilitating many Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team workshops for Padraig clients, I realized something about team goals: Teams are stronger when they have one, big, collective, near-term goal.

As a Certified Executive Coach and Padraig facilitator, I frequently work with leaders and organizations to build trust and strengthen relationships among team members. We lead the assessment-based Five Behaviours workshop, which is based on the best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.

In this workshop, we use an assessment tool that looks at each member of the team, and the team as a whole unit, to help everyone understand their strengths and the areas where they need to grow and develop. For instance, with part of the assessment, participants learn more about themselves and how they interact with others.

It’s very powerful, both as a one-day, high-level overview or as a three-day, behaviour-changing program.

My experience is that there are common challenges among team members. They’ll express that they feel:

  • their objectives are misaligned.
  • that they don’t communicate well.
  • that decisions made in team meetings aren’t clear to all.
  • that they are working in silos, duplicating work or missing opportunities.

Participants will share that they feel disconnected, uncertain or frustrated. Sometimes they get along with each other but don’t feel connected to their teammates (consider that not all groups are teams), while other times, they’re weakened by destructive interpersonal conflict.

Team Goals are Vital 

When I lead this workshop, I find that often I’m taking participants to the point of answering this question:

What is your collective goal?

They sometimes don’t know what they’re all working on together. Often, they’ll refer to a strategic plan. So, I’ll ask again:

What is it you’re trying to achieve together, that one thing?

And usually, we’re still getting answers that aren’t actually team goals.

Here are some examples of ideas that are often shared that don’t quite work (and why they don’t work):

  1. Ensure compliance with new HR policies.”
    While this is vital, it’s more of a function of adhering to operational necessities than a rallying team goal.

  2. Fostering better communication.”
    This is more of a behavioral aspiration and not a tangible, measurable goal.

  3. Improving individual productivity.”
    While beneficial, this is an individual goal that doesn’t require collective effort or alignment.

  4. Updating the CRM system.”
    This is a task or project that might involve some members of the team but not the collective team as a whole.

  5. Finish designing the new website.”
    This sounds like a team goal, but it’s more of a project outcome. It likely involves only a subset of the team (e.g., designers and developers) and may lack the inspirational, collective nature of a shared objective.

A team goal should be something that affects everyone on the team. Even if they aren’t controlling a part of it, they will still have input and be focused on helping the team to achieve it.

Digging Deeper into Team Goals 

There’s an activity that we use to help teams determine their one big, collective goal. It starts with these questions:

What is the most critical thing that your team has to achieve together in the next three months?
Or, to frame it another way, what is the most critical thing that if you do not achieve it,
you will consider it a failure?

Everyone is then given time to brainstorm on their own, and then they share their answers with the group. We record what people share and work through the suggestions.  

Typically, what we discover together is that the answers they share are quite tactical. They’re too big or too small.

For example:

“Build on on our trust” is too big.

“We need to make sure the marketing strategy is finished” is too small.

Good short-term team goals are going to pull everyone together. They will be big, aspirational, inspirational, achievable and include everyone in the room in some way. We’re looking for a collective result from the contributions of everyone on the team.

Sometimes there needs to be a second round of brainstorming. We ask again:

What is it that we have to achieve together in the next three months to be successful?
What, if we don’t achieve it, would make us feel unsuccessful?

The big team goals are not always operational. They’re often strategic.

When everyone in the room can align around that one thing they want to do together, then they really start to work as a team and see how they’re all connected.

Get Everyone Involved in Team Goals 

The next task is to brainstorm the steps. Sometimes, what needs to be done to meet the team goal is not equal weight for everyone, and that’s okay as long as they have some part to contribute.

Ask the team members to brainstorm tasks. I’ll give them sticky notes to write down their ideas so that everyone has input.

We’ll put the sticky notes up on the wall and then work together to sort them into work packages. I’ll ask them to find the themes, such as planning, budgeting and communicating.

It’s inspiring to see it come to life as they project plan together.

Next, we consider who is leading what. Then we go through and assign.

Pro tip: You might like to use a sheet of paper to keep track of your goals or give our Ultimate Goal-Setting Worksheet a try. Also, grab our free downloadable RACSI Matrix worksheet by clicking the pop-up below, it’s very useful for delegating tasks.

You’ll see the positive shift among the team members once they find one project they all agree needs to be done — it’s critical, it matters to everyone and everyone has something to contribute. It also helps to determine a collective priority because any other tasks that would come at the cost of this project can be deferred until after the project.

One big goal can be a powerful exercise for any team, whether they’re working in silos and not getting along or if they’re a high-functioning team that gets along but they don’t feel connected.

Coach’s Questions:

Do you know what your one big goal is? Would others agree? How do you know? When could you use the one big goal exercise?

This week’s Coach’s Questions Blog is written by Padraig Coach, Katharine Cherewyk.