Engaged employees bring energy, creativity, and focus. They work harder and are more committed to success. It’s much more difficult to hit targets and work through challenges when the team also struggles with motivation, turnover, and performance.
And yet:
- Only 33% of US employees are engaged. It’s just 15% globally.
- 51% of employees are quietly quitting.
- Another 16% are loudly quitting.
Even when you follow Gallup’s 12 Leadership Questions, create a collaborative culture, or provide opportunities to learn and grow, an engaged team remains a real challenge for many leaders.
This is Chris from Level Up Leadership, and stretch goals are the focus for this week.
What Are Stretch Goals?
Meaningful, challenging goals drive engagement. Yet only 43% of employees set ambitious goals. In addition, when you have to learn new skills, a goal is nearly 10 times more inspiring. This is how stretch goals can increase engagement within the team.
Stretch goals live outside the usual goal setting that occurs with the team. Whereas KPIs and other targets need to be achieved for success, stretch goals are instead ambitious. They serve as challenges to motivate.
However, even ambitious goals need not be necessarily impossible to achieve. They instead push people outside of their comfort zones. They push people beyond their day-to-day tasks too. And they often require innovation and creativity, discovering new ways of doing things.
In short, stretch goals are designed to push boundaries. And it’s important to note that missing the target for a stretch goal shouldn’t be viewed as a failure.
Some examples of stretch goals might be:
- Customer Success: Decrease inactive users by 20%.
- Operations: Reduce operational inefficiencies by 25%.
- Sales: Increase deal size by 30%.
Depending on the organization, each of these stretch goals is ambitious but attainable with the right strategy and resources.
Pro point!: Set stretch goals with your OKRs.
Use the OKR cycle to also incorporate stretch goals into the mix. The teams can track progress regularly, adjust their effort, and maintain momentum.
How to Set Stretch Goals
Here’s how you can set stretch goals with your team:
Collaborate with your team: You don’t want to dictate stretch goals, but rather discover what excites them. What do they want to achieve beyond the day-to-day?
Provide support: Make sure you give your team the resources they need to at least come close to achieving these ambitious goals.
Balance ambition with reality: Stretch goals should be challenging but not impossible. For example, you don’t want an impossible and stress-creating target, such as “Let’s reduce customer churn to 0.1%” or “Let’s 5x sales this quarter.”
Wrapping Up
Stretch goals serve as a powerful tool to increase engagement. They push your team to think bigger, act bolder, and unlock new and creative solutions. If you aren’t yet convinced, here’s one more statistic: People who set difficult goals are 34% more likely to love their jobs!
Until next week!