One of your first tasks when building a team is to establish team goals. Typically, you can do this in one of two ways. You can establish the goals yourself, or you can elect to take a collaborative approach and involve your team's members.

A collaborative approach can help to build a stronger team in several ways:

• it enhances personal commitment to achieving goals
• it drives performance
• it strengthens job commitment and satisfaction, and
• it promotes shared responsibility for goals

Another way that collaboratively establishing goals strengthens teams is by helping to create a sense of balanced authority within your team. Unlike dictatorial leadership, an open and collaborative leadership style encourages a team mentality by creating a sense of inclusion and ownership.

This open, collaborative, nondictatorial approach to establishing goals also provides several other team strengthening benefits:

• it creates a cooperative team atmosphere rather than superior-subordinate relationship
• it shows you value team member contributions, ideas, and efforts
• it demonstrates the confidence you have in team members' capabilities, and
• it demonstrates that you understand each member's role and how they contribute to the team

Next, a collaborative approach to establishing team goals helps to establish effective goals. When team members are involved, the team goals are more effective as a result of the team members' perspective, expertise, and insight. Involving team members helps to refine team goals, ensuring they're realistic and results focused, which in turn can help to maximize team output.

Taking part in the goal-writing process also allows team members to grow professionally. As they work to write goals, team members will develop both their interpersonal and professional skills.

Using a process to establish team goals

Establishing team goals collaboratively provides a framework for building a successful team that achieves its common goals. You can use a four-step process to establish team goals:

• write goals
• categorize goals
• discuss the categories and clarify the goals, and
• create a single goal for each category

Collaboratively establishing team goals is a terrific team-building activity. It also helps to create a clear vision of the team's priorities and purpose for all team members. Team leaders should be prepared to lead their teams through the process of establishing team goals. The four-step process consists of writing goals, categorizing goals, discussing the categories and clarifying the goals, and creating a single goal for each category. Essentially, a collaborative approach helps a team optimize its efforts through joint, concentrated contributions.