How to Turn Goals into Action: Your Step-by-Step Guide

Whether you’re a leader, part of a team, or enrolled in the entrepreneurial journey of owning and operating your own business, the ability to turn goals into action is essential. After all, it’s an intricate series of small steps that eventually add up to major accomplishments. But how do you turn inspiring goals into motion? In this blog post, I’ll be sharing with you some step-by-step tips on how to base decisions and break down goals concretely so that each task can lead your team closer toward success – without feeling overwhelmed!

This post is in our series on “Breaking Down Your Work”. See the whole series here.

Define the Goals

Having a clear set of goals is essential for any team to be productive and successful. But how do you go about defining short and long-term objectives?

As part of this organizing work series, we previously discussed why setting goals is important for your team.

Start by breaking down the overall vision for the team or company into smaller, achievable goals that you and your team can work towards. These should be achievable within a quarter or so of time. They can help the team understand the overall picture and give them information about how to go about their work to best reach the goal (remember that the people closest to the work have the best information for making decisions on how the work is done!).

Depending on the size of your initiative or team, you should aim to have 3-5 quarterly goals or objectives. These goals should be challenging but attainable. One might be a ‘stretch’ goal that is slightly less attainable. The goals should then be prioritized according to the value they provide to customers. From there, it’s time to turn goals into action.

Breaking Down the Work

From there, the team should break these quarterly goals down into short-term goals of a few weeks.

Teams should consider:

• What are the basic steps required to meet the goal?
• What should they focus on first?
• Is there something they need to research or learn to achieve the goal?
• Do they have the resources (people, skills, tools) to meet the goal?

The short-term goals should then be prioritized. Is one step dependent on another, such as setting something up or learning a new skill? If so, plan for that goal to be reached first, and then the subsequent ones.

From there, the short-term goals should be broken down into tasks. These tasks are the specific steps needed to reach the short-term goal. Each task should be specific and should have an owner. The owner may not be responsible for doing the work but they are responsible for making sure the work gets done.

Leadership’s Role

In the process of turning goals into action, the teams should be self-organizing. They should decide how the work gets done and in what priority they fall and who is responsible for each piece. They understand best how to approach the work.

Leadership’s role is to provide the environment for the team to do their best work – let them focus without constantly changing priorities, supply any missing resources that have been identified, and support the team without micromanaging them.

Leaders can offer suggestions from their learned experience but stay away from dictation or mandates. That stifles creativity and the team may miss out on a great option or opportunity because leadership dictated a process or approach too specifically.

Tracking the Progress of Turning Goals into Action

Teams can use tools to track their progress toward their goals. I’ve had teams use a wide variety – from something as simple as Mural or Miro to more complicated options like Jira, and several in-between systems like ClickUp, Monday.com, or Asana.

I recommend staying away from spreadsheets like Excel as they can get unwieldy and teams often spend more time organizing the work than doing it. The intention is to make the tool lightweight, transparent, and helpful without being cumbersome.

Adapt

Understand that plans will change. Your life will be a lot easier if you accept that undisputed fact from the very beginning.

The key to success is to build adaptation and adjustments into the process.

Teams should constantly be re-evaluating their progress towards the goals, both short- and long-term, and adjusting their approach as necessary. If they learn something new, maybe their original plan doesn’t make sense anymore and they need to adjust it.

As a leader, you must expect and embrace these changes to the plan. Teams need to focus on reaching the goal, not following the plan.

Conclusion of Turning Goals into Action

By breaking down the work into short- and long-term goals, and breaking those down into actionable tasks with owners, teams will be able to stay focused on the end result.

Leaders must provide an environment where teams can self-organize and make decisions about how the work should get done. They should supply any missing resources that have been identified and trust the team to do their best work without micromanaging them.

Finally, teams need to be diligent in tracking their progress toward their goals and continuously adjust and adapt their plan as they learn new information or find better ways of doing things.

Making the effort to turn goals into actionable steps is key to successful project completion. With the right approach and attitude, teams can make progress toward their goals and have a much smoother path to success.