Driving vision and alignment
Live Goals allow your team to track and see progress against projects and initiatives. They are as much about communication as they are about alignment. Most remote and hybrid teams suffer from an “alignment gap” because the tools they currently use do a poor job of keeping teammates focused on the big goal. These tools are too close to the daily work.
This typical “alignment gap” is a source of enormous frustration for so many teams: competing priorities, infighting, disconnection, lack of focus, overly large meetings, and more. Everyone is working feverishly, but it seems like no progress is being made toward the big things that matter to your team. This gap can be excruciating for a leader who has to deliver results.
Setting the vision
Live Goals in Steady give you the power to create top-level goals that capture your vision and long-term targets. You set the mission and direction, and then the teams that you lead create sub-goals focused on the execution.
Alignment requires buy-in, and buy-in happens when everyone has a hand in crafting their Live Goals.
Staying up-to-date
As a leader, you'll be able to see each goal's latest updates, progress, and overall confidence on the Live Goals page. In a single view, you'll be able to understand exactly where each project and initiative stands and what you can do to keep things on track.
Sharing progress
When it comes time to share your own update on a top-level goal, Quick Fill will summarize the progress of its child goals, making it quick and easy to keep the whole company up-to-date.
Simply add a few sentences of your own commentary and color, and post your update.
Creating Live Goals
The smallest unit of measure should be “project sized”.
Live Goals are about the big picture over periods of time, not granular tasks. With that in mind, the smallest unit of measure for a goal should be “project-sized”. Keep in mind that every goal assumes that whoever “owns” the goal will provide updates on it. Don’t make a goal for it if you don’t want to report on it! Roll it up with a similar goal into a broader objective instead.
Creating effective Live Goals
Goals come in infinite flavors, but you should ask yourself two questions before creating a goal in Steady:
- Will this be helpful for me to see every day? Live Goals in Steady show up on your daily check-in sidebar. Ideally, you want a goal that’ll help you maintain focus on the kind of progress you want to make.
- Do I want to write about this? Remember that Live Goals in Steady are essentially short-lived micro-blogs about a particular subject. If you don’t want to write about it or don’t think you’d have anything to say, consider a different goal.
Keep it focused
Live Goals exist to create focus. Creating too many is inherently counterproductive. People should own one to two max. It keeps focus high and “alignment effort” low.
Live Goals are great for team professional development too
No one’s stopping you if you want to make a “Let’s improve our accessibility” goal that you use to share, learn, discuss, and reflect.
Live Goal owners shouldn’t only be managers
If only a few people own Live Goals, only a few people get heard. When everyone owns a goal, everyone has a dedicated venue to share their work.
Live Goals are most effective when they’re not handed down
Alignment requires buy-in, and buy-in happens when everyone has a hand in crafting their Live Goals. Consider a cascading approach where the manager/leader sets a top-level goal, and folks underneath create their own goals that support it.
Higher level = lower frequency
Consider longer cadences like bi-weekly or monthly for team goals, and weekly cadence for individual goals. That means whenever it’s time to provide a team goal update, you’re guaranteed to have updates from supporting goals on tap.
Creating and assigning Live Goals to multiple teams
It's common for larger goals and initiatives to have multiple teams contributing to them. We make it easy to share a Live Goal across multiple teams.
When creating your Live Goal, simply select the teams in the Teams involved drop-down menu.
The Live Goal will display on each team's Goals page, and members of each team will receive notifications whenever a Goal update is published.
What your team can expect when they're assigned a Live Goal
When team members are made an owner of a Live Goal, they'll receive weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reminders to provide an update. They'll also see an action item on their Daily Digest page.
They can also provide an update at any time by selecting the goal and the "Post update" button.
The cadence and day of the week can be customized by editing the goal. To edit a goal, click on the name of the goal and select from the "..." menu to the right of the goal name.
To set the day of the week that you received reminders, change the start date to that day of the week.