Page 133 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

122 HBR Leader’s Handbook

How do you develop a stretch goal for your team?

If you want your team members to focus on a step-up result, you need
to challenge them with a stretch goal. But how do you come up with the
right one? Here are several approaches you can take:
• Ask internal or external customers to identify something

your team could do to help them be more successful. For
example, the head of an analytics team for a digital marketing
company asked several sales managers whom she supported to
consider this question. The most common answer was to identify
which ad characteristics were most likely to be clicked through
by different customer types—which would help them target sales
more effectively. Based on these discussions, she then challenged
her team to help the sales leaders increase click-through rates for
four customer segments by 10 percent, using predictive models,
over the next six months.

• Ask your own people to identify their most intractable prob-
lems. Using this approach, the head of a technical field services
team learned that engineers were frustrated when they showed

Hold people accountable
Every leader talks about the importance of holding people accountable for
meeting their measurable goals. Making it happen, however, is not so easy.
Nobody wants to be viewed as (or feel) mean, unfair, unbending, or
unreasonable, which is what often happens when you create meaningful
consequences for not delivering, like withholding a bonus, slowing down
promotions, moving a person to another role, or taking someone out of
your organization altogether.
If you bend over backward to avoid these tough decisions, however,
your people are less likely to deliver on the stretch goals. Human beings