THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOAL

As a Leader, what is your goal for Run Mate by Core-Lean? Having fun? Increase the cohesion within your team? Going through an experience with your friend? Run it below 18 hours? All those goals are valid, and they may not be necessarily mutually exclusive so you can have several of them but you need to define it as it will align all your teammates against a common objective.

But first, a team need a Purpose: The purpose is the “contract” between the team and the world, it’s evolving in, its meaningful contribution. If a team doesn’t fulfill a need of the environment they live in, then the team won’t survive because its environment won’t interact with the team. A purpose defines the North Star, the intention, the direction on which the objectives and goals are defined. For example, Core Lean’s purpose is “To unlock the potential of your people to deliver Exceptional Performance”.
With that purpose in mind, one of the Objectives of Core Lean is to help you understand and unlock the potential of your people. The Leadership Lab and the Run Mate by Core-Lean experience is a specific Goal to achieve this objective.

A goal must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time based. Did we have fun? Have we run it below 18 hours? Once defined, you can split the team’s goal into smaller ones like personal ones. To be consistent, the personal ones should be cascaded down from the team’s one.

In for-profit organization, objectives, goals, key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to drive decisions and manage the business. Similarly to Run Mate by Core-Lean, they are also used to assess whether a project is successful: was the return of investment matching our expectations? Did we improve our customer service by opening a new Distribution Center? Once your goal is clear, you, as Leader, know how to move towards where you want to go, you can define what you need (resources) to meet achieve it (which training do you and your team need to follow in the case of Run Mate by Core-Lean).

There are a lot of values on sports applicable to business. Run Mate by Core-Lean is an experience that can help the team members become aware of the hidden values that the team has when facing challenging goals and discover the importance of trust in achieving the results. The learnings that the team can take back to the workplace are unique, valuable, and fully replicable. We will talk it more in our next article.