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Managing people is the cornerstone of any successful organization. At its core, effective management isn't just about delegating tasks or overseeing operations; it’s about understanding and nurturing the people behind the work. When employees are unhappy or disconnected from their roles, their performance can suffer, impacting both their individual productivity, the overall morale of the team, and can even ripple out to affect the company’s bottom line. 

“Whether you’re dealing with a multinational corporation, a small business, a startup, or an individual employee, goal alignment is one of the most important aspects of management,” explains Esther Sackett, Assistant Professor of Management. “Goals and motivation ultimately drive our behavior. They provide direction and focus, boost motivation and engagement, and increase accountability.”

Decades of research have un covered a great deal about individual and collective goal pursuit. However, teams in modern organizations don’t operate in isolation - employees are often balancing multiple teams and projects, along with their personal goals. Despite this, knowledge of the more complex dynamics of goal pursuits in teams is more limited, which is why Sackett has dedicated her research and teaching to better understanding how team members align their goals to improve motivation and collaboration. 

Sackett’s research starts from an acknowledgement that, in addition to a team’s shared goals, team members often hold goals unrelated to the team. Whether it’s a goal for another team, or personal goals, like to get promoted, spend less time at the office, or run a marathon, everyone has these external goals, but we don’t tend to openly discuss our external goals quite as much. Her work explores the conditions under which discussing external goals can help teams, and whether it can ever be harmful. Because goals help us to make decisions about how to allocate our time, attention, and other resources, there’s a risk that disclosing personal goals will be perceived as a threat to other team members, especially if doing so reveals that a shared goal is not a top priority. However, Sackett’s research suggests that contrary to this belief, disclosing external goals can have positive effects on team performance, viability, and satisfaction. So, while it may seem intimidating to share goals with team members, teams can benefit from sharing information about their broader goal systems. 

But when is the right time to discuss this broader goal alignment? Sackett’s most recent research suggests that earlier is better. This research explores the entrepreneurial team formation process, finding that lead entrepreneurs have different goals for forming a team than potential co-founders, with lead entrepreneurs prioritizing co-founders that have complementary skills, and potential co-founders prioritizing interpersonal similarities (including goal alignment). This can complicate the team formation process if the two parties “talk past each other” during their early interactions and fail to discover the ways in which they are aligned. 

“Learning how to identify, prioritize and communicate our goals to team members in an effective way, that doesn’t cause them to question commitment, is a skill. It’s also becoming increasingly important as the pace of workflow is faster than ever before and the attention to goal alignment therefore becomes harder to wrangle,” explains Sackett. “What we don’t yet know is who needs to know about everybody’s goals, how much we really need to know about these goals, and if there are certain types of goals that are more important for team members to know about than others, which is something I plan to focus on in future research.” 

Perception and awareness of other people’s goals is a complex topic to bridge, as personal ambitions can sometimes conflict with team objectives, or remain hidden out of fear of judgment or disruption. Managers today face tough questions about how they can ensure everyone stays on track with their goals while balancing the need of the team and the company, how to align individual aspirations with the collective goals of a team, how to know when people are being honest about their intentions, and how to create an environment where people feel comfortable setting and sharing goals in a way that fosters collaboration, growth, and innovation.

“These are critical questions that get to the heart of effective organizational and team dynamics,” Sackett says. She advises that in contexts where people are balancing multiple teams and projects, having shared goals within a team likely isn’t enough to motivate people - it’s necessary to be explicit about shared priorities and to understand the interdependencies across teams, not just within them. Not only that, but in a fast paced work environment, managers should make sure that team members are regularly (and proactively) communicating about changes in their availability, constraints, and how it might affect the work of others.

Lastly, Sackett suggests that when forming a team, it’s important to consider how potential team members’ goal portfolios align, rather than selecting them based solely on complementary skills. She notes, “By embracing transparency, fostering proactive communication, and focusing on goal alignment, organizations can cultivate a culture of collaboration, growth, and innovation.”