THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOAL

As a Leader, what is your goal for Run Mate by Core-Lean Lake Geneva? Having fun as a team? Improve its cohesion? Live a unique experience with your friends? Running the race in less than 18 hours? All of these goals are perfectly valid and are not mutually exclusive so you can have more than one, but it is important to define it/them to align your teammates towards a common goal.

An objective can also be long-term and represent the contract between the team and the environment in which it is. If the team does not fulfill a need of the environment in which it lives, the team will not survive because its environment will not interact with it. For example, Core Lean's long-term goal is to "Unlock the potential of its customers so that they can achieve exceptional performance."

An objective must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time based. For example, did we run in less than 18 hours? Once set, you can break down a team's goal into smaller, individual ones. To be consistent, it is best to cascade objectives from top to bottom.

In professional organizations, objectives and performance indicators are used to make decisions and manage day-to-day affairs. As with Run Mate by Core-Lean, a project can be evaluated as successful or not, based on performance indices: does the return on investment match our expectations? Have we improved our customer service with the opening of a new distribution center? Once your goal is clear, you as a Leader know in which direction to go and what you need (resources) to get there (what training you and your team need to do in the case of Run Mate by Core- Lean).

There are many sports values that can be transposed into a “business” environment. Run Mate by Core-Lean is an experience that helps each participant be more appreciative of team values when facing difficult and ambitious goals, and at the same time discover the importance of trust. These learnings that each team can bring back to their professional environment are unique, rich, and perfectly transposable. We will talk about this again in future articles.