On setting goals for teams

In the last post, we saw how to compose teams: how to think about team size, diversity in demographics, personality, values etc. In this post, we will examine how to set goals for teams to achieve excellence (you might want to refer to this earlier post on setting goals for individuals).

Does the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Reasonable, Time-bound) framework work for teams as well?

• SMART goals work for teams in general! 
• Caveats
• Specific performance goals are better than specific learning goals (research here), especially on complex tasks. Teams do better on both performance and learning when given specific performance goals. 
• Learning goals cause people to be siloed, reducing coordination, communication, and teamwork => Missed learning opportunities => Lesser innovation 
• Set general learning goals, as opposed to specific learning goals for team members. 
• Growth mindset (vs fixed mindset) is important to teams as well to accomplish difficult goals (research here). Learning orientation is better than performance orientation: making mistakes and learning is better than focusing on not making mistakes, proving themselves to others which typically results in restricting team to known tasks.
• High interdependence yields better performance coupled with high commitment (research here). Note that for teams with low commitment, interdependence undermines performance.