When I was promoted to my first management position I was put in charge of an existing team in our company. I soon discovered that each member of the team had their own ideas on what was most important and everyone had their own agenda. This behavior resulted in delays to all project deadlines and low team morale. I tried everything from team building exercises to weekly group meetings to improve productivity and moral but nothing seemed to help. It was out of sheer desperation that I began searching for help and I discovered the management tool, Management By Objectives.

Using this tool, I met with my team to review the company mission and what our team was expected to do to redeem this mission. The meeting was very informative with lots of questions and sincere interest by all of the team members. We then discussed what would be the key strategies to insure our team’s success. To my amazement, everyone contributed ideas and we soon had a very solid list of key strategies. After reviewing these strategies, I set another meeting where I assigned our agreed upon strategies to the individual members of the team.

I think for the first time, every member of our team understood how they would be helping the team meet its objectives. We then agreed to meet monthly to review our progress. Using this process, we began completing our projects ahead of every deadline and everyone on the team was proud of their accomplishments. Management By Objectives helped turn our department from dysfunctional to one of the best teams in the company. I have been using this management tool ever since with the same results.

Dan Stewart
Mr. Objectives
Twitter: @MrObjectives