5 Silly Simple Mistakes Leaders Make When Setting Team Goals

July 18, 2023

If you’re like most, you have moments where you get frustrated when team performance misses the mark.


It’s never been more critical for your team to stretch and win. In this season, it’s also never been more challenging.


Many teams feel disoriented, which makes missing targets or objectives even more likely. How do you even know what to shoot for in a swirling environment as confusing as ours?


All of these are great questions, and fortunately, there are answers.


After leading teams for three decades, here are five mistakes I’ve made and want you to avoid when setting goals with your team.

field goal post

The solution for many of these issues is a framework I call “Results-Based Leadership,” which I outline in-depth inside the Lead Team Institute {LTI}. 


5 Silly Simple Mistakes Leaders Make When Setting Team Goals 


1. No clearly owned mission, vision, and set of values.


Your mission, vision, and values decide how and in what direction your team runs (with or without you). Most organizations know enough to throw a mission statement and set of values on the wall, but it usually doesn’t make it into the hearts of the team. 


What’s on the wall often isn’t owned down the hall.


It’s the same with cultural values. Many leaders love envisioning the culture they want, but often there’s a big gap between the culture they want and the culture they have. In addition (and from testing this out), most staff members couldn’t name more than one cultural value their organization has embraced.


So, how can you tell if your team owns your mission, vision, and cultural values?


Here’s a little test: During your next Lead Team meeting, ask your team if they can sketch out your campus values, mission, and vision without looking them up.


If they can’t, you know there’s work to do in the front office before your DNA can scale throughout the rest of the system. When mission, vision, and values aren’t owned by your Lead Team, your other teams will move in a thousand different directions and might not progress much of anything.


If you would like to experience the simple 3-step process I use to create better cultural value statements, you will want to consider the Executive Team Quarterly {EQ}. 


Defining your values is the first step to having your team own them.


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2. No clear strategy.


Mission, vision, and values should have a long shelf life.


Strategy, not so much. And that’s critical because your strategy is how you plan to accomplish your mission.


Here’s an example that’s probably fresh on everybody’s mind: For almost every campus system, COVID threw a wrench (or nuclear bomb) into strategy. And a return to your old strategy likely didn’t work.


As much as you didn’t have certainty during that season, it was vital to have clarity.


Part of my strategy before the pandemic was speaking and training exclusively on campuses. When COVID shut down travel, my team and I pivoted (overnight) to become a 100% digital Executive Team Coaching practice. 

  • Faith communities moved online. 
  • Schools and campuses delivered virtual instruction.
  • Restaurants moved to takeout and outside patios.


The mission of serving your people stays the same but the strategy changes.


In fact, in times of rapid change, quick pivots in strategy preserve the mission.


If you haven’t clarified your strategy recently (even if it’s a strategy for the next 30 days), block a 2-hour session with your Lead Team and do it. Soon!


No team can own and commit to what it doesn’t understand.

 

3. No clear goal.


Once you decide how to accomplish your mission, you must determine how much. 


Many leaders naturally answer that question by telling their teams that they want ‘more’—more enrollment, grants, community partnerships, retention, and graduates.


Having more as a goal demotivates your team because you’ll never hit it.


You can’t hit more.


Eventually, your team feels like the kid who brings home a straight-B report card, only to have the parent say, “Why not A’s?” And returning the next semester with As and hears, “Do they give A+’s?”


Who doesn’t want to say, “I quit” in that environment?


So, define it. What does more look like?


One person? 100 people? 2% growth? 20 growth%? 200 growth%?


Then when you hit it, celebrate it.


4. No focus on lead measures.


Leaders are easily lured into focusing on measures they cannot control. These are the system’s lag measures (i.e., graduation rates, enrollment numbers, and expenses).

  • Get the numbers.
  • Say they’re not quite good enough.
  • Tell their team(s) to do better.


While these measures are great for telling you how your organization has done or is doing, the challenge is that you can’t change them. Your lag measures represent your historical data that cannot be changed.


A better option is to look at lead measures. Lead measures are elements within your control that ultimately impact the performance of your lag measures. 


Lead measures might include focusing on response times to inquiries from prospective students, the number of formally guided campus visits each week, or program partnerships secured each semester. 


Your team will never crush its goals if it focuses on what it can’t change. Instead, Higher Performance Teams a savvy to understand the dynamics between their preferred lag measures and the most impactful lead measures that influence their growth. 

 

5. No one is accountable.


Of all of the strategies on this post, this is the one that’s the hardest for most leaders but also gives the most significant return. I know because I’ve been on both sides of the challenge—not wanting to hold people accountable (and doing it poorly) and then learning how to do it well.


When a team member misses an expected goal, leaders tend to utter two phrases that create a complete lack of accountability.

  1. “That’s okay.”
  2. __________ (nothing at all).


Mature leaders know it’s NOT ok that a team member missed the goal or deadline. Stop acting like it is ok. 


Not saying anything when someone missed an expected goal is a pretty good tell that the leader:

  • Didn’t know.
  • Didn’t care.
  • Were too afraid.


Both responses are toxic to team health.


Ironically, holding your people accountable (I prefer the term ownership) in a healthy way motivates them rather than demotivates them. Guess what else?


Your best leaders love being a part of teams where every member owns their work. 

  • On-time.
  • On budget.
  • As expected.


Leaders who fail to hold team members accountable will end up with B and C-Team players because your A-Team players are leaving out the back door.

Transform Your Future | Lead With Clarity | Grow Your Performance


You aren't alone if you've struggled to find clarity in leading your team forward.


Teams function at less than 60% of their performance potential and community trust is at an all-time low. 


Simply put, leading people and systems has never been more complex.


The Lead Team Institute {LTI} will equip you to break through your growth barriers.


Whether it's leading results-based teams, communicating with success, improving your engagement, increasing influence, refreshing your vision, building trusting communities, or many other challenges we face as campus leaders, you'll know exactly what steps to take to generate momentum for your community.


If you want to build an irresistible campus brand, you will want to join the waiting list to enroll in the next Lead Team Institute {LTI} Campus Cohort. 


Accelerate Your Team’s:


  • Communication
  • Connection
  • Alignment
  • Capacity
  • Execution
  • Culture


Reserve Your Spot for Fall 2023. Join the Lead Team Institute Waitlist Today!

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Higher Performance Insights | YOUR PROBLEM HAS BODYGUARDS

By HPG Info • November 10, 2026
Every problem can be solved. "That won't work here." Every leadership team I've ever sat with has said it. District offices, presidents' suites, my own conference room. Yup, I said it plenty in my years as a principal and superintendent, usually around 4:45 on a Thursday. It sounds like experience. Listen closer, and it's a bodyguard. Big, calm, arms folded, standing in front of a problem somebody quietly decided to keep. So here's my claim, and I want you to argue with me in the comments. Every problem your leadership team faces right now can be solved. Every one. Some of you nodded. Some of you started typing. Good. Hold that thought until the end, because you're going to pick a side. FIRST, SORT THE PILE Situations stay no matter what you do. The birth rate behind your 2031 kindergarten class is already set. So is the funding formula your legislature won't touch this session. You accept a situation, plan around it, and stop spending Tuesday mornings angry at it. Problems have solutions. Expensive ones, unpopular ones, ones you'd rather not choose. They exist. Stuck teams mix the piles. They fight situations as if they were problems and wear themselves out. Then they treat problems as if they were situations and call it being realistic. The second mistake is the expensive one. Nobody puts it in the minutes. MEET THE BODYGUARDS You know them by name. • "Our board would never." • "Our faculty won't." • "That's a big-district idea." • "Our students are different." • "We tried that in 2019." • "Not in a referendum year." Each one shows up on time, never takes a vacation, and has never once been asked for ID. Some of them are telling the truth. Plenty are guarding a fear nobody has said out loud, and it's usually one of two. The first fear: we try it, it fails, and people say we overreached. The second fear is the one nobody talks about. We try it, it works, and now we've made a promise we're not sure we can keep. More scrutiny. Higher expectations. Our name on it. Neither ending feels safe. So the bodyguard keeps its job, and the same item comes back to the agenda every month. "That won't work here" is sometimes a fact. More often it's a fear wearing a fact's clothes. FIVE MOVES TO GET PAST THE BODYGUARD Any leadership team can run these in one meeting. 1. Sort it. Ask the room, "Is this a problem or a situation?" If it's a situation, stop solving and start designing around it. You'll get back every hour you were spending on a fight you can't win. 2. Name the two wants. A protected problem usually hides two wants that can't both be true. Put the sentence on the whiteboard: "We want ___, and we want ___." We want to sunset the program, and we want the faculty senate to feel fine about it. We want a team that tells us the truth, and we want every meeting to feel comfortable. Once both wants are on the board, the real conversation starts: which one will you give up? 3. Ask the bodyguard for ID. When someone says it won't work here, most of us pile on evidence. More data, another district that pulled it off. I've done this a hundred times, and it almost never moves anyone. Hand the question back instead: "Has anyone done this somewhere like us? Show me the model. Then tell me which part of it scares you." 4. Find out who hired it. Every bodyguard works for a human need: status, belonging, or safety from blame. Say you won't launch a new learning model until it carries a state recognition. One layer down, the worry is often that launching without it would make you look like a fraud. No award fixes that. Say the need out loud, then point it at something worth building, like a program your community would miss if it disappeared. 5. Ask the failure question. "If we knew for certain this would fail, would it still be worth doing?" If the answer is yes, you're free. Your reputation is off the table, and the decision can stand on its merits. WHY SMART TEAMS GET STUCK We measure team intelligence as TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. IQ can write a brilliant analysis of why you're stuck. It takes EQ for someone to say, "I'm afraid this might work." It takes PQ, the team's awareness of itself, to tell which bodyguards are fact and which are fear. The three multiply. Let one drift toward zero and all that IQ produces a very well-reasoned standstill. MONDAY MORNING: THE BODYGUARD ROLL CALL Thirty-five minutes. (If you're mid-crisis, bookmark this and do it Tuesday.) Step 1 (10 minutes, before the meeting). Pull your last three agendas. Mark each recurring item P for problem or S for situation. Circle every P that has been there three months or more. Step 2 (15 minutes, at the meeting). Pick the circled item that has lasted longest. Ask the team for its bodyguard, the exact sentence you hear whenever it comes up. Then fill in "We want ___, and we want ___." If people fill it in differently, good. You just learned you were guarding different things. Step 3 (10 minutes). Same item, out loud: "If we knew this would fail, would it still be worth doing?" Go around the table. No one passes. You'll hear two pushbacks. "We don't have time." You already spend the time, every month the item comes back unchanged. Thirty-five minutes once costs less than another semester of circling. "My team will get defensive." Some will. Go first. Say your own bodyguard and your own fear. Teams take risks at the level the leader models. SCREENSHOT THIS Three questions for the whiteboard. Tape them inside the agenda folder. The bodyguard does not care for it there. • Is this a problem or a situation? • "We want ___, and we want ___." Which one will we give up? • If we knew this would fail, would it still be worth doing? PICK A SIDE A: Every problem in education can be solved. The ones we call unsolvable are being protected. B: Some problems in our work can't be solved, and telling leaders otherwise burns good people out. Comment A or B. Then give me one bodyguard you've heard this year, word for word. Bonus points if you said it yourself. I read every one. FROM DR. JOE When someone on your leadership team says "that won't work here," who in the room is allowed to ask why? In a lot of the teams I work with, the honest answer is nobody. Everyone is smart. Everyone means well. Your best people spend their best energy explaining why the problem can't move, and the leader at the top carries it home alone. That's how good leaders burn out. Your organization has spent years developing leaders. Higher Performance Group builds the team those leaders sit on. The Team Accelerator spends five months building the other version of your team. It sorts problems from situations in ten minutes. People name a fear without losing face. Decisions get made in the meeting instead of the parking lot. It starts with the TQ Assessment , a free baseline on how your team thinks, decides and sees itself. It might confirm what you suspect. It might show you the bodyguard. Find your team's baseline here. If this named something your team has been circling, repost it with your A or B, or send it to the one colleague who needs it before their next meeting. Turn high performing leaders into a Higher Performing Team. Higher Performance Group | The name in team development.  Follow DR. JOE HILL · Higher Performance Group

Higher Performance Insights | THE ALL-STAR PROBLEM

By HPG Info • November 2, 2026
Why a leadership team full of great hires still drops the ball The Brewers won the World Series Wednesday night, 4–1 over the Rays in Game 5. It’s the first title in the franchise’s 57 years. Ms. Becky and I are building our shack in Wisconsin, so we’re officially on the bandwagon. Baseball is the sport where stacking stars most reliably buys wins. Each hitter stands alone at the plate. Add a great one and the win column moves. Basketball works differently. The NBA teams with the most stars on the roster win less than their talent says they should. Ten seasons of data say so, and so does anyone who has watched a superteam forget how to pass in the fourth quarter. Your leadership team plays basketball. Most of us hired it like a baseball roster. Every superintendent and president I talk to has hired at least one person they'd call the best they've ever worked with. A finance chief who reads a budget like a novel. A chief academic officer the faculty actually trust, which is rarer than a balanced budget. An HR lead who knows every contract clause by heart. Then a hard season shows up. A budget gap, a referendum, a bargaining year, an enrollment dip. The room full of all-stars starts pulling in different directions, each one excellent, each one alone. Everybody is playing hard. Nobody is playing together. So here's a question to sit with before your next leadership team meeting: when did you last hire someone for how well they pass? THE DIAGNOSIS · A ROOM FULL OF FINISHED REPORTS Picture a Tuesday morning leadership meeting in November. Finance brings a projection. HR brings a staffing plan built on last spring's numbers. Teaching and learning brings a new intervention model that needs four positions nobody budgeted. Each report is sharp and finished, and none of them were built with the others in the room. The real meeting happens in the parking lot at 11:40, two people at a time, engines running. Nobody at that table is underperforming. That's what makes the problem so hard to name. Your evaluations say everyone is excellent, and they're right. We built it this way. Job postings, interviews and annual reviews all measure the individual, and nobody's contract lists assists. We hire for points, pay for points, and then act surprised when nobody passes. Three questions worth answering honestly: How many of your top five priorities can one person on your team deliver alone? When a hand-off between two of your leaders drops, who finds out first, you or your board? When the next three months get harder, does your team pass faster, or does everyone retreat to their own lane? I know the loneliness of being the one person at the table who sees how all the pieces connect. I've sat in that chair. For a long stretch, my teams underperformed despite being full of talented people, and I kept trying to close the gap with my own effort. That works about as well as a point guard deciding to also play center. In The TQ Advantage, I call the result the Individual Brilliance Ceiling: talented people in the wrong positions, with no shared way of working, producing average team results. 📊 60% of collective capacity: where most leadership teams run, across nearly 1,000 TQ assessments . The talent is there. The passing is missing. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. IQ is the talent you hired. EQ is the shared language that lets that talent coordinate under pressure. PQ is each leader's accurate read of where they play best and where they're covering. It's multiplication, so a zero anywhere wins. Stack the IQ, let the other two sit near zero, and the product stays small no matter how many stars you sign. A quick timeout before the research. If one of those three questions made you wince, that wince is data. Most leadership teams I work with can name their best individual performer in two seconds and can't produce a single written hand-off. Closing that gap is what our TQ Advantage workshop is built for, and I'll say more about it at the end. First, the sports science. THE RESEARCH · THE TOO-MUCH-TALENT EFFECT In 2014, researchers from INSEAD, Columbia and VU University Amsterdam published a study in Psychological Science that tested something most hiring committees treat as settled: does adding top talent always make a team better? Before they ran the numbers, they asked ordinary people to predict the answer. Most said yes. More stars, more wins, no ceiling. Then the researchers checked. They looked at three sports: two World Cup qualifying cycles in soccer (2010 and 2014), ten NBA seasons (2002 to 2012), and ten Major League Baseball seasons over the same stretch. In baseball, more talent kept paying off. Each added star moved the win column. In soccer and basketball, talent helped up to a point. Past that point the gains flattened, and at the very top the curve bent down. The most star-heavy teams won less than their talent predicted. The NBA data showed where the wins leaked out. The most star-heavy teams coordinated worse: fewer assists, lower shooting percentages, fewer defensive rebounds. Anyone who has guarded a ball hog in a rec-league game knew this already. Now there's a regression line. The deciding variable was interdependence. A baseball hitter stands alone at the plate. (Baseball is a team sport roughly the way a spelling bee is.) A point guard needs four other people for the play to work. When winning depends on coordination, stacking individual brilliance without building the coordination stops paying. One caveat, because a sharp board member will ask: the downturn at the very top comes from a fitted curve, and the coordination link is a correlation. Treat it as a strong signal about where to look. Most of us hire leaders as if we're building a baseball roster. Then we ask them to play basketball. THE FRAMEWORK · SORT, PASS, POSITION Three moves. You can teach all of them to your team in sixty seconds. Sort the game you're actually playing. Some work really is baseball. A great grant writer or recruiter can win alone at the plate, so let them. The leadership team plays a different sport. The budget, the master schedule, enrollment, the board and the bargaining table all run through each other. When one leader guards her lane, somebody else's work stalls. Build the passes on purpose. In the NBA data, the damage ran through coordination. Coordination is a skill, so a team can practice it. Most leadership teams have never written down a single hand-off: who gives what to whom, by when. They run on goodwill and email. Goodwill holds up fine until February. Email holds up fine until someone hits reply-all. Put people where they play best. I was recruited to play catcher in college and spent four years calling pitches and talking with my pitcher between nearly every one. Now and then my coach moved me to right field to rest my legs. I could play it. I was never brilliant out there. Plenty of leadership teams have catchers playing right field, and nobody has said so out loud. The TQ framework maps five types of thinkers: HEART, SOUL, STRENGTH, VOICE and MIND. Every team leans hard toward a few. Among the leaders we've assessed, HEART shows up 43% of the time and MIND just 7% . If nobody on your team naturally plays the MIND position, someone is covering it, and they're probably tired. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE · ONE DROPPED PASS Here's the pattern I see most often. Finance flags a deficit in October. HR waits on enrollment projections before starting the staffing plan. Finance assumes teaching and learning is producing those projections. Teaching and learning assumes HR has them. Nobody dropped the ball on purpose. Everybody assumed someone else was holding it. Three excellent leaders, one dropped pass, and the reduction conversation slides to April, when every option is worse. Map that team's thinking and the reason usually takes about ten minutes to see. Nobody naturally plays the long-range, systems-checking position, so the superintendent has been covering it herself, at 10 p.m., for years. The fix is two moves. Write the six most important hand-offs as one-sentence agreements with names and dates. Then give the systems check to the leader whose profile leans that way, with permission to slow a decision down when the numbers don't connect. Same people. Different sport. TQ IMPLICATION → If most of your priorities need two or more leaders moving together, your development plans can't all be batting practice. THE DRILL · 20 MINUTES AT YOUR NEXT MEETING Sort the work (5 minutes). List your team's top five priorities for the year. Mark each one B for baseball, if one person can win it alone, or H for hoops, if it takes two or more of you moving together. Count the H's. If most are H's and every development plan on your team is individual, you've found the gap. Find the passes (5 minutes). For each H, write the hand-off as one sentence: who gives what to whom, by when. "Finance gets the enrollment projection to HR by February 1 so staffing can start." Name your positions (5 minutes). Go around the table once. Each leader answers: "Where on this team do I play catcher? Where am I playing right field?" No rebuttals on the first lap. Fix one pass (5 minutes). Pick the hand-off that dropped most often this fall. Agree on one change and one owner. Open your next meeting by checking it. "We don't have time for this." Count the decisions this fall that came back to the table a second time because someone wasn't looped in. Multiply by the people in the room and the minutes each one took. You're already paying for the drill, in rework. "My people are too senior for this." So were the NBA's most stacked rosters, and coordination was still where they lost games. Twenty minutes usually surfaces one hand-off everyone quietly knew was broken. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "We need to hire another star." Mature leaders think: "We need the stars we have to pass." Immature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent, so my team is excellent." Mature leaders think: "Everyone on my team is excellent. Now we build the team." Immature leaders think: "Put the best person on the biggest problem." Mature leaders think: "Put the right position on the problem, and protect the hand-offs around it." YOUR TURN Finish this sentence in the comments: "The pass that keeps dropping on our team is ______." One line is plenty. Then read a few of the others. You'll see fast that you're not the only one, which is either comforting or alarming, depending on your board. THE NEXT MOVE Quick gut check. If you ran the drill tomorrow, how many of your top five priorities would come back marked H? And how many of those have a hand-off anyone has written down? If the honest answers are "most" and "none," you're in good company. It's the most common pattern in our data. It's also the one that costs the most in a hard season, because dropped passes show up right when the margin for error disappears: the budget gap, the bargaining year, the board meeting where three of your leaders describe three versions of the same plan. If the drill surfaced more dropped passes than you expected, let's talk it through. Thirty minutes, your team's real hand-offs, no slides and no pitch. Start with a 30-minute conversation: BOOK IT HERE When you're ready to go further, the TQ Advantage workshop puts your whole leadership team in one room for two and a half hours. Everyone completes the TQ assessment first. In the room you see your team's map side by side: who plays catcher, who's covering right field, and which positions nobody holds. You leave with the hand-off and decision protocols you'll use the next morning. Workshop details: higherperformancegroup.com/team-intelligence Know a colleague whose leadership team is in a hard season? Send this their way. And if you're new here, hit subscribe so next week's issue finds you. SOURCES & FURTHER READING Swaab, R. I., Schaerer, M., Anicich, E. M., Ronay, R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2014). The too-much-talent effect: Team interdependence determines when more talent is too much or not enough. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1581–1591. Read the study Plain-language summary: Association for Psychological Science The book: The TQ Advantage by Dr. Joe Hill Behind the 60% figure: HPG research on nearly 1,000 TQ assessments
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