The founder or leader of any growing company has a lot to juggle between steering the ship of business and finding a sustainable way to scale. Particularly in growth phases, investing in company culture and creating robust hiring and onboarding practices will benefit any startup in the long run.
How do you create a great company culture that shines through even in the hiring process? One important way to stay focused is to create SMART leadership development goals around hiring, onboarding, and maintaining company culture that reflect your mission and values. Here’s our guide to developing leadership goals for company culture that incorporate SMART goal practices and help you better know yourself in the process.
DiSC Assessment
Before you begin developing your leadership goals, it’s essential to understand who you are in the workplace and how you lead most naturally. Everyone has a unique style of leadership that prioritizes different things: do you value consensus over the next steps? What about having all the information possible on a decision point?
A great way to learn about yourself and your own style of decision-making is to take a DiSC assessment. DiSC, which stands for (D)ominance, (i)nfluence, (S)teadiness, and (C)onscientiousness, evaluates each person on these four variables and paints a picture of overall work and/or leadership style.
The way you lead is helpful for developing goals, as you can design goals that work in harmony with your leadership style.
SMART Goals
Another critical concept to embrace before developing goals is the SMART goal. SMART goals are (S)pecific, (M)easurable, (A)chievable, (R)elevant, and (T)ime-Bound; therefore “achieve world peace” is not a SMART goal, but “hire two software developers by Q4” is much closer to the mark. These goals are designed actually to be accomplished rather than remain lofty and philosophical. Practical goals are inherently more actionable.
In this post, we’ll provide an example of a SMART goal for each goal listed.
Hiring Goals
Hiring goals are fundamental to establishing not just the workforce you need for your company, but also the workforce you want to take with you to the next level. Scaling a startup can be tricky, particularly in this economy, so setting rock-solid SMART goals around responsible hiring will only benefit you in the long run.
Improve financial acumen for sustainable growth
Before you can hire, you must know your budget. Financial management doesn’t come easy to everyone: we’ve seen countless startups balloon and fail or fail to take contingency plans into account and go underwater.
Really evaluate where your company is right now financially and where you want it to be. You can’t hire staff until you know you’ll be able to sustainably pay them. In order to understand your company’s definition of sustainability, you need to understand your finances. A great place to start is to allocate funding towards staffing but also to a ‘rainy day fund’ should the economy take a downturn.
SMART goal example: Create a line item in next year’s budget for two software developers, accounting for onboarding expenses, and create a corresponding line item for savings.
Mentor and develop talent for easier hiring
A crucial part of hiring is to create an environment where new hires are plugging into an already vibrant culture of training, mentorship, and peer-to-peer collaboration. Make sure your current staff is empowered to capably train and mentor new hires by training and mentoring them from the jump.
SMART goal example: Develop SOPs in one month for all core processes for your company and have a staffer responsible for each workstream QA for accuracy and completeness.
Understand your company culture as it is currently
A key hiring strategy is to hire candidates for culture fit as well as for their skillset; this is very difficult unless you already understand your company culture. Are you a startup of individuals, or do you have a highly collaborative workplace? Do people feel connected or prefer to keep rigid work boundaries? Understanding what makes your company tick is vital to hiring and will increase the likelihood that the people you hire will stay if they gel with the company culture.
SMART goal example: Circulate an anonymous company culture survey to understand work styles, net satisfaction, and priorities of your staff. Include questions in interviews that address cultural priorities in the workplace.
Onboarding Goals
You have new staff: now what? Here are some goals to consider around onboarding new hires to maximize their assimilation into your company.
Foster an inclusive culture
Groupthink, or the phenomenon of complete alignment of opinion to the point of major blind spots, can be a death sentence for a startup. A great way to combat a tendency towards groupthink is to intentionally hire and then support a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets. By fostering an inclusive culture where every voice is heard and considered, ideas and decisions made by consensus are less likely to have blind spots. It’s important in the onboarding process to affirm employees and maintain the message that their perspective and input is not just valued but actively sought after.
SMART goal example: Create a training paradigm in which a new hire actively contributes to work from the start and treat their input equally.
Set clear and achievable goals
We’ve already established the importance of SMART goals for leadership; this holds true for onboarding employees as well. The more you can map out benchmarks, dates, and tasks into an easily followed checklist, the better the onboarding experience will be for a new hire.
SMART goal example: Create an individualized onboarding plan with benchmarks and a timeline for each new hire.
Build trust and credibility
First impressions are everything, and new hires are an especially vulnerable population. A huge part of this is consistency and transparency: as you onboard new hires, are you ensuring they have a holistic sense of your company and its success, or were they told something in an interview that isn’t strictly true? Ensure that your offer is in line with your job description, and ensure that the new hire is trained in the job they applied to.
SMART goal example: Develop regular transparency updates surrounding things such as company finances and future hiring plans so all staff can understand the global picture of your company.
Encourage continuous learning
SMART goal example: Develop regular all-staff training and map out potential rewards for off-hours professional development.
Promote work-life balance
Startups and tech companies have a bad reputation when it comes to work-life balance, but that doesn’t mean you need to play into that stereotype. In fact, recent studies have shown that misaligned work-life balance is the #1 cause of employees leaving a company. In onboarding, be sure to explain your company’s PTO policy and emphasize that PTO is there for a reason. A company that creates a culture of nonstop work will burn out; one that values rest as a critical component of innovation will thrive.
SMART goal example: Cement your PTO policy and make sure you take a minimum of half that PTO yourself, thus leading by example.
Company Culture Goals
While a lot of work must be done to properly hire and onboard staff at your company, the work never ends regarding company culture. A toxic company culture can injure any business, so cultivating positive culture as one would a garden is imperative. Here are more goals to set around fostering company culture.
Practice communication skills at all levels
A company that is open and effective at communication will go far. Particularly in remote-forward environments, clear, effective communication is absolutely vital. To this end, model clear communication yourself across all channels and, if necessary, train your staff on communication skills. If your company is client-facing, ensure that client communications are a core part of professional development and onboarding training.
SMART goal example: Audit all communication channels and ensure each are meeting or exceeding the needs of the workplace. Then, ensure that communications are addressed in onboarding materials and ongoing training.
Promote team collaboration
A team that works well together already embodies a healthy company culture. As a leader, it should be high on your goal list to foster an environment of positive and productive collaboration. You’ve already fostered a diverse workforce that brings various perspectives to the table: now leverage them to collaborate and combine strengths and find innovative, cutting-edge solutions.
SMART goal example: Prioritize project management and peer feedback across workstreams.
Hone decision-making and develop transparency
One of the main things leaders do is make decisions: you’re steering the ship, and ultimately, the ship’s well-being lies in your hands. But it’s not just what you decide that affects your company’s culture; it’s how. Look at your own decision-making process: is it from the gut, or do you take data, feedback, and consensus into account? Do you study the impact of your decisions, taking a ‘seventh generation’ mindset, or a mindset of asking how your decision will impact the far future?
SMART goal example: Create a decision rubric for yourself that holds you accountable to data, feedback, and input from all relevant stakeholders.
Deepen your emotional intelligence
While fiscal stewardship might appear to be just a numbers game, emotional intelligence is vital for any leader. Do you want to be Scrooge before or after several ghosts visit him? Which leader inspires: the leader with humanity, or the leader that seems inhuman or emotionless? It’s extremely difficult to manage your own emotions and expectations while simultaneously holding space for others at your company, but this is vital to creating a company culture that honors humanity and avoids toxicity.
SMART goal example: Assess your emotional intelligence and consider coaching or counseling to strengthen your skills. Alternatively, practice mindfulness for 30 days and notice what changes in your emotional landscape.
Enhance strategic thinking
Leading a company one day at a time might sound like a nice motto, but having a long-term strategic plan that charts your path will serve you and your company much better in the long run. Consider your startup’s mission and vision; what will it take to get where you want to go? At what rate will you need to scale? Grounding leadership in a strategic plan augments transparency and provides a built-in rationale for decision-making that will resonate with your team.
SMART goal example: Develop a 5-year plan incorporating revenue, scale, and product offerings.
Adapt to change with ease
Rigidity is the enemy of progress. Cultivating a mindset that embraces change and honors agility in the face of adversity will serve you and your staff over time. As the last five years have demonstrated, we live in interesting historical times, and the companies that performed the best as world orders changed were the ones able to stay grounded in the present and look toward the future. Being able to anticipate or at least prepare for unforeseen difficulties will keep anxiety down in your workforce and make it that much easier to pivot at the drop of a hat.
SMART goal example: Perform an in-depth risk assessment and evaluate your company’s preparedness for a variety of adverse events.
Increase accountability across all levels of staff– including yourself
Accountability ensures that there is one set of standards applied to every worker at your company, from the newest hire to yourself. When you take responsibility and own mistakes, that communicates that it’s ok for others to do the same, and it better motivates your staff to own their work. Accountability also means celebrating wins: it’s essential to cultivate a culture that honors accomplishments as well as points out when people fall short. This even-handed approach to accountability will empower your team to do their best.
SMART goal example: Hold a regular meeting to check on all work streams and create space for all teams to take accountability for wins and setbacks alike.
Enhance time management through efficient planning
Time management is tricky, especially as the leader of a startup, determining where to spend most of your time can find you pulled in many directions. This also holds true for your team: effective time management lifts the entire company up and keeps them from being bogged down by superfluous obligations. By determining task priorities, you waste less time figuring out what to do and can better focus on doing it. This will then free up time for deeper, strategic thinking as well as creating more space for work-life balance.
SMART goal example: Spend an hour on Fridays prioritizing the following week’s tasks. This will let you jump into the work week and be more present during the weekend, preventing burnout.
Strengthen conflict resolution skills
Conflict is a fundamental part of progress, and at first, sitting in the discomfort of conflict might be very difficult. However, disagreement not only reinforces a culture of diverse viewpoints, but it also guards against groupthink or blind spots. As such, honoring conflict while steering towards resolution is vital for any leader, and honing skills around conflict resolution will take you far. Learn the genesis of conflict, and lead your staff towards resolution by honoring all viewpoints and developing consensus.
SMART goal example: Learn about conflict resolution skills and make sure that everyone feels heard in conflict. Take pulse surveys if necessary.
Drive innovation through active learning
SMART goal example: Create a monthly meeting for peer-driven education and/or discussion of industry-wide trends.
Conclusion
These leadership goals all concretely improve company culture, from hiring the right people at the right time to training and onboarding in a way that creates happy, engaged, self-motivated employees. Good leadership at every point in scaling your workforce will create a positive and fulfilling company culture that will, in turn, make your own leadership easier.
