Goal-Setting Strategies for Stronger Teams with William Vanderbloemen and Jennifer Paulson

In this episode of the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast, William Vanderbloemen and Jennifer Paulson discuss the importance of setting clear goals and how leaders can create alignment to drive their teams forward.

They explore:

· How to set goals that are both ambitious and achievable.

· Why defining success is crucial for team motivation and accountability.

· The role of communication in keeping teams focused and aligned.

· Practical strategies for overcoming obstacles and adapting goals when needed.

Whether you're leading a church, business, or nonprofit, this episode will provide actionable insights to help you clarify your vision, set meaningful goals, and build a team that is motivated to achieve them.

Resources

Follow William on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvanderbloemen/

Follow Vanderbloemen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanderbloemen/

Rocket Fuel Book: https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Fuel-Essential-Combination-Business/dp/1942952317 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to the Vander Blumen Leadership Podcast, where we help you build, run, and keep great teams. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in. Well, welcome in. Let me tell you guys, you're in for a treat today because we not only have the expert William Vanderblumen, but also we have both of the leaders of Vanderblumen. We have Jennifer Paulson in here, COO or coup, as she sometimes puts it. And we're talking about, I know one of Jen's favorite subjects, goals, talking all about goals. And I want to hear from both of you guys, but what are just some of the ways for our team leaders for them to effectively communicate goals to those who are members of the team?

SPEAKER_02 0:45

I'll go first. Hire a good goal setter. No, seriously, I think I think is the you know, every every leadership team is different. I get asked all the time, should I have one direct report? Should I have five direct reports? Is the team better? Craig Rochelle has four. Yes, and it's a wonderful team. I had the same four forever. Turn around another group. Oh, he's just got one, or she just has one. Or it kind of depends. And honestly, we've gone through a lot of different models over different seasons. But what I will say, I'm trying to do that I didn't do a very good job of when I was younger, is hire people that complement my deficiencies rather than just people that are like me. You know, I like me. So when I was younger, I hired a lot of people. I'm like, what do all these people have in common? Like, oh, they're like me. Well, that was pretty dumb.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

So but I bet it was fun.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

It was fun for a while. Oh, yeah. But it it I've said many times, it taught me why no one wants to coach the Olympic basketball team because the whole team just says ball, ball, ball. There's no that's right. That's right. There's no complimentary. And so uh in this season right now, Jared, one of the things that's so wonderful about the model that we have is Jennifer's very strong where I'm not. And I am not strong at setting goals and then backdating that to the bite-sized steps. I know it needs to happen. I can do it. I do it with my running, I do it with, you know, diet, I do it with lots of things. But boy, she's better at it. And I I'll never forget one senior pastor said to me one time, I think God's gifted me to get up in the crow's nest of our ship, if our church is a ship and we're going. And my job, my gifting is to look out over the horizon and say, that's where we need to go. And he was looking for an exec pastor. He said, I need someone who can sit down, hands on the wheel, and say, I know how to get us there. Yeah. That's what Jen's been here. So I'll Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Well, one thing that I wanted to talk about is proactive versus reactive. That's something that I say a lot. And I think what happens in most companies, probably churches as well, is they become very reactive. And instead of consciously making a plan for where they want to go, they kind of just let things happen to them and they're busy saying, okay, this just came in, I'm gonna handle this. This email came in, this problem, and they're reactive. And in a reactive stance, you're never gonna be able to move your company forward. You can't grow from a reactive stance. So the point of goals is to turn the vision, make make things proactive rather than reactive, because then on a daily basis, you're taking a conscientious step to move forward rather than being stuck in a place where you have to be defensive and you're not moving forward at all.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Yeah. It's kind of like being stuck in kind of like a survival mode versus wanting to move the organization forward with goals and such. You know, we were talking beforehand about goals, just briefly going over what we were going to talk about. And we had some strong opinions on S M-A-R-T smart goals. William, I know you have I think they're super smart.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

That's right. I mean, I like it because it's an acronym and preachers do that. You know, I wish they all started with the same letter, but yeah, you know, was it I don't even know what SMART is. Measurable, achievable. Yeah, yeah. But uh then I got corrected.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

I don't like SMART goals.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

So what are they, by the way?

SPEAKER_00 4:01

So it's specific, measurable, attainable, um, realistic, and time bound.

unknown 4:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

So those and I think it the reason I don't like it is because I think there's four too many acronyms. I four four too many letters. I think it should just be S specific. You just make a goal. Um there's so many different there's people making money, there's a lot of different um templates for goal setting. OKRs is one that we use that just means objective and key result. The bottom line is set a goal and make sure that there's a path to get there. I think that a lot of business gurus are trying to capitalize on acronyms and you know different different systems of doing it when it's really just set a goal, attain the goal.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

How would you balance when going to achieve a goal, you know, kind of flexibility versus like, no, we need to, we need to go and hit this one for sure.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

That's a great question. So I think it's important to have high goals that they're gonna be your north stars and you're not gonna bend against them. Like let's say revenue growth number. Whatever we do, we're gonna be shooting for this revenue growth number. Yep. And then there's lower goals that you can be flexible depending on the needs of the business as you go through the year. So I would just, I would I would advise people to set maybe three big goals and every decision that the company makes is to achieve those goals. And then some smaller ones that help you achieve them, but everyone knows that you can be flexible on those.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah. When, you know, a lot of people they set goals, especially at the beginning of the year too. Um being realistic, hey, some people don't achieve those goals. Do you have you seen any commonalities? Maybe you can both speak to this between um companies that have maybe set a specific goal or organizations and they have not achieved it. And how can maybe we can help listeners today avoid those pitfalls and help them to achieve the goals that they've set for this year?

SPEAKER_02 5:46

I think as a senior leader, um I'm a seven, so I love the next party. Yep. But I wing six, which is weird. I finish marathons. Yeah. So the danger, there are a whole lot of leaders out there who are sevens or eights, a whole lot of senior pastors. And I think the the the gifting is being able to pivot and move and all. But then the backside of it is you get the pastor, you say, Hey, Pastor, what's your favorite book you've ever read? And it says, I just finished it. And then you ask him six months later, I just finished it. And so you get what I call uh SOS, shiny object syndrome. So like Pastor went on vacation and he came back, and we have a whole new plan. Like we have a whole new and pastor, and then there's the Jesus card. Well, Lord gave me a word. Go to a church conference. The Lord gives words to groups, not just individuals. So, you know, it's it's sorry for those of you I just offended, but I think the danger for me, what I'm having to learn to do is if we say those are the goals and they're the three immovable things we're doing this year, I have to defer my seven that wants to go into a new thing or another new thing, and just say, okay, we all said these are the three things and we're gonna get the so for me as a leader, I'm having to learn to defer to what we decided the North Stars were for that year.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

That's well said. I was gonna speak on the word galvanizing. So you were talking about how can we make sure that we don't set goals and then get distracted or fall by the wayside. The galvanizing portion, so that's everyone coming to agreement. When we make goals, William and I don't just sit in a room and make the goals and tell everyone this is gonna be, these are our goals for the year. Yeah, we do it collaboratively because when people have weigh-in, they have buy-in. So I think the main reason that companies don't follow through on goals even in the first couple months of the year is because there isn't buy-in, and the people and other teams, they're not seeing that that's an important goal. So they're not taking action to achieve that goal. And then the the goal won't be achieved. So if if people can't rally around the cause together and all get on the same page, the it the goals are not going to be achieved.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

I I think the the biggest thing that you said there was just having buy-in from a team for a goal. How would you go about um maybe getting some team members who maybe are a little bit reluctant to get on board with uh with a certain goal? How do we, I guess, galvanize them to be willing to say, hey, no, this is something we are really passionate about? This is something that we um are are setting as a North Star goal that we must achieve. How how do you help bring team members along to that?

SPEAKER_02 8:18

So so kind of like if a football team gets galvanized around a national championship, it it really because the the school paid $20 million to get Ohio State that trophy like that?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Well, when that's uh an example, I'm not going to refute you on this podcast. That's a that's for a different one.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

I I I'm kidding and poking, but I'm actually I'm actually being real. Money will not galvanize. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

That's true, William. That's exactly right. I think there's three. I'm not gonna remember all three of them when I when I say now, but I think the first thing is communication. So it's very important that um the decisions that the leadership team is making or thinking through are well communicated. So I've got to communicate to people what I'm thinking and why I'm thinking, and then give them that big picture. So it would be very easy for someone, let's say in IT, to not understand why a goal that we set is important. But if you can give them that background, give them the big picture and communicate it well, that helps people get on the same page. Yeah. So those are just two.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Yeah. And I I think it goes back to our recent podcast on uh unifying the team around vision. I think the senior leader's job is to just incessantly beat the drum of the vision. We're gonna help the church go farther and faster by solving their people problems. What would happen if churches didn't have turnover of their pastors? What would happen if you had a headmaster who was really committed to raising up a whole new generation of leaders? What would happen if you had a CEO of this nonprofit that, you know, the goal of the senior leader has always been vision? But here's the news uh for those of us on Team Jesus, we are getting lapped by the rest of the world. 75% of millennials and Gen Zs want to know the purpose of a company before they take a job, not church, company. And so now you've got companies like, you know, Tom's Toothpaste, great company, but they're doing a better job of casting their vision than we are. And we have the only permanent vision on the planet. Yeah. So I just want to light a little bit of a fire under leaders out there. You say, well, we've already talked about that. We've already talked about that. You haven't enough. You've got a generation coming that is dying to hear why you're doing what you're doing. And it may feel repetitive and it may feel like second, verse, same as the first, but it's on you to drive that vision. It's on you to be up in that crow's nest saying, we're going towards something that matters, so that when your person that is actually saying, and here's how we're going to get there, they don't have to do the hard work of convincing people. It's undergirded by the why.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Two, two things on that. One is the younger generation, probably my age and and below, are choosing companies based on the values. So based on the values, but also based on knowing that they're going to be cared for. So I think we can set all the goals that we want, but if our employees don't rally behind the vision and the values of the company, they won't be achieved. And if we don't show our employees that we actually care about them as people and want to help them advance in their career, want to help their lives improve, they're going to be less likely to want to get on the same page as us.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

What's maybe a success story of a team organization that y'all have been a part of that has set clear, um, communicated well their goals and gone on to achieve such goals. Is there any commonalities between, you know, we talked about what when they don't? Is there any commonalities when they when they do achieve the goals that they've set, the vision, I guess, that they've set for for the team?

SPEAKER_02 11:43

One thought that comes to mind, and I mentioned this in a previous podcast, the Tom Brady speech about do hard things. Yeah. Oh, yeah, everybody should play football because it's hard. Everybody do hard things because life is hard. And he said, and here's the thing: you don't have to be exceptional. You just have to be what 97% of everybody isn't, and that is steady and consistent.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

And I I think the the clients that we have that are really achieving their goals, there's nothing sexy about it.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

I mean, they might do fun things, but there's really nothing sexy about it. It's the how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? How do you when I started running after I've been smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day, different podcasts, I quit on Ash Wednesday. It was kind of funny. Uh oh, and I was living in Winston, Salem, North Carolina. So not an easy place to, yeah. So I I decided I'd start running. And I I went on a little walk every day, trying to get in shape. I was way overweight. And uh I I the mile, it was about a mile and a half walk. I finally got that down. I thought, you know, that last quarter mile, I'm just gonna run it. And I didn't make it. And it was downhill, and I'm pretty sure the wind was with me. And uh and I finally got where I make it, and I literally backed up one telephone pole a day until I got to the full mile and a half. And I think it's that unglamorous. We're gonna do this and we're gonna do it one step at a time. And what Jen does a marvelous job of is breaking down the how we get there into digestible steps and just it's not sexy. It's just commitment to doing what 97% of everybody else won't do. You can bar say it better.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

No, I just completely agree. And I'm not I'm not ever a fan of the next big thing. I'm not ever a fan of the next big shiny object, or here's a book that'll tell you how to do this, or you know, if you're not life's not going well, you just need to make this one change. I agree with William. I think it's stability and consistency. You set a goal, you set a goal for a year, for 10 years, a life goal, and every day you just take little steps to achieve that. It's really nothing fancy. It's just you've got to put your nose to the grindstone and and do it.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

You know, when we're talking about setting goals, what are some of the mistakes that you've seen leaders of teams make when they're choosing their North Star? You know, we talked about mistakes that are not maybe maybe not mistakes, but failures of teams to achieve the goals. But sometimes when the goal is not correct, you know, they can put the team off.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

I think the biggest mistake that visionary leaders make is setting a goal that's way too ambitious. Uh William says this a lot. It's much easier to lead a team from ahead than lead a team from behind. So if you set a goal that's just wildly ambitious, that might be exciting for the for the visionary leader, but it's demotivating to everyone else. And then every month, as there's a check-in, oh, we're not there yet. Oh, we're still not there yet. Oh, we're still not there yet. Yeah. So my biggest piece of advice would be to g give a goal that's, you know, slightly ambitious, but that really is attainable because people feel really good when they achieve a goal and they feel pretty bad when they don't.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

I say all the time, the the greatest friend of a leader is momentum. Yeah. And that doesn't mean low ball your goals. I mean, like you get honest with uh where you think the goal should be. Listen to people who are integrators. If you haven't read the book Rocket Fuel, that's just an amazing book about how visionaries and integrators can learn to live together and and work together because we're wired differently, I think. But uh it it I think the classic mistake that I've made as a visionary is assuming that a 10-year goal can be accomplished in a year. Yeah. And you know, people uh Craig Grischel says this all the time. People overestimate what they can get done in a year, yeah, and they underestimate what they can get done in a decade. And so I think it I totally agree with you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

I think um one of the things that, you know, maybe team leaders and people who set goals kind of um can when they when they realize that they have set a goal that's maybe not in alignment of what the organization should be, how often should we be revisiting and coming back to these goals and saying, making sure like, okay, this is still aligning with what we are really about here, you know, this is really who we are.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

With those three North stars, you really should um have a lot of discernment going in and make sure that you don't change those. If, however, I set a North if we set a North Star goal and we realized five, six months in we weren't gonna make it, I would do the communication and the transparency and I would say to the team, you know, we set this goal of 50% attendance growth or 50%, and we're realizing that we're really more on track for 20. So we're gonna lower that to 30 percent, not lower it to where we're at because we still want there to be an you know an achievable goal. But I do think in order to keep people motivated, periodically you might want to change that. Try not to.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

And and I I think it's uh for me, it's how do you keep momentum going? Yeah. I'll use a Stark example. Uh, about five years ago. I don't know when this is airing, but about five years ago, right now, is when the world fell apart. No, well, guess what? I, you know, I I didn't go to business school. I have a religion and philosophy degree. So like most people spend their career with those degrees saying, Would you like fries with that? You know, so oh you know. So I don't have business, but here's a business lesson I learned in the pandemic. All the churches were closed, all schools were closed. If all of your clients are closed indefinitely, it's going to change your revenue for the year. Yes. So so we had to say, okay, time out. Everything just changed. And that happens in ministry. A crisis in a community. Everything just changed. Let's drop back and take a realistic, it's almost like recasting those North Stars and saying, what can we achieve and how can we make a difference? And and then make it so achievable that there's almost immediate momentum, especially if it's a tragic thing that's happened. Like we we made a pretty drastic change around here. We had to cut 40% of our overhead in one day. And that wasn't on a whim, that was actually thought through and calculated, and that's depressing. But we immediately started to see some momentum and some little wins. And little by little, I don't know how we got out of that thing, but we did. But I think it's because we I don't know if we were just dumb luck or what, but we just shifted everything when the world changed.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

And broken record over here, but communication. So if you do change your goals, if you do have to do something that dramatic, there needs to be really clear communication to the employees as or, you know, other workers as to why that's happening. Otherwise, it will become scary and they'll think that it could happen at any time.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

As we close today, let's just kind of give um actionable steps to kind of our listeners. And William, you can do it from the perspective of, you know, the casting vision in gen, maybe from actually going and executing the the plan. But um just for our listeners that are leading teams and going in planning and assessing their goals and deciding what is right for their company and their team, what what are just some kind of um best practices, maybe some lasting tips that they can take with them today?

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Yeah, as the senior leader, I think you need to get to know yourself and not just in a uh nicey nice way. Most of us, uh when we studied unicorns for the book Be the Unicorn, that'd be the best of the best, they had 12 habits in common. The one that they said they were worst at, like across the board, was self-awareness. Well, they're actually the best at self-awareness. And when we surveyed a quarter million people that were not unicorns, just normal, everyday people, and like 91% of them said they're better than average at self-awareness. So, like, I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure there's no groove where 91% is above average. Oh, I'm not like that. Hey, Pastor, do you remember the first time you heard your voice recorded? Ooh. Ooh, that's not me. I don't like that voice. I'm glad I don't sound like that. That's the lack of self-awareness. And I am not great at goal setting. I can do it if I have to. I mean, when we started and it was just me, like we we had to figure it out. But I think what I'm trying to learn is where am I good and where am I not? And then how do I defer to people who are good at the things I'm not? And if you're a visionary leader, then go buy rocket fuel and read it today. It's a one plane flight read. It won't take you long, but it opened my eyes to okay, if I'm wired this way, then I need to be extra careful to defer here to integrators. Some of your senior leaders that are more detail-oriented than anybody, but but get to know yourself so you can staff in a complimentary way and the goals can get set in a way that that everyone can get on board with.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

My tip would be people related. So you're not gonna be able to achieve your goals if you don't have the right people. So I would say two specific steps. One, make sure that the people on your leadership team are the people that you want on your leadership team, really high performers, um, people that are gonna be able to have the skill of tenacity, they're gonna be able to enact goals that you set. And then the other thing I would I would say is also people related. A couple of weeks ago, we took the time and we went through all of our employees and we did a nine-box ranking system. If you're gonna achieve goals, you have to have the right people on the team. So I would make sure that your leadership team is all on board with the employees that you want to pour into and maybe the employees that whose whose time has run their course. Because if everyone is pulling in the same direction, you're gonna achieve your goals a lot faster. Yeah. And if you've got some people that aren't pulling in the same direction or maybe aren't able to that doesn't happen in church. From what I've heard, it happens even more in church because in business there's a lot of metrics, and in churches, maybe we give people more opportunities.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

Well, Jesus never fired anybody. Not.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I'm happy to come to your church and help.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Well, listen, we hope you enjoyed today's episode. Here's what I know is that if you set the right goals for your team, you'll be able to achieve more than ever before in 2025. Thanks again for joining us on the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're looking for more leadership resources, you can find us at Vanderblumen.com and on socials at Vanderblumen. We'll see you again next week where we continue discussing how to build, run, and keep great teams.