Set Goals Higher Than Last Year Allowed
Lead yourself and your team toward what is now possible.
Most leaders set their goals for the year by looking back. They take what the team delivered over the last twelve months, add a stretch that feels ambitious but safe, and plan around the people, budget, and time they expect to have.
Work that once filled a quarter can now be done in weeks, and a small team can take on what used to require a much larger one. Many of the limits behind last year’s numbers no longer apply, and a goal sized to them will likely ask too little of you and the people you lead.
Meeting a more ambitious goal depends on how you lead yourself, your team, and your part of the business. The rising leaders who do it well choose the right goals, give their teams a reason to care about them, stay honest about what they don’t yet know, keep learning, and hold steady on what matters while the path keeps changing.
Size Your Goals to What Is Now Possible
Start each goal from the result the business would value most. Ask what your part of the business could deliver if the limits on time, capacity, and budget that shaped last year’s plan were lifted, and what that result would be worth in revenue, client relationships, or margin. Goals built this way are tied to what the business is trying to achieve, which makes them easier for senior leaders to support.
Ambition also changes how a team approaches the work. When a goal is set only modestly above last year’s result, most teams plan to meet it with the same process and more effort. A goal several times larger cannot be met that way, so it pushes the team to rethink how the work gets done.
Picture a rising leader who runs marketing for a consulting firm’s healthcare practice. Her first draft of a goal is ten percent more qualified opportunities. When she asks what the practice would value most, the answer is more and larger work from its twenty biggest clients. That goal cannot be reached by running more campaigns, so her team rebuilds its plan around those clients, working with account leaders on each one and using AI for the production work that once filled their week. The goal becomes a plan the practice’s leadership wants to fund.
Size your own goals the same way, and share them. An ambitious goal shows your team and your leadership how much you believe is possible.
“Many of the limits behind last year’s numbers no longer apply, and a goal sized to them will likely ask too little of you and the people you lead.”
Decide What Your Team Will Be Known For
As AI becomes part of how almost every firm works, much of what firms produce starts to look alike. Proposals, points of view, and campaigns built on the same technology and the same widely available thinking tend to reach similar conclusions in similar language, and clients notice. That makes distinction one of the most useful goals a rising leader can set.
Start by deciding what you want your team to be known for by the end of the year. It might be deep understanding of a particular industry, a point of view clients seek out, or the speed with which it turns a hard problem into a solution. The strongest choices connect to a real need in the business and build on something your team already does well.
Then set goals that build it. Consider two marketing teams supporting pursuits at professional services firms. Both can now produce proposal content in a fraction of the time it once took. One uses that time to produce more of it. The other sets a goal for every proposal to carry a clear recommendation for the client’s business and the outcome it should deliver by the end of the first quarter, drawn from the team’s knowledge of the client relationship and industry. Within a few months, partners are inviting the second team into pursuit planning.
A distinct team attracts the hardest problems and a stronger case for investment, because senior leaders know exactly what they get from it. Make the same choice for yourself as a leader, and choose the work this year that builds and reinforces it.
Make Sure Everyone Knows Why the Goal Matters
An ambitious goal mobilizes a team when people understand why it matters. As the year gets busy and priorities start competing, the people who can explain the reason behind a goal make day-to-day decisions that move it forward without waiting to be told what comes first.
The reason worth sharing connects three things: what the goal does for the business, what it does for the clients it serves, and what it asks of each person on the team. Explain all three plainly when you set the goal, then make room for questions, since they show you which parts people don’t yet understand. Each person should be able to see where their own work contributes to the result and how they will know it is progressing. As roles and priorities shift, a goal with a clear reason behind it gives people a fixed point to steer by.
A few weeks after you set the goal, ask someone on your team to explain the goal in their own words, including their part in it. If they can’t, explain it again in a different way. Repeating the reason more often than feels necessary is part of the job.
Be Honest About What Is Still Unknown
Ambitious goals set during constant change include parts no one can fully plan. You may know the result you want and still be unsure how clients will respond or what the work will look like six months from now. No leader has those answers in advance, including the most senior people in your firm, and leaders who say so plainly earn more trust when the plan has to change.
Be specific about which parts of the goal are firm commitments and which are informed bets, and share the questions you will need answered along the way. Then ask your team to help answer them. The people closest to clients often see first whether an assumption is holding, and they speak up sooner when they know you want to hear it. Saying “I don’t know yet, and here is how we will find out” takes confidence, and it makes teams more willing to commit to an ambitious goal.
Pair Every Results Goal With a Learning Goal
An ambitious goal usually asks people to do something they have not done before, which makes learning part of the plan from the start. For each result you set out to deliver, name what you and your team will need to learn to reach it, and give that learning the same weight as the result.
A useful learning goal names something a person will be able to do by a specific time, such as presenting the practice’s next-generation go-to-market plan to its partners by midyear. Ask each person on your team to choose one capability that serves the team’s goal and their own career, then give them work that builds it, such as a pursuit outside their usual sector or a piece of the goal they have never owned. Pair that work with regular coaching, so they build operator, strategy, and leadership skills while the team delivers its results. The team finishes the year with stronger results and more capable people.
Keep the Outcome Fixed and Adapt How You Reach It
Through a year of constant change, the outcome is the part of a goal to protect, and the plan for reaching it is the part to keep revisiting. New priorities, requests, and ways of working will compete for your team’s attention every week. Some help the team reach its outcome sooner, and others pull effort away from what matters most. Discipline means telling the two apart and declining good ideas that don’t serve the goal.
Look broadly across the business, at what clients are asking for, what account and sales teams are hearing, and what is changing in your market, since that is where you will first see when the route needs to change. Then work precisely on the few things that drive the result, and keep most of your team’s time, and your own, there.
Mark progress with milestones a few weeks apart and the first one inside the first month. Each shows whether the plan is working, and meeting the early ones makes an ambitious goal feel reachable.
Set This Year’s Goals With Your Team
The most useful goal-setting conversation you can hold this month is one with your team in the room. Bring a draft of the outcome you believe the business would value most and what you want the team to be known for, and ask the team to challenge both. Agree on the reason behind the goal, which parts are firm and which are still open, and the capability each person will build. Before the conversation ends, set the first milestone and decide who owns it.
Then set your own goals the same way, with a result that matters to the business, a capability to build, and someone you trust to tell you honestly how it is progressing. A personal goal with a clear reason behind it is far easier to protect when other demands compete or conflict with it.
Leaders who aim higher this year will find that far more is within their reach than last year’s plans suggested. Their teams will learn faster than they expected and finish the year more capable than they started it.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
