5.1 Next steps
This is your opportunity to plan what you’re going to do next to develop your team working skills and experience.
Try to make the goals you come up with SMART, i.e.
S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable
R = Relevant
T = Time bound
In your Toolkit [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , you’ll find a Goal Setting tool, which will take you through the SMART process and help you to write down and plan your goals. If you choose to access this, you’ll notice that the acronym has been expanded to SMARTER, adding Engagement and Reward to the list of letters. There are various different interpretations of the SMART tool and you should choose the one that resonates for you.
If none of this resonates, there are other goals setting tools available, such as HARD (heartfelt, animated, required and difficult) and PACT (purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable), which we don’t have time to cover in detail here, but that you can easily explore using your preferred online search engine.
Activity 5 Making plans
In your Toolkit, you’ll see a Goal Setting tool, which takes you through the SMART process and helps you to write down and plan your goals. Open the toolkit in a new tab or window and come back here when you are done.
Reflecting on your learning throughout the course, consider what aspects of your skills and experience you’d like to develop further and set some goals relating to those. For example:
If you need to build a wider range of teamwork experience – an appropriate goal might be to:
- sign up for a club, such as a sports team
- volunteer to join a committee
- get together with some friends and organise an event.
Revisiting Week 1 should give you some ideas.
- If you want to work on enhancing your team working skills – you could set yourself the goal of:
- making at least one suggestion in the next team meeting you attend
- trying out some active listening and reflecting on how that changes the quality of your communication with others
- giving some feedback using some of the techniques you’ve learned on this course.
Comment
If you have identified more than one goal, you’ll need to prioritise your action plans. Is it achievable to tackle them all in one go? Don’t have too many goals or you’ll be overwhelmed and may not achieve them all, which can be demoralising.
You may find it useful to return to the course in order to evaluate any new team experiences you have in the future. Once you have a bank of examples to draw on you can consider them using your learning from this course, for example, reviewing the role that you played in each team or assessing the stages that each team went through in formation and performance, and reflecting on your input into this.