Do you set team goals at the beginning of every year, but somehow end up in the same place at the end of the year? Or maybe you and your team hit your goals, but it was an exhausting, gruelling year trying to achieve them.

Either way, if that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I’ve worked with hundreds of managers who feel exactly the same way and here’s what I’ve learned: the reason you’re living Groundhog Day every end of year is because there’s a massive gap in the way that you’re setting team goals. And that gap is exactly why every year feels like a repeat.

So to prevent that feeling next year, I’m going to teach you three things:

1. Why you keep ending up in the same place year after year (even when you’re working hard and setting goals).
2. How to create goals that drive different outcomes instead of just rolling over the same priorities with different numbers.
3. How to communicate your team goals in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your people and instead energizes your team.

How Most Managers Set Team Goals

Does your goal setting look like this?

It’s planning season and your senior leaders have just shipped over next year’s priorities—maybe it arrives in a deck, maybe in a long email, maybe someone reveals it all in an all-hands meeting. And as you’re scanning through it, a few thoughts pop up immediately:

“These are… ambitious.”
“Do we actually have the bandwidth for this?”
“And how am I supposed to present this to my team without sending everyone into panic-mode?”

Still, you do what good managers do. You block off time, translate these high-level priorities into something your team can actually understand, and then share the updated goals. Maybe you even take the extra step of dropping everything into your project management tool so people know who’s doing what and by when.

And then? Everyone goes right back to whatever they were doing before. Planning season is complete.

Sound familiar? It definitely was for me. For years, that’s exactly how I handled goals, and based on conversations I’ve had with other managers, I’m not alone (and if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve also figured out by now that this doesn’t exactly work).

Why You Fail To Hit Your Team Goals

Now, the traditional goal-setting process I just laid out isn’t wrong… but it is incomplete. And that missing piece is exactly what leads so many teams to feel overwhelmed and fall short by year’s end.

So what’s the piece everyone skips?

The obstacles.

Think about it. Let’s say you’re leading a client experience team. Leadership hands you a target: improve customer satisfaction to 4.5 stars. You relay it to your team, maybe even plug it neatly into a project management tool, and on paper everything looks great.

The problem is that none of that addresses the very real issues standing between you and that 4.5-star finish line.

Maybe your team is drowning in manual processes that chew up ten hours a week (time they can’t spend actually engaging with customers and resolving issues). Or perhaps there are skill gaps that make certain team members hesitant or unequipped to handle complex customer scenarios, which directly impacts satisfaction scores.

When those obstacles go unacknowledged, your team does what most teams do: they work harder. They push through. They take on more hours. They try to compensate for the barriers no one ever named out loud.

And then the cycle repeats.

Leadership sets the targets.
You set the goals.
Your team grinds harder to overcome invisible obstacles.
And by the end of the year, you land right back where you started (tired, frustrated, and wondering what went wrong).

I’m here to tell you as someone who has coached hundreds of new managers, that you’re struggle to reach your team goals is not because you’re not trying hard enough or because your team isn’t capable. It’s because the goals were incomplete.

You defined the what without addressing the obstacles that shape the how.

And that missing piece makes all the difference.

Fixing Your Team Goals (And Ending This Cycle)

The good news is that if you have been making this mistake, fixing it doesn’t require more work. In fact, you already have everything you need to identify the obstacles that are blocking your team (because you likely just wrapped up annual performance reviews).

And if those conversations were done well, you didn’t just talk about performance metrics and development areas. You talked about challenges, bottlenecks, frustrations…the real stuff that shows up in the day-to-day. Which means your team has already told you, directly or indirectly, exactly what’s getting in their way.

Maybe they’ve said it’s:

• The manual processes
• The skill gaps
• The resource constraints
• The communication breakdowns

They’ve already handed you the roadmap.

All that’s left is connecting what they told you with the goals you’re setting for the coming year. That connection is the bridge most managers never build.

And once you’ve made that bridge, the natural next question becomes:

How do you actually turn those insights into goals?

Setting Better Team Goals (You Can Actually Hit!)

Let’s walk through the process using the example from earlier: leadership hands you the target “Improve customer satisfaction to 4.5 stars by the end of 2026.”

With that in mind, your next step is to revisit your team’s performance reviews. Go through them one by one and jot down every obstacle that got in the way of people doing their best work last year. It could be big-picture issues or day-to-day frustrations. List anything that slowed the team down or created friction.

Then ask yourself, are any of these obstacles likely to keep us from hitting next year’s goal?

If the answer is yes, circle them. If you have one clear standout, perfect.

If not, ask yourself a second filtering question:

“Which of these obstacles, if removed, would have the biggest impact on our ability to hit this goal?”

Let’s say three themes emerge (manual processes, training gaps, and communication breakdowns), but the obvious bottleneck is the manual processes sucking up 10 hours a week from everyone on the team. In that case, it’s time to set a complementary goal like: “Automate the data-entry process to free up 10 hours per week per person by end of Q1.”

Now, instead of one isolated target, you have two aligned goals working in tandem:

• Company priority goal: Improve CSAT to 4.5 stars by end of 2026
• Obstacle goal: Automate the data-entry process to free up 10 hours per week by end of Q1

Communicating Your Team Goals Without Overwhelming Your Team

Here’s where things often go wrong: a manager identifies the obstacle but communicates it like it’s just another task piled onto the team’s already full plate.

It sounds something like: “Alright team, we have two goals for next year. Goal one: hit 4.5 stars. Goal two: automate the data-entry process by Q1.”

On the receiving end, that feels like more work. Instead, you want to position these goals not as extra tasks, but as the solutions that make the primary goal possible.

Here’s what that can sound like:

“Alright team, leadership wants us to reach 4.5 stars in customer satisfaction by the end of next year. I know that feels like a big lift—especially given what many of you shared in your reviews.

A lot of you told me you’re spending around 10 hours a week on manual data entry, which leaves little time to actually engage with customers and resolve issues. I heard you.

So here’s what we’re going to do: INSERT LIST OF GOALS

This isn’t about adding more to your workload. It’s about removing what’s been making your job harder—so hitting that satisfaction goal actually becomes possible.”

Do you feel the difference?

You’re not just giving your team another checkbox. You’re showing them that you listened, that you understand the real obstacles, and that the plan moving forward is designed to make their work easier, not heavier.

And when your team hears that and sees you addressing what they told you, they won’t feel overwhelmed. They’ll feel supported and energized instead. They’ll feel like you’re in it with them.

That’s how you break the cycle and that’s how next year actually becomes different.

Want Help Hitting Your Team Goals And Leading Your Team This Year?

If you’ve ever wondered why goal-setting feels like déjà vu every year—same energy, same obstacles, same outcomes—now you know the missing piece. When you build goals without addressing what’s standing in the way, you’re relying on willpower to do the job of strategy. But when you identify the barriers, connect them to the goals, and communicate them in a way that strengthens and supports your team, you break the cycle.

This is the difference between goals that feel heavy and goals that feel empowering.

And if you want support implementing this (and if you want to learn more about how to lead with clarity, confidence, and a system that makes your team stronger instead of stretched thin), I’d love to help you go deeper.

My program, New Manager Accelerator, was designed specifically for managers who want to level up their leadership skills, build a high-performing team, and navigate challenges like this without burning out. If you’d like support growing in your role as a manager and leading your team to hit their goals, I’d love to welcome you inside.