Posts Tagged ‘goal setting’

I was recently talking with someone and we got into a discussion about our respective businesses.

As is often the case when I ask someone what they want for their business, they told me all of the things they didn’t want.

The trouble with this is that, if you focus on what you don’t want, you will stay stuck. Think about it; you don’t drive a car looking through the back window. You focus on the road ahead.

So if you want to get better results as a leader, manager or in your career, focus on what you want, not what you don’t want.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

Mistake 1
• Using vague or non-specific terms like efficient, effective and quality, to name just a few.

Mistake 2

• Creating a list of activities, rather than results orientated goals.

Mistake 3

• Not defining what will be different when the goal is achieved.

Mistake 4

• Not linking them to the overall vision and mission of the organisation.

Mistake 5

• Not setting a deadline.

Mistake 6

• Not allocating responsibility for each goal.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

Goals are good right?  From my perspective they are but for some they can be de-motivational and even just pointless.  Let’s be frank, any organisation or individual wants to have some idea of the direction they are going.  In business this is often expressed in terms of business strategy or business plans.  On an individual level it can be related to career planning for example.

On the other hand there are risks too of excessive target or goal setting.  So what are the risks?

Risk 1: People lose sight of the purpose

Every organisation was established for a particular purpose.  In the early days the purpose or reason why the business existed was crystal clear and understood by all of those involved. 

As a business grows it starts to become more and more difficult and as a result it is easy to lose sight of the purpose.  At that point it is all too easy to end up with targets or goals that are not connected to the purpose or reason why the organisation or team was established.

Make sure that from time to time you remind everyone of the core purpose from time to time and ensure that your goals and targets are connected to that purpose.

Risk 2: Box ticking is what matters

We often see this in organisations.  People start to become so obsessed with getting a good assessment against the targets set.  At this point they probably become less connected to what the customer, client or service or user needs.

Some will claim that this just happens in big public sector organisations.  Yet in truth it is just the same for large public companies where the City has certain expectations around performance.

Risk 3: People take excessive risks

The financial services sector and banking in particular might well provide the most recent and high profile example.  Yet in truth where you have a culture of succeed at all costs, people will take excessive risks.

Bottom Line- Goals and targets have there place but make sure that they are connected to the results you want to achieve and the core purpose of the organisation.

Much is written about the benefits of setting goals and how they can transform individual and organisational performance.  While it is true that goals can make a real difference, they need to be meaningful.  What do I mean when I say that they need to be meaningful?

They need to focus on something that matters

Too often, organisations set goals that they think should rather than setting goals that they really care about.  When this happens, it might be due to the organisation losing sight of its core purpose or reason for being in business.

They need to be realistic

There are many differing points of view on what is realistic and what is not realistic.  Part of this realism test is about taking stock of where you are right now and whether the timescale that you have set for achieving the goal is believable to you and your team.

They need to measurable

If you are to set a meaningful goal you need to be able to measure whether you are on track or off track when it comes to delivering the anticipated results.  If you find that you are struggling to determine a way of measuring, it might be that you need to revisit your goal to make more specific and reduce vagueness.

Bottom Line – Goals that are meaningful can help you and your team achieve organisational success. So what do you need to do to make your goals more meaningful?

Setting goals is easy, right?  All you have to do is make sure they are SMART

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Results orientated
Time limited

While SMART goals are an excellent start point, sometimes they are not just enough.

The key to setting goals is to define the results once the goal is achieved.  What will people inside and outside the organisation:

See
Hear
Feel
Notice
Detect

A simple technique is to get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.  Label one side now and the other side future.  Then write down 10 adjectives that describe the organisation now and when the goal is achieved in the future.

How often, when you ask someone what they want, they proceed to tell you what they don’t want.  I have been noticing this response more and more recently.  Knowing what you want professionally and personally is essential, no matter whether you are a small business, a major corporation or a manager of a small team. 

Imagine you stepped into a cab and the driver asked you where you wanted to go.  Would you reply, I don’t know, you choose?  Of course you would not.   So why do so many people adopt this approach to area like business, career, relationships, health, fitness and personal growth.  Setting a clear direction has a number of benefits:

• Gets you connected to your bigger vision of what you want to achieve and the impact that you want to have

• Acts as a reference point to support your decision making on a day to day basis.  Simply asking yourself the question, is this moving me closer to or further away from what I want will help you to target your energies

• Keeps you motivated when times are tough

So how can you start the process of setting a clear direction?

Establish Where You Are Now

Finding out where you are now is a vital first step.  You need to consider questions like:

• What’s working?

• What’s not working?

• What’s motivating?

• What’s de-motivating?

• What strategies are you deploying?

• Where are your strategies taking you?

This process can be done for you as an individual, as a team or even for a business as a whole.

Where Would You Like To Be?

Once you have got some clarity on where you are right now and the direction it is taking you in, you can start to create a vision of where you would like to be.  In creating a vision, some of the common problems we run into include:

• Aiming too low and not making it compelling enough

• Overly worrying about how we are going to do it

• Producing something that is out of line with our values

When starting on your vision, it is worth thinking about:

• What you want to create

• Why you want to create it

• What it will give you when you have achieved or partly achieved it

• How you will feel if you don’t start or don’t achieve

In our vision, it is all too easy to focus on things like:

• Financial benefits

• Status

• Materialistic things

While these are important, don’t forget about things like lifestyle.  For example, do you want lots of money and a life that consists of 80 hours a week of work, 56 for sleep and 34 for everything else?  There is no right or wrong, but consciously choosing is incredibly powerful.

Selecting Tactics

The tactics are those things that you will do to make your vision a reality.  In a business context they might include things like:

• Training and developing staff

• Raising finance

• Marketing

• Selling

• Developing technology

In a career context it might be things like:

• Taking a secondment, maybe overseas

• Working on developing a particular skill or attribute

• Self appraisal and feedback from others

• Researching related roles or even completely different roles

Choosing tactics gets you into action and action gets results.

Monitor and Adjust

Even when you have established where you are, where you want to get to and chosen your tactics, chances are that things will not always go quite as you expected. It is essential that you have a mechanism for:

• Monitoring your progress

• Adjusting and taking corrective action

At the end of the day, setting direction and achieving results is a relatively simple process.  The question is are you ready to make it happen?

The new year is a time when most of us make plans for the year ahead.  The vast majority of these plans or goals fizzle out by February or March of each year.

If you want to use goal setting to get results you need to be clear firstly on what a goal is and what a goal is not.   You then need to understand and be ready to address some of the barriers to your success in order to achieve results.

To help you to use goal setting to get results, I am providing a recording from a recent teleseminar that I delivered.  I hope you enjoy it and as always please add your comments or ideas on what you have found most effective when it comes to goal setting.

There is a great phrase that I came across which really captures the benefit of having goals.  Goals are merely dreams or desires with legs.  If you are a leader, I am sure that you want to be a success and setting goals is one of the key tools that you can use to achieve success.  So what are 5 main reasons to set goals?

 

Reason 1: Increased Focus

 

If you have a goal it gives you focus something to aim for, a target or vision to work to.  The desire to achieve that target keeps you focussed on the things that matter to achieving the outcome that you want rather than getting distracted.

 

Reason 2: Higher Motivation

 

Achieving or making progress towards a goal can be hugely motivating.  Imagine for example you want to improve your time management.  When you start you probably struggle to keep to the discipline of planning your day, keeping track of your time and managing interruptions.  Pretty quickly you start to see that the actions you are taking are having a real impact which drives and motivates you to do more.

 

Reason 3: More Success

 

If you set yourself a goal you are more likely to succeed.  Once you set an idea in your mind that you are going to do something, there is likely to be a much greater chance of success.  Why? The reason is that you will go the extra mile to achieve it.

 

Reason 4: Confidence Building

 

If you start setting and achieving goals your confidence will rise.  I use myself as an example.  I left school at 16 with basic qualifications.  I started an Accountancy Diploma at night school.  Each time I passed a set of exams it gave me the confidence to tackle the next level.  Eventually I qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant.  It gave may the confidence to apply for more and more senior jobs.

 

Reason 5:  Personal Growth

 

Every time we set a goal we grow as a person.  The reason for this is that we are probably going to have to develop or learn about something to achieve it.  Chances are we might even have to step out of our comfort zone to do it.  Maybe there was a time when you had to work really hard to achieve a goal around a presentation or proposal.  I am sure that in the process of achieving the goal you learned a lot of new skills and about what you could achieve if you put your mind to it.

 

Bottom Line – Goals lead to action and action leads to results.  So what goals will you set to achieve even more success as a leader?