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Goal Setting: Why to Do It and How
In most enterprises today goal setting for team
members is a part of the business structure. Goals provide a direction
toward which your team can direct their energies. Goals focus your
efforts and the efforts of your team on the activities that propel you
in the direction you want to go and provide milestones that tell you how
far you have already come.
Business goals are never achieved in just one step. It takes a lot of
small steps to get there. These steps are taken largely by the members
of your team. Their goals will enable you to achieve your own vision by
defining a number of smaller and more manageable efforts that must be
made. Goals clarify what the tasks are, who will do them and what is
expected from every participant.
Goals also give the members of your team something to strive for. It’s a
fact that people are more motivated when challenged to attain a goal
that is beyond their normal level of performance.
Goals are important ingredients in any employee appraisal system because
they help measure progress and enable self-evaluation of performance.
There is a widely-held but mistaken belief that goals should be set as a
means of achieving improvements in performance levels. It has surprised
many employers to find that a program of goal-setting has had exactly
the opposite effect and performance has suffered.
There are some important fundamental principles to keep in mind when
framing goals for members of your team. There’s no guarantee that
they’ll give you the outcome you’re after, but at least you’ll benefit
from the accumulated wisdom of other employers who’ve gone through the
same process and found out what happened.
A Mix of Goals Works Best
An individual’s performance is most likely to be optimized by a mix of
short-term and long-term goals.
Short-term goals give the person a set of easily-recognized benchmarks
that provide feedback on performance within an acceptable timeframe. A
good example of this is found in various weight-loss programs that
provide a series of short-term goals as a means of eventually
accomplishing the target weight desired.
Long-term goals, although important, don’t always enable people to judge
their performance towards the intended outcome and can actually cause
demotivation for this reason. They might actually be getting there and
not be able to see this.
Set a combination of interrelated short-term and long-term goals and
your team will have a much better chance of achieving all the goals in
the mix.
Set Goals with your Team
Goals can be set for both individuals and an entire team or part of a
team. A structure that allows team members to participate in setting
goals for themselves has a much greater chance of success than a
dictatorial regime. Imposing goals on employees without consultation can
easily generate hostility and resentment. If ownership of goals is
shared the chance of achieving them is greatly increased.
Be Specific and Consistent
To be effective each goal must be attainable and quantifiable. The goal
must be clearly understood by all those responsible for achieving it. A
vague statement like “increase performance” is useless. A better
approach is to quantify goals such as “make ten calls per day” or
“complete thirty analyses each week”.
Set milestones along the way. This allows everybody to see whether
they’re still on track to meet the goals that have been agreed. It also
allows evaluation of goals to be sure they still serve a purpose and
have not become outdated.
Be consistent and make sure that those with similar positions in the
practice have similar goals. Responsibilities rather than personal
characteristics or abilities should be the drivers here. Goals that are
positional in nature are the easiest to understand and accept.
Things to Avoid
Setting goals based on outcomes instead of setting performance goals can
lead to perceptions of failure when the outcomes aren’t achieved for
reasons outside that person’s control. This can also happen when goals
are set unrealistically high. If a goal is perceived to be truly
unreachable, no effort will be made to achieve it.
Goals can also be set too low. Unless there’s a challenge to achieve a
goal it will be seen as a waste of time. Another problem is with goals
that are too vague and nobody knows if they’ve been achieved. If
achievement cannot be measured there’s no way of knowing if progress
towards them has been made.
Too many goals can lead to a feeling of overload. A similar problem is
with goals that are not prioritized. Designate a level of importance to
each goal so that your team knows which deserve greatest attention and
effort.
It’s a Management Skill
Setting goals is one of the responsibilities faced by every manager.
When goal setting goes wrong the whole reason for having goals can be
lost, along with any intended incentives or motivation.
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