I’ve worked for many years in targets/goals setting for corporations. Sometimes inside a specific team such as salesforce or collection teams and other times in typical support functions (strategic planning, HR, finance), leading the performance process for the whole organization.
In this last role I had plenty of learnings. Few places in an organization can give us such a holistic view, and an understanding of how departments interact, collaborate or conflict and consequently how the humanities of the company work. Vanity, fear, ego, lack/excess of drive, values, they are all there when we discuss about targets, especially when they impact financial rewards. The way we approach bonuses, targets etc, may make enormous sense or it can make no sense at all, depending on the corporate culture.
But this article is not about setting goals for corporations and their executives (I have a lot to say on that, so maybe one day I will do it). This is about how working with this theme made me improve my personal goals setting and monitoring.
As we are starting a new year, and everybody is working on their targets, I thought I could share something helpful.
This is not to end on January 15th. But to be constantly reviewed and pursued until December 31st.
1 – When we set targets for a company, we need to consider its culture. The same way, when setting targets to yourself, you need to pay attention to who you are and how you work. An aggressive set of targets may overwhelm someone not used to it, and very few and loose targets may bring very low results to someone who likes and lives well with discipline, process and structure. So, build something that you can work on along the year. This is not to end on January 15th. But to be constantly reviewed and pursued until December 31st.
2 – A goal is not a dream: a goal is something you want to achieve in a limited time frame and whose needed resources you have or you are able to obtain. It is wonderful to have dreams, and for sure they should guide us in establishing goals. But a one-year goal is a concrete objective you believe you can achieve by the end of the year. One sentence that will tell if you were successful or not when the year ends. So “be healthy” is not a good goal. You need to break it down. The same way “travel around the world” should be something like “visit counties x and y in this year”. “Become a better person” says nothing about what do you want to look like by December 31st. What does it mean? How will you look at you by the end of the year and tell if you had become a better person or not?
3- A goal is not a task list: suppose you want to spend 3 weeks traveling around Asia this year. Your goal is “to spend 3 weeks in Asia this year”. This goal will bring tons of activities, but focus on the goal. If you focus too much on the activities, you will miss the main point. It doesn’t matter if you accomplish all activities but, in the end, you don’t spend 3 weeks in Asia. So, set you goal, make a list of activities and review this list of activities periodically to guarantee that they still make you achieve that goal.
4 – Identify conflicts: this happens all the time! Talking about personal targets, you need resources to accomplish them. You need time and energy and sometimes also money. If you want to travel a lot and remodel your apartment and get a promotion and have a child in the same year, it doesn’t look very promising… Our time is finite (even for the ones who master in productivity or wake up 5 am everyday), money also and energy… well, if you don’t take care about your body and soul, energy declines every year. So, after you make your list of goals, take a good look at them as ask yourself: “will I have enough (time / money / energy / patience) to do this all?” and also “are there any contradictory goals?”.
5 – Identify commonalities: you want to travel and you want to get a promotion and for these goals a second language is important. So, this is top priority activity as it will unlock the way towards two important goals. Maybe you will need to invest on this activity this year and put the promotion to the next.
6- Identify partners in goals: in corporations we call it crossed targets. A target that is common to one or more teams. It is a very good mechanism to make people work together and also to have someone looking at a blind spot in the organization. The partner can be a friend, a colleague or a relative that has a similar goal. If you want to lose weight and a colleague too, why don’t you set a goal together until the end of the first quarter? If you do that, you will help each other in achieving this common goal. You exchange recipes, apps hints, and maybe you will do much healthier activities together (like taking a bike ride instead of having a triple chocolate muffin). But to identify a goal partner you need to follow tip number nine.
Creating good habits and eliminating bad ones are usually good targets as they cause long lasting impact.
7- If you don’t know where to start, start from the basics. In a company, when we are dealing with a new plant or operation, we expect it to stabilize basic KPIs, meaning we have a sustainable operation. Are you a sustainable operation? I mean, are you healthy? Are you exercising? Eating well? When was the last time you got a blood test? Are you financially healthy? Are you making more money than you spend? If there is something to work on here, start from here. Your goal can be to make exercise a habit. So next year, you won’t have such a goal. It will be part of your life; you won’t have to worry about it. So, creating good habits and eliminating bad ones are usually good targets as they cause long lasting impact.
8 – Put a process in place: what do you do after you set a target? You set your expectations for each quarter. Do you want to help you parents move from where they are until the end of the year? Good, so by the end of 2nd quarter you should already know where to go, right? If you let it go and wake up in September, this target will move to next year, for sure. So, depending on your nature, your process may be as simple as schedule in your calendar that every quarter you will look at your list. But it can also be a monthly follow-up on an excel spreadsheet with the percentage of the targets already achieved. Again, a process that doesn't conflict with the way you work.
9- Talk about your goals. Don’t keep them top secret. I know we don’t want to share everything with everybody. But you can share your aspirations with some selected people. You don’t even need to call them your targets, but you can share what you’ve been thinking of. This makes you reflect better on your goals, makes people aware of what you want (and hence, more capable of helping if they want to), and helps potential goals partners to show up.