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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Copyright 2003, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.