Perspectives & Strategy

Historically it has been shown that successful people all set themselves achievable goals and then work out a plan to succeed. Whenever it comes the time for the annual performance review, or even our new years resolutions, we often set ourselves unreachable targets then fail to monitor our progress against these. No wonder many feel the whole process a waste of time.

In my experience goals must be:

○ Attainable
○ Relevant
○ Specific
○ Measurable, and
○ Time bound

I have always set goals, even when I have been employer free. I have not always written them down – That is a change I have made in recent years because if we write them down we tend to focus on them more in our everyday lives.

All of our milestones need to be tangible – but often in a business environment they need to be focused around business cycles. e.g. if you are selling sun-tan lotion then reaching and perhaps exceeding targets is easier in July than December.

Every goal needs to to be challenging, yet inspire a person to reach them, e.g. getting up at 6 am to complete your exercises  before going to work at least twice per week may be an important personal goal. A person needs to remain committed to achieving them, it helps where it is tied to a personal desire – less so when it is a boring work task e.g. delivering the weekly status report by 10 am every Monday morning. Yet as a goal the boring task is as important to business success as the exciting one.

The goals need to be flexible. Personally I have 30, 60 and 90 day goals for me personally and for my business. I write these down and then check progress against them as time goes on. Flexibility is important, especially where a goal involves other people – they may not have the same desires as you or fee that the target is as important as you feel it to be. I had a December 31st goal that could not be achieved because of the inaction of others, yet it was more than achieved on January 5th, the second working day of the new year.

My 30, 60, and 90 day goals allows me to have attainable deliverables. The problem with annual targets is that we tend not to think about them in the first half of the year then panic about them in the last quarter. Breaking the target down into 30 day segments makes the focus more achievable, nail the first 30 days (or better still do better than expected) then you are well on you way to the annual goal. I have always found it curious that when when you reach one target other things start falling into place to enable you to reach others, like wasting for a bus then six arriving at the same time.

I tend to re-write my goals every day – this helps me focus on the contents. It is about getting things done. Then I reward myself when I reach milestones. At a recent Toastmasters meeting someone talked about writing down your goals, diary-ing them, and sharing them with others. It has always been the later that has been my greatest personal challenge.