Beat Your Goals, Don't Meet Your Goals

To increase your influence, beat your goals sooner rather than later

Within the world of business, no matter what industry you are in, there is always some continuous improvements/goals/milestones wanting to be met.

For example, in the rail industry where I have worked most of my career, the goals for engineering are: number of delay minutes a day, making service with a specific amount of trains each day, and reducing the amount of technical issues.

These all had daily, weekly and monthly goals.

I’m sure that whatever industry you work in, your organisation has daily, weekly and monthly goals too. However, we ALL have team and individual goals, and these are usually called objectives.

A very corporate term, but they are there for a reason. They are there to measure our performance and also to figure out what kind of development we need. Most of the people I worked with didn’t care about objectives, but I did and so should you.

When we are set a goal, or an objective, we usually try to find a way to meet that goal or to just about achieve it. But, I am saying that we should find a way to beat that objective or goal, not just meet it.

We are striving to be excellent, so we should know how to make things happen.

Now, we don’t just want to make things happen, we want to make things happen quicker and better than what our boss expected. Imagine how much you could increase your influence if you not only beat your goals, but you did it sooner.

Not only that, the trust you will build with your boss and the team will increase too.

Doing tasks or beating goals sooner than your boss expected helps you build trust. Trust is the foundation of leadership and influence. So your foundation of trust will rise, and be of great benefit for you in the future.

Which means, you will be given a lot more responsibility and again you will be known as the leader within your team.

Your boss will increase the amount of confidence they have in you if you can beat their expectations sooner. You will be the first person they ask for help. You will be the first person they ask for an opinion. You will be the first member of the team they listen to.

Your responsibility level will rise and your influence will increase.

Don’t be the person who doesn’t care when they complete their objectives or tasks. Having an attitude like that will only create distrust between you and your boss, and your influence will decrease.

Your boss will lose confidence in you and then they won’t ask you for help, they won’t raise your level of responsibility, and they won’t ask your opinions on things.

The leaders who don’t have any trust with anybody, but still have influence, only do so because they are in a certain position or they have a certain job title. People only follow them because they have to, and that is no way to lead.

They only lead through fear, manipulation or intimidation. There is absolutely no foundation of trust, and their influence is very negative.

Don’t let that be you.

All the best,

Tom Lawrence (Highly Effective Leader)