Deadlines Make Goals Real
When I was Vice President of Creative Services at Conseco, we were always out of literature for key products. In the insurance business literature is all you have to sell, so these outages would cripple our sales team. Our out-of-stock list was routinely close to 300 different items. We had numerous meetings on the subject nothing ever changed.
So I stopped talking about procedures and policy and asked a simple question "If our goal is an outage level of 100 what should we do?"
Defining a specific target, instead of vague "get better" gave a focus to our discussions. Every day we knew exactly how far we were from our target.
We felt confident we could make significant progress within two months so we set a specific date to hit the target. The date gave us the sense of urgency we needed to keep this goal in the forefront of our discussions.
We hit our goal three days before the deadline.?
There are several important lessons for small business owners in this story:
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Over the last few years, I have had some excellent conversations with business professionals about goals and execution plans.
If you're like most business owners you've set lots of goals and in your life and you've never fulfilled them. It may not be the goal, but your decision making process that is creating the failures. Debra Sunderland explains we have three decision centers the head, heart and gut.?To often we let the head make the plans.?The problem is our brain, in an attempt to protect us, anticipates risk and sets limits. She advocates for letting your heart and your passion drive your goals. - LISTEN NOW
Goals are an important part of a successful business, but we often don’t achieve them as quickly as we would like.?Coach Cailen Ascher Marone suggests business owners take a few lessons from yoga.
They have these wonderful teachings around non grasping, and detachment, which often get misinterpreted, as being blasé about life. That is not the point. Think of it as if you are holding your goals with an open hand rather than a clenched fist. LISTEN NOW
Achieve Career Growth, Make Bold Moves & Lead Confidently ?? Executive EQ, Confidence & Career Coach | Award-Winning Brand Strategist
1 年The way you laid it out, it seems so simple, but I think goal-setting - a tangible goal - is one of the most challenging tasks for people across the board as people or professionals. I love the two conversations, they really gave some great perspectives on goal-setting and support! ?? Thanks for all this awesomeness Lorraine!
I help consultants do more marketing in less time by implementing automation systems & a Lifecycle Marketing strategy.
1 年I like how you point out here to make the goals quantifiable and how in the example you used instead of setting a goal that may not have been achievable - set one that kept everyone confident the goal would be met if they kept measuring the progress.