Do we need to think differently about goals given the lessons of 2020?

This quote from Bruce Lee might ignite opinion about how sacred goals are as the lynchpin for performance, but last year we all saw goals trampled by the onslaught of Coronavirus.

As rounds of lockdowns and economic uncertainty pursue us into 2021 what's our enthusiasm for goal setting? Do we feel straightjacket goals are dead in the water because of the volatility of our circumstances? Or is there a way we can create goals that will serve us well even in these times of change and challenge?

Goals have always been important because they:

• Create focus
• Help guide decision making
• Engage the team in common language
• Encourage collaboration and support
• Help with measures of success and so on ….

You get the idea. I’m not adverse to goal setting, this is an incredibly important and powerful process. But given where we are, this year it might not be so relevant to spend hours of our January planning time extracting and cascading the detailed metrics and KPIs that are the common goal language of most corporate teams.

I'm not saying we should ditch the annual goal process completely.

Well defined goals help us avoid ‘focus drift’ where we are driven by the ‘urgent’ items on our to-do lists, rather than spending our time on activities that move us towards our most critical goals. In the busyness of our days, buffeted by the winds of change and challenge, we need goals to act as our guide - to stop us drifting off into unhelpful territory or disappearing down the rabbit holes!

BUT if 2020 offered us any lessons, it was this:

S**T happens

And when it does, we need a framework for goals that help us to adapt, reset and motivate us to keep moving in the right direction.  I've used the SMART model for stress testing goals for years, it's a useful framework and already baked into many corporate goal setting cycles.  

Firstly - let’s remind ourselves of what SMART stands for:

Specific Measureable Attainable Relevant Timely 

These are all important gauges to develop our goals against and I’m sure you’re practiced at this already. There are some good articles on how to get clarity on the elements of SMART goal setting and I've linked to some at the end of this article. 

What I’ve focused on here is how I’ve built on this proven model to make it even more useful, building in the lessons we’ve learnt from 2020. 

In other words making it smartER for 2021

I've added an E and an R to the existing SMART acronym and these additional letters come at the end for a reason - because they build on the model. They don't replace anything in the SMART framework, but they add to it making it much more relevant and powerful. Whether you're designing personal goals or co-creating team goals it's important you have the elements of the SMART model clear first, but it gets really interesting when we add the E and the R to make the goal much smartER.

The E stands for Emotion and Engagement

Emotion

Goals don't have to be boring, they can be incredibly motivating, the difference is the emotion you attach to the goal. This is all about finding the 'why' or the purpose behind the goal and identifying with what this means to you, your team and your business. This gets to the essence of Lee's approach to goal setting - many things can knock us off course in our pursuit of a goal, but if we're emotionally attached to why we're pursuing the goal it makes it a lot easier to keep going in the right direction, even if we have to reset targets, milestones or metrics.

So how do we get to the emotion behind a goal?

Once you’ve defined your individual elements of the SMART model to describe your goals you will have stress tested your thinking and are probably pretty clear on what you’re trying to achieve.  What I’ve found really helpful, particularly in team goal setting, is to create a single sentence to describe the goal, incorporating all of the elements of the SMART model and leading with the 'why' this goal is important to attach to the emotion, first.

Here’s an example from my days as a CMO of a $Bn revenue business:

‘Prove the value of Marketing to the business by doubling our contribution to the Sales pipeline to achieve $23M in 12 months, without increasing spend.’

This was a (real) monumental goal designed by my team in my first year as CMO in a business that treated Marketing as the relegated, second class citizen to Sales. The team had suffered years of being marginalized and underinvested. The ambition was to prove (beyond conjecture) what value Marketing could deliver to the business so we could start to establish our credentials, build presence and ultimately drive our own agenda and budgets. We challenged ourselves to do this in a way that could not be ignored or trampled on, because the metric mattered to Sales and if they saw results they would sit up and take notice.

Not all goals are this big and hairy but even the simplest goal can be described in a way that is motivational and ticks the SMART elements. 

If you are setting an overall team goal then getting this brief description right is critical, as it needs to be something that everyone involved in achieving the goal can relate to and talk about. By leading with the 'why' (‘prove the value of marketing’) which carries the emotion behind the goal with the what (doubling our contribution to sales pipeline) in a single sentence is compelling and worth spending time with the team to craft. The more specific and accessible you make this description, the more it will become part of the team’s shared, common language.

Engagement

We rarely achieve any goal ALONE. And if you’re part of a team or organisation, I would say it’s impossible to achieve any significant goal on your own. 

One of the key lessons from 2020 has been the importance of connection and community. Working from home ripped from us the usual (more informal) channels of communication and we’ve had to learn new ways of staying connected and giving and receiving support. By building ENGAGEMENT into your goal planning you’re getting clear on WHO you will need to get help, support or resources from ahead of the curve, so you can ensure you establish and nurture those relationships before you need them. The recognition that you’re not in this alone, shifts the emphasis from ‘me’ to ‘we’ and encourages a collective approach to achieving the goal from the outset, which is much more likely to keep us motivated when the going gets tough. 

You can make an exhaustive list of those people inside and outside of your team, department and organisation who may be impacted by, or have influence over the success of your goal, then prioritise this list of connections and create an engagement plan. If you’re doing this as part of a team, allocating stakeholder engagement by individual team members can be very effective.

The R stands for Reputation and Review

Reputation

The first R in the smartER model may be the most important, and also the least obvious! Whether we recognise it or not we are building our reputation every day. Every time we engage with someone they are left with an impression of what it is like to work with us and it is this, above all else that builds our reputation.  

Or as Maya Angelou said: People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

In my experience, it’s critically important to be intentional about how we want to come across, especially if we’re pursuing ambitious goals, as part of a matrixed team. This intention acts as our guide, reminding us everyday, no matter what new challenges come our way, how we want people to feel when they work with us.

So how can we start to think intentionally about our reputation?

A simple way to create this intention is to answer the question ‘how would I like people to describe what I’m like to work with?’ As you distil your answer, think about 3 words that will help you focus on this intention and act as an anchor for how you want to ‘show up’.

I call these 3 words my North Star words and they have had a huge impact on how I have shaped my behaviour over the past 10 years. I use these 3 words to intentionally drive my behaviour - both amplifying my strengths and course correcting negative behaviours I can fall into when I’m stressed. This approach demands self awareness and thought, but you can start simply with 3 aspirational and positive words to act as a reminder for how you want people to experience you. 

As we’ve moved to remote working over the past year, I think setting intentions around our behaviours are even more important than before. With the absence of casual engagement the impact of a single terse email or clumsy Zoom conversation is magnified. Whilst there is always opportunity to misinterpret, the more intentional we are about how we want to come across, the more likely we are to achieve it, even when we are hit with the inevitable change and challenge of life.

Review

How many times have you spent days in January turning the annual plan into goals, only to enter them into the performance management system and then forget about them until Q4 reporting? I know I have. And even if we incorporate quarterly goal reviews, we know from the volatility of 2020 that we need to increase this frequency of goal review.

Goals need to become our companion - well known, understood and always by our side. We also need to be reviewing where we are against them and using them daily as the benchmark against what we consider to be important in the sea of urgent requests and activities.

Making a review of progress against goals a standard item on your weekly team meetings encourages debate about whether they are still helping you move in the right direction - which I believe (like Lee) is ultimate test for progress.

So there we have the SMART model, improved through the experience of Covid to be even smartER, taking the lessons from 2020 to make our goal setting more impactful in 2021.

Do you see how adding the E and the R can have a positive impact on how you plan your goals this year? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below ??????

If you want more detail on the core SMART model:

Mindtools on SMART goals

?Indeed Career Guide How to write a SMART goal

At Nkuzi Change our mission is to help organisations unlock the full potential of their people through coaching and we specialise in issues faced by Middle Leaders in large organisations.