Goal-setting - The Cricket Way

During my discussions with my boss, I'd learnt two important facets about goal-setting – achieving the goal should be controllable by an individual and there must be some stretch involved in achieving it. That the goal(s) should align with the organization vision is always implicit. When I internalized that, I added another dimension to it – a goal should also involve personal growth of an individual. But those were just the tenets of goal setting – what about the approach ? I still needed to get my theory right and that’s where cricket came to my help.

Let’s assume a scenario, where a coach announced in a team meeting that they’re supposed to set individual and team goals for the upcoming season. There were immediate responses from the group – “I’ll score at least 2-3 centuries per series”, “I’ll take more than 2 five-wicket haul in each series", "We’ll bowl out the opposition in all the innings” etc. The coach heard all the responses and said, “Guys, that’s great. But that sounds more like a wish-list and NOT the goals. What if you get some bad umpiring decisions or you get injured in a game or if a game is washed-out due to rain.” That silenced the team immediately. The coach pressed on, “Don’t be disheartened. I’m pleased to hear your positive intents. But a goal should be within your control to achieve and most importantly, should be aimed at improving your shortcomings and maximizing your strengths. Scoring runs or taking wickets is your job-description – don’t confuse it with a goal. Think about it and we’ll meet again to discuss the same.”

A week later, the team met again and this time the responses from players were more specific e.g. “I’ll not get stumped out to a leg-spinner”, “I’ll rotate the strike more and improve my strike rate by x%”, “I’ll improve my batting average at least by x% per series”, “I’ll improve my strike rate against the left-handed batsmen by x%” etc. The group then discussed and finalized the team-goals like – the team will not attract a fine for slow over-rate throughout the season, while fielding will always back-up a throw at stumps and while batting will try to convert a single run into a double by quick running between the wickets. The coach was overjoyed to see a turnaround in the perspectives and knew that the folks have understood to channelize their intents into meaningful goals. He further went on to fine-tune the individual goals for each player according to their strengths and areas of improvement.

As a coach of the team which set of goals would you prefer? Of course, the second one – and why? Because not only they’re SMART but they’re also well controllable by an individual and also aim at his personal growth. If we take the same template and apply it to any team or business, it should resonate well to the vision set out by that organization.

I’m quite sure that there would be other approaches, equally effective, for the goal-setting exercise. Being a cricket buff, it was natural for me to find a synergy there :)

And by the way, my goal before writing this piece was to keep it below 550 words and I'm just about there :)