Goal Setting

Goals give direction.?Goals direct our motivated behavior.?Goals provide feedback on our process.?Goals can be meaningless.?Goals can hamper progress.?Goal setting works best when it is used as the framework for your efforts as opposed to being a list of things to achieve in life. This framework, much like a project plan, will help you to determine what needs to be done, in what order, and when to complete work.

?There are a few different categories of goals (I understand, possibly just a beneficial review for many of you).?Outcome goals are those based solely upon desired results.?Performance goals are specific accomplishments that need to be done to achieve a desired outcome.?Process goals represent specific behaviors or actions that are completely under an individual's control.?For those who this is a review for, looking back on last year, what types of goals did you actively set and pursue?

Outcome goals are not always a bad thing. It would be hard to think of any competitive athlete who doesn’t have a desire to win. It would be hard to imagine a product team that didn’t want to create a blockbuster. The problem arises when the outcome is our sole focus. When I was a software consultant, a work-related outcome goal was to move up in salary and position.?Being primarily focused on outcome goals leaves most people stressed, distracted, and feeling burned out.

I work with fighters. Clearly, we want to win, as losing comes with great potential consequences. I work with them and their coaches to ensure they have clear Performance goals.?Identifying what they need to do to have the greatest chance of success. In some sports (make 8 free-throws or fewer than 32 puts), in MMA we would also use time, such as getting a takedown in the first 2 minutes. As a manager, it is important to not let these become a recipe for micromanagement.?I think a good alternative is to use these goals to help you facilitate better work.?I would recommend asking your manager or a mentor to work with you if these are hard to envision for your role.?In my software consultant life, this could have been a success rate for my code with QA or having zero spelling errors in business process papers.?As a manager, this might be the number of minutes spent actively listening.

Once you’ve identified your performance goals, you can begin to write out your Process goals. These are the most powerful goals to have in terms of performance enhancement. These are the actions and behaviors you will need to engage in so that you are able to complete your performance goals. This is also where you begin to put thought and structure into your preparation. Using my software consultant example, this would have been following a systematic quality check of my modified code or using a specific proofreading process after authoring white papers.

After these goals are established, you then need to take the time to figure out the steps needed to complete them. Your goals will have different time frames depending on the complexity and amount of improvement required to meet each goal. You should set goals for short, medium, and long-term time frames.A short-term goal could be something for today or this week, a medium-term goal for this month, and a long-term goal is generally a goal that requires achieving multiple short-and-medium-term goals to accomplish. The long-term goal is an endpoint, and the short-term goals are the steps to reach it.

Quality is also an important consideration for all these goals. The quality of a goal is represented by how hard and realistic the goal is to achieve and how much that goal will directly affect your performance. As a manager, this is what your company generally expects you to understand.?Most likely, they hope you do so with their input and learn to be clear in this area.

Choose the goal framework that best matches your systems. I recommend that goals are:?

Specific: how much you will improve, when it will happen, and how you will measure it. Your goals should feel slightly beyond your current ability level.Challenging/Controllable: Your goal's achievement should be under your control.

Attainable: A goal that is impossible to reach is of no help. Select goals that you feel could be reached with enough effort.

Measurable: You will benefit the most by objectively knowing the progress you’ve made.

Personal: The goals you set should be your goals, not the goals others have for you. This will ensure your commitment to the goal process.

Make sure you have help keeping yourself accountable. A goal without accountability is one that has no commitment. Having someone to provide feedback on your progress, such as a coach or training partner, helps. Recording your progress regularly also helps. One way to ensure that you are holding yourself accountable is to put your goals in a location that you see on a daily basis. It could be on the refrigerator, the inside of your locker door, or on the top of your equipment bag.

What happens if you don’t hit a short-term goal target? This is typically not a bad thing. Missing a short-term goal could be the cause of setting the goal too high. It could also be that the goal doesn’t represent the thing you should be putting the majority of your effort into either. Missing a short-term goal is beneficial since it gives you important information about what you need to focus on going forward. By setting goals, you take an active role in defining your training, helping you to make your desired performance more likely to occur.