How to Set Meaningful Goals?

‘We need to reduce complaints by 2%’

‘I need to sign up for a marathon.’

Often as teams and individuals, we are trained to believe that having goals is important to get stuff done. Over time, we also learn that if a goal is easy to measure, then there is a higher chance that we will achieve it. Better still, having very specific numbers also takes away some of the judgment and emotion.

While I can’t argue with the need to have goals, the more I work with organisations and coachees, the more gaps I find in in the way we set out our goals. Sometimes, we are in a rush to get started and sometimes we may want to outdo someone else. Whatever be the reason, we just don’t take the time to think things through.

Setting the wrong goals can not only lead to a massive drain in resources, it can also derail you completely. So here below are four key points to think through when setting your goals. Some of my thinking is inspired by Simon Sinek.

What’s the Why:

Tangible goals tell us the what, which is great. Often though, when you lift the hood, the how and the why just cannot keep up.

For example, some of us want to be married by a certain age although we are unable to articulate the reason due to which we chose that number. In the case of teams, passionate leaders are often inspired by something they just saw or heard and that drives their thinking until the next big halo arrives. Let's work with a real case today.

In this example, a leader wants to drive efficiencies and therefore is keen to reduce the number of times customers phone his department. Looking purely at his/her cost per call, they know that fewer calls will mean a huge save.

The How:

Assuming we have a really robust why (organisations do need to be efficient), the next logical step is to work through the how. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of this in driving the right behaviours. Missing this step often results in goals that do a huge disservice both at an individual and organisational levels driving issues such as conflicts and disengagement.

Continuing with the above example, the team is given a goal to reduce repeat calls. The way the repeat call rate works is that if a customer makes a call on day 1 and then calls again within 5 days of an initial call, that would be a fail on the repeat call scoreboard.

This was an actual project I worked on and doing a bit of Gemba (floor walking) I realised that teams felt penalised for issues beyond their control and had found ways to make the numbers work. For example, when an issue was not fully resolved, they simply told customers to write in. That way, we got rid of a repeat call because customer would leave about 5 days for their letters to arrive.

Let’s not talk about the disservice to the efficiency because in most organisations, reverting to letters is a lot more expensive than responding to calls. And if you are thinking about the impact on customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and complaints, I'll be here all day.

The What

Thinking through the why and the how will help you arrive at a more relevant what.

Continuing with the above scenario, assuming that call handling costs are hurting the business and the ‘why’ is to drive down calls, then a better way to do this might be to actually target the real reasons that cause the customers to phone in. If you think about it this way, then you would launch the two initiatives in parallel (one, to measure the rate and two, to fix the root cause) because anything else would be insufficient.

The Congruence

Finally, look at the bigger picture.

Organisations are often extremely siloed and leaders are only thinking of their own unit. In doing so, they may be oblivious to the others or even worse, at odds with others in the system. For example, while one party is trying to cut costs by reducing repeat calls, the other party is trying to delight customers 'at any cost.'

Optically, the two seem to clash, but if you go through the thinking the way I just did, they both want the same outcome - happy customers served in a sustainable way.

However, due to a lack of structured thinking, their goals appear so incongruous that it may seem that one can only be achieved at the cost of the other.

It really does not have to be this way.

I have used an organisational example here but the same is true of us as individuals. I know from my coaching conversations that many of us set goals that mean very little and are not even true to our purpose. As a result of this, we either stop pursuing them or worse, we feel unfulfilled even after we work very hard to achieve them. Do let me know if you might like me to cover an example of individual goals in a future article.

I’ll leave you here with final thoughts.

Setting goals is easy. Anyone can set goals. But setting meaningful goals that will serve you well and igniting the passion that it will take to achieve them, takes a high level of commitment and focus.

So stay focused and keep asking 'WHY?'

**

I am a keynote speaker and a mindset coach. You can reach out to me for bookings via my website vinitaramtri.com or drop me a note on +447817256077.

Click here for more articles.

Click here for my YouTube channel.