The Power of Setting Goals

I want to show you the power of setting goals.?

When you set goals, what do you have in mind? Who do you have in mind?

If you set the same goals for everyone in the class, you could be setting goals TOO LOW for some students.

Note: For full effect, I should be telling you this story in Swedish. Since I’m writing in English, I need to tell you that the numbers 40 and 70 sound almost the same in Swedish. Listen to them here.

To be fair, we set the same goal for everyone

I was living in Sweden, working as a coach for an organisation that had a contract with the Job Center - the place where people go to find new jobs. My role was to support people in their job-seeking processes. The Job Center required job-seekers to apply for a certain number of jobs every month, in order to continue receiving financial support.?

My work involved more than finding suitable jobs and helping them to apply for them. The greatest challenge was attitude - the job-seekers had lost their jobs, often through no fault of their own, they had also written their CVs and application letters; and sent them off to dozens of potential employers; and heard nothing back from any of them.

Almost all of the people I worked with had been unemployed for more than three years. They were depressed and inactive. Imagine receiving silent rejections month after month, for years. It's not surprising they stopped applying.

My contract with the organiser was to deliver coaching aimed at getting the job-seekers back into employment within three months, for which I would be paid a fixed amount of money.

Morning goal-setting meetings

The strategy I used was to bring fifteen or twenty job-seekers together in a room, sit them around a table and put a stack of current Job Adverts in front of them. After a round of 'good mornings' over coffee, I invited the job-seekers to interview each other in pairs, first the person on their left, then the person on their right. The key question was, “If it were possible, what kind of job would you like to have?”

What you focus on, is what you get more of

Focus on problems, you get more problems.

Focus on solutions, you get more solutions.

In my morning meetings, moaning and complaining were discouraged, not because they weren’t valid but because today we are going to pause such things so we can get you the job you are seeking. We can go back to the moaning and complaining after lunch, if we must.

It's easier to set ambitious goals for someone else

The second part of the activity was to ask the job-seekers to look through the pile of Job Adverts to find a job for the person on their left, or the person on their right, or both.

It was a lot easier for them to find a suitable job for their partner when they were not weighed down by the long history of repeated failures.

Everyone was offered at least one job, often two, every week. A few needed help with writing and sending applications. We organised that within the group.

Applying = a step towards success

There were some objections to the jobs that were offered. Usually, it was not what they were really looking for, or they didn’t have the exact qualifications or experience to apply. At that point, I would remind the job-seekers that they had a contract with the Job Center, and should apply anyway. Their job at the moment was to apply for jobs, even ones they didn’t want, nor expected to get. Apply for a number of jobs, get paid for the month. It was only a question of getting financial support or not. Nobody wanted to be without income.

When there was a group of similar people sitting around the table saying, “Let’s do it anyway, we get paid to apply…”, it was easier to send off the application. So they did. In droves.

Summary

Within a month, almost all of them had been invited to job interviews. I don’t know if it was because more jobs had become available or because the job-seekers were now applying for many more jobs than they had in the previous month. As a group we applied for thirty to forty jobs every week.?

There was a sense of teamwork bringing success to the job-seekers. Even when two of them had applied for the same job and had both been called for an interview, they saw it as a win.?

As the weeks went by, the group got smaller and smaller. By the end of my three months with them, almost 80% had been to interviews and most of them had started working. I got paid an extra ‘finders fee’ if they started work within six months of being with me.

The above story could be used to show the benefits of setting clear goals, but the story has a twist to it.

New Boss = New Goals

The organisation holding the contract with me and the Job Center, reorganised. I got a new boss. At the first meeting with the new boss, he described our job as he saw it, “We need to get at least 40% of the jobseekers into employment within three months to cover our expenses.”

Because he was speaking Swedish, I heard him say 70%.

It felt good to have reached 80% with my groups, so I told him how happy I was to have been reaching the goal.

“No,” he said, “you misheard me, it’s 40%.”

I asked for a meeting to clarify my position. When we met, he had my figures in front of him. “There’s no need to work so hard,” he said, “40% is enough.”

I left that employment as fast as I could.

My reflection, as a teacher, is, “How often do we set too low goals for our students?”