Setting Goals.

One of the hottest topics in the self-help section of any bookstore is goal setting. While most people have a different approach to goal setting, the guiding principles are mostly the same.

A skill I use often

Step 1: Goal setting always starts with deciding what problems do you want to solve for yourself. I suggest you list down everything you want to achieve as a list. Now bucket these into three categories: personal, professional, and social. Within each of these categories, decide which ones you can have a material impact on using Stoic Principles of Control. These principles break control into three categories:?things we have complete control over, things we have partial control over, and things which we have no control over. Go after things where you have complete or partial control. You can use the same approach for a team goal setting.

Use a priority matrix similar to the one I shared in this blog post below to decide your focus.

Step 2: Next you can use a framework like SMART, WOOP and/or OKR to define your goals. SMART and WOOP are generally used for individual goals while OKRs are more popular for team goals.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. All three have their strengths with SMART giving clarity to goal setting, WOOP helping with visualizing your goal, and OKR to map key actions to the goals.

Step 3: Track your performance against each of the plans you make to achieve your goals. Ensure you measure progress at a logical point, for example, most people who start exercising begin to lose motivation if they don't see weight-loss after 2 sessions of exercise. Keep a physical diary or an app that can help you log your efforts. In the above example, measure the amount of exercise and activity (lead metric) daily while you measure weight and BMI (lag metric) weekly.

Goal setting is known to increase performance as it directs your effort and attention while energizing and motivating you. It even improves your persistence and helps you acquire knowledge and strategies.

On the flip side, setting unrealistic goals could go against you. It could lead to unethical behavior with people trying to take shortcuts to achieve results. It could also lead to loss of motivation and dissatisfaction due to the unsustainability of these unrealistic targets.

An app I would recommend this week

A great workplace to define and track your goals could be Notion. I would highly recommend Notion for its simple UI and flexibility to build complex workflows.

A question that I am thinking about this week

The primary job of a leader is to create more leaders. So when do you sign-off that you have actually created more leaders? While thinking about this, I created the Leadership Sabbatical Test. A simple scenario with a difficult answer.

There is no correct answer to this scenario, the idea is to dig deeper into how we look at?talent?and?leadership?development.

How would you feel? Is there someone on your team today, you would be comfortable reporting into? If you could not picture yourself reporting into one of your directs, what areas of development you need to focus on to get them there?

#leadership #notion #goalsetting #WOOP #SMART #OKR