When it comes to achieving your goals, never compromise

There is a lot of conflicting advice out there for entrepreneurs when it comes to goal-setting. Aim high but be realistic. Motivate the team but give people room to fail. Be specific but see the big picture.

Over the years, I have developed my own strategy for setting and achieving targets. It has always worked for me and, this week, I learned that someone I really admire follows a similar playbook.

I read an interview with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, the man credited with saving the world from Covid, in The Jerusalem Post. Asked what he learned from developing the vaccine, he replied: “The most important lesson for me was that if you task your people with a very difficult goal, the first reaction is to lower the bar. If you don’t lower the bar and insist that the goal remains the goal and you provide the resources, you will be surprised how much they can do.”

Bourla’s words resonated with me: I have seen many entrepreneurs make the same mistake. They set a goal, then decide it’s impossible, and keep moving the goalposts, unwittingly stifling their ambitions. Or they set a goal but fail to allocate the right level of resource to achieve it.

When I think about setting goals, I always set the bar high. Then I give my colleagues what they need to meet their targets, and try to help them along the way if they struggle. What I don’t do is compromise: the goal remains the same, otherwise everyone gets confused.

And when I talk about resource, I don’t just mean investment in the financial sense, although this is vital. I mean the right people, the right time frame, the right attitudes in the mix.

When you build a great team around you, it makes it easier to dream big. There’s no point setting a high bar unless you know that you have the right talent in place. And once these individuals reach the ambitious target set for them, it has an incredible impact on their self belief. Bourla says that his team is now poised to make similar progress with drugs battling cancer. Having conquered Covid, they will attack the new challenge with renewed vigour.

At BigChange, I have always been impressed by my colleagues ability to hit targets, and then come back the following week with the energy to attack even bigger goals. Once we had become a dominant player serving small-to-medium-sized businesses, we moved into the enterprise sector with extraordinary success.?

Of course, goal-setting in this way requires one vital ingredient. You need a mission that your whole team can get behind. For Bourla, that mission was to save millions of lives. It’s hard to imagine a more powerful driver. At BigChange, we might not be battling a pandemic but we are passionate about helping to drive down emissions, go green, and help make businesses more efficient and successful. That is the mission that spurs the team here on when the going gets tough.

So when you read advice about how to achieve your?business dreams, beware of anything that suggests you should dilute your goals or limit your ambition. To create a big change, you need big goals. Just ask Albert Bourla.