Are Your Goals as SMART as You?

“The more spe­cif­ic and mea­sur­able your goal, the more quick­ly you will be able to iden­ti­fy, locate, cre­ate, and imple­ment the use of the nec­es­sary resources for its achieve­ment.” — Charles J. Givens, author

Most exec­u­tives, lead­ers and man­agers you talk to know exact­ly what the acronym SMART is when it relates to goals.

But most objec­tives or goals at a com­pa­ny, team or indi­vid­ual lev­el are usu­al­ly far from it.

I’m not talk­ing about whether they are rel­e­vant to the com­pa­ny strat­e­gy — that’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent conversation.

It’s just about the fact that many goals are like an ath­lete say­ing, ​“I’m going to try hard.”

Or a sales­per­son who says, ​“I’m going to sell lots” ver­sus ​“I’m going to get face to face and make a pre­sen­ta­tion to 30 new prospects” or ​“I’m going to close and sign $5,000,000 in new busi­ness” or ​“I’m going to increase my con­ver­sion rate from 23% to 27%”.

Although every­one knows this con­ven­tion­al wis­dom, it’s rare in practice.

In orga­ni­za­tions we work with on strate­gic plan­ning, we always keep a pulse on and review goals – the quar­ter­ly set­ting and reset­ting of goals — at com­pa­ny and team levels.

We even cre­at­ed a cou­ple of tools to help us to man­age that process, to make sure that you are set­ting SMART goals — oth­er­wise they can eas­i­ly become vague or lose their teeth.

For exam­ple, for one orga­ni­za­tion that had a par­tic­u­lar­ly hard time with SMART goals, we cre­at­ed a grid for each of their goals. It helped them to cre­ate a habit of keep­ing track and for con­duct­ing a very struc­tured evaluation.

Set­ting SMART Goals — Activ­i­ty vs. Outcome

One of the biggest dis­tinc­tions to know is the dif­fer­ence between activ­i­ty goals and out­come goals.

• Activ­i­ty goals are rel­e­vant when it’s about doing the work and try­ing hard.
• Out­come goals are about get­ting the results and suc­ceed­ing. These are more chal­leng­ing to fig­ure out in many cas­es, and to deliver.

In almost every case, do your best to get to an out­come goal.

The Chal­lenge

• Look at your over­all com­pa­ny and team goals.
• Do they meet the SMART cri­te­ria in a way that would make one of your account­ing team very hap­py (do they have a lot of num­bers in them)?
• What can you do to sharp­en them?

For more about this, lis­ten to Episode 71 of The Growth Whisperers.

Lawrence & Co’s work focus­es on sus­tain­able and enhanced growth for you and your busi­ness. Our diverse and expe­ri­enced group of advi­sors can help your lead­ers and exec­u­tive teams stay com­pet­i­tive through the use of var­i­ous learn­ing tools includ­ing work­shops, webi­na­rs, exec­u­tive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.

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