Employees thrive on achieving goals as long as you create goals which they can attain. Attainable goals can be stretch goals – they can be designed to get an employee to work outside of their comfort zone, to try new things, learn new skills, and work hard than they have ever worked before, but they still need to be attainable. In this article, we’re going to explore 4 ways you can create attainable goals that employees will work hard to achieve.
1. Create Specific Goals
People need to understand exactly what they are striving to achieve. You need to make sure all goals are very specific – vague goals can never be achieved. One time several years ago, as we were walking out the door to get into the car to go to a family renunion, I asked my wife if she had a map to the marina it was being held at. She said no, but it should be easy to find. It was only about 10 miles from our house. An hour later, we found the marina.
We didn’t have a map to where we were going and creating vague, non-specific goals is similar to this driving adventure. A sales goal of “increase sales” is not as powerful as a sales goal of “33% sales growth for the Zeus product line in six months.” That is a very specific goal and one which the employees will know if they are on target to achieve.
2. Strategy is Good, Execution is Better
When we discuss goals, we often develop a strategy to achieve them. The strategy is good and necessary, but the execution of that strategy is what really matters. Develop a number of good strategies and never actually executing them will result in failure. As you create a goal, thing strategically about how you could achieve this goal and whether or not executing that strategy is feasible. For example, if you want a 33% sales growth in 3 months and you know the strategy will involve increasing your marketing budget 50%, will the CEO sign off on that spending increase? If you know the answer is ‘no,’ you need to factor that into both your goal creation and the strategy that follows. Or, you need a strategy to convince the CEO this is necessary. Either way, execution is a crucial part of creating an attainable goal.
3. Create Measurable Goals and Then Measure Them
When an attainable goal is your desire, you should always think about how you will measure the goal. In our earlier example, measuring a 33% increase in sales is pretty easy. If you’re working in an internal IT support team and you want to close 25% more support tickets, are you sure all of the tickets are being measure? “Drive by” IT tickets are the bane of every support manager. When you craft an attainable goal, make sure it has a measurable component (this defines success), think about how you measure it, and then make sure all of staff have the tools necessary to measure it. As you progress towards the goal, report on current progress so employees understand their efforts do make a difference.
4. Be Optimistic and Realistic About Your Goals
Be optimistic about what your team can achieve, but realistic about the resources you have. There are going to be times in your management career when your goals are not met. Either you didn’t have the right team in place to achieve them, external factors prevented them from being achieved, you poorly managed the path to achieve the goals, or some other factor caused failure. Hopefully, you learn a lesson and understand how to craft attainable goals in the future. Be optimistic about what you could potentially achieve, but realistic about what may happen.
When you create attainable stretch goals, you will find employees will strive to meet them.
April 21, 2011
Motivating Employees