Individual Skill Building: Making Clear and Important Goals

"Failing to plan is planning to fail." This common quote emphasizes the importance of planning, and the critical first step to building a plan is the development of goals. Without goals, there is no direction or guide for what actions are necessary, no thumbtack in the map to show you where you would like to end up. Most people need an identifiable endpoint, with milestones along the way. This helps track progress, and give the feeling that an accomplishment has been made. If there were no goals to achieve, eventually a pessimistic or cynical mindset may overcome even the most enthusiastic of individuals. The same reasons ring true as benefits for the organization; there needs to be a way to track progress, evaluate current methods to achieve the goals, and make adjustments as necessary to remain on track. It is therefore of utmost importance that in setting these goals, that they be clear and important, something that may sound easier to accomplish than it actually is.

Strengths of Making Clear and Important Goals

To find the most distinctive strengths of clear and important goals, one must look no further than the title itself: clarity and importance. The strength inherent in a clear goal is that it provides focus for the employees working to accomplish said goal. A clear goal is attainable, as is an unclear one; however, a clear goal, when accomplished, will have the outcome that was originally desired by all parties. An unclear or ambiguous goal on the other hand, can be achieved, but due to the lack of clarity, may mean different result than were intended. For example, if the goal were to improve customer service (too ambiguous), one may wonder if "improve" means to reduce telephone hold time, reduce complaints, or to cut costs in the customer service department. Any one of these could be achieved and considered an improvement, but only one (or none) of these goals may have been the intended outcome by the goal setter. Without clarity, focus on important goals is lost, and the end-results of the organizational goals becomes a crapshoot.

Importance of goals is necessary to guide prioritization at an organization, and also goes hand-in-hand with clarity of goals. Even if a goal is made very clear, if it is simply not important to the organization, it will not help anybody involved. An unimportant goal can also waste time and resources spent towards achieving that goal, and reduce return on investment. To return to the example of the customer service department used earlier, let's say the goal is to improve average hold time from three minutes to two minutes, meanwhile there have been little to no complaints about excessive hold time from customers. Achieving this goal would use resources that could otherwise be used to accomplish something meaningful, that has an impact on customer satisfaction and the bottom line financials. Improvement in any area is always good, but priorities must be made when dealing with finite amounts of time and resources.

Weaknesses/pitfalls/traps, and how to avoid them

One thing to be avoided while setting goals is to set the focus too narrow in breadth. While clear goals can focus attention to important areas, excessively narrow focus can lead to "blinders" being worn by employees, much like a horse pulling a carriage. By focusing too much on one specific area, other areas may suffer unintentionally. A simple example of this would be a shipping department manager, whom would receive a $10,000 bonus if he can improve average order to shipment time by 25%. The manager would spend his time making sure that the shipments were sent out as fast as possible, while ignoring whether the correct items were in the shipment, as well as overlooking the condition of merchandise being shipped. By setting focus on only shipment time, other important organizational goals suffer unintentionally.

To avoid goals that are too narrow, it may help if the goals contain a multi-faceted approach to success, i.e. there is not simply one objective presented. It is still important that the goals be specific and measurable, but they must also encourage the right behaviors. Instead of simply a improved shipment time of 25%, a new goal could be to improve ship time by just 10%, while improving the number of correct items shipped from 80% to 90% and decrease returns due to damaged items by 10%. By reducing pressure on one goal by lowering expectation, there is room for overall improvement in the department, leading to better overall shipment quality, as opposed to improving one facet at the expense of others.

Another harmful side effect of improper goal setting is unethical behavior, which can be caused by narrow focus goals, as well as misaligned goals. One of the biggest contributors of this behavior is a strictly monetary goal. By putting an extraordinary emphasis on attaining a certain level of profit and ignoring other contributing non-monetary factors, can lead to an "ends justify the means" attitude. It can also focus the work strictly towards one's own department and ignoring the overall organization's goals, leaving other to deal with side effects of your actions ("It's not my department/That's not my job"). For example, if a manager were told that if she didn't maintain $100 million in net income for the year that she would lose her job, there is a much higher chance that she may do whatever is necessary to achieve this goal in order to save her job. When such an ultimatum is presented, people behave in ways they normally would not, and in this case, expenses may magically turn into profits.

One easy way to overcome this is to not throw an employee's job on the line based on a single goal. While failing to meet goals consistently can be grounds for dismissal, it is not smart to put such a high degree of pressure on one person for one goal, since by human nature, most people will look to preserve their income, and some will resort to unethical behavior to do so. Those who will not resort to this behavior are likely to leave a job with this amount of pressure or with goals so far out of line with personal ethics.

Another way to overcome unethical behavior as an unintentional outcome of goal setting would be to avoid focus on a single monetary goal, and try and look at underlying factors that can influence the desired outcome. Instead of focusing only on a net income of $100 million, set a goal of reducing the most costly expenses by 10% or reducing equipment set-up time to increase efficiency. Either of these goals would help avoid looking only at the bottom line, but at the same time, cutting expenses or improving efficiency would both contribute to an increase in profitability.