By Ken Chapman, Ph.D.
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In November 1976, Time magazine invited two hundred “leaders” to Washington, D.C. to deliberate on the nature of “leadership.” Represented was every sector of American life–business, industry, education, athletics, the arts, the press, and government. From each sector, the very cream of the crop was in attendance. The group worked for a week — meeting in small groups, writing position papers, and trying in other ways to pin down their elusive subject. It might appear that such a widely diverse group would have difficulty arriving at mutually agreeable conclusions. But at week’s end, there was an amazing agreement on two points. First, the group agreed that leadership is leadership, whether it is exhibited by a coach leading the team to victory, a general leading the troops to battle, or a supervisor leading his or her employees to higher levels of productivity, success, and excellence. Secondly, and most significantly, the group agreed on an important quality of leadership behavior: Goal Setting.
One of your foremost functions as a supervisor is leading your employees to higher levels of achievements. Goal setting is a powerful tool that can enhance your success in this challenge.
To stay competitive in today’s economic climate, business has to become more productive. One way to improve productivity is to make better use of the organization’s human resources by doing a better job of managing.
Goal setting is a proven and reliable management technique recognized by all major theories of work motivation. Yet few organizations or supervisors use the technique systematically.
Goal Setting is something you already do—sometimes
While very few individuals or companies use goal setting as a systematic tool to achieve important goals, most people already set goals far more often than they realize.
People are constantly on the move, engaged in two forms of travel. Occasionally, they travel from place to place, city to city, and continent to continent. Continuously, they travel through time: moment-to-moment, day-to-day, and year to year. Curiously enough, most people approach these two forms of travel in completely different fashions. In most instances, more time and effort is put into the planning of the occasional journey than is put into the continuous journey through time.
For the first type, traveling from one place to another, there is usually a purpose. Perhaps it is a vacation, a visit to friends or relatives, a business endeavor, or any combination of these and other reasons. The trip is assigned a purpose, and therefore, has some meaning to you. A date for departure and arrival is set. A means of transportation is chosen and scheduled. An itinerary is developed of things to be accomplished upon reaching the destination. A map is plotted or a route is chosen. Climatic conditions are studied and appropriate clothing is selected and prepared. Costs in money and time are evaluated. A communications system is established so that the people you expect to meet are notified in advance and those who remain behind are kept informed of your whereabouts in the event of an emergency. Obstacles are anticipated and planned for, such as having a spare tire in the car or a magazine to read if the plane is delayed. All of this involves planning and organizing with forethought. The planning process is usually accompanied by an enthusiastic anticipation of the journey. What might appear to be a somewhat complicated process when analyzed in detail is usually a relatively easy task and necessary if the journey is to be a successful one.
The continuous journey through time, however, is usually less well planned and organized by comparison. Yet it is the most important journey you will ever take, and you only make it once. You need only ask yourself, “Where have I been going for the last few years, where am I going now, and where do I really want to be a few years hence?” to discover that you have not planned your life, your future, with the precision and thoroughness that you have planned your vacations. Your journey through time is more random and often lacks the direction which you give to a trip from place to place. Unfortunately, the success of the journey is also equally random, dependent upon chance, fate, circumstances, and a host of other tenuous factors.
In reading the life stories of famous leaders of the world, a striking similarity emerges; namely they all had one thing in common, they had a goal and a strong desire to achieve that goal. Their desire to achieve motivated them to do whatever was necessary to achieve their goal. An extra job, more knowledge, additional schooling and extra hours were all merely necessary to achieve their goal. Most of them had systematic plans of action for achieving goal after goal which were spelled out in detail. They controlled their own destinies rather than letting fate or circumstances control them. They were future-oriented, looking forward with anticipation toward the attainment of their goals, rather than looking backward and wondering where all their time had fled.
Goal setting gives meaning and purpose to life. It serves as a continuous source of motivation in the pursuit of all your activities. When you have clearly defined goals, the pathway to achievement becomes as exciting an experience as the attainment of the goal itself.
The message is clear. To be as successful an individual and leader as you have the potential to be, you must set goals and develop a plan for attaining them. Far too many people do not set goals for their lives in a conscious manner. They only attain a fraction of the success they are capable of achieving. If goal setting is such a critical process for success, why then do so few practice the process? The reasons for this are many. Far too often though, the reason is simple: we’ve never done it before. When we are young, parents plan much of our early life to the minutest detail. As we grow, schools and other social institutions take over the planning. A restricted number of choices are given to us, and as a result, we learn little about self-direction. As a consequence, we find great numbers of individuals today who are at a loss in planning their own destiny and adding some significance to their lives. Their lives and their activities are directed by others. They have never experienced the thrill, excitement, and power of taking control of their own life . . .and without mastering the art of goal setting, they probably never will.
This is not the case for you! As you proceed through this program and begin to methodically set meaningful goals in all areas of your life, you will begin to discover that many areas of your personal and professional life will take on a new excitement. You will begin to discover that there is much to be achieved and rewards and satisfactions to be gained. Your life will begin to take on meaning and your everyday activities will become purposeful. You will soon find that you are using your creative ability and potential more fully. You begin to develop the supreme confidence and excitement that comes from a sense of purpose. You will discover, perhaps for the first time that you are truly in charge of your future.
Success never happens by accident. It happens because you have a goal and a plan, and plenty of determination to see them through.
What Goals Are
A goal is an objective, aim, target, mission. A goal is what you aim at. Goals give you a daily sense of purpose and mission in life. Goals give life the same direction that a road map gives a trip, or a rudder gives a ship. If a steamship lost its rudder in mid-ocean and began circling around, it would soon exhaust its fuel supply without reaching shore, despite the fact that it would use up enough energy to carry it to shore and back several times.
The individual who labors without goals and plans resembles the ship that has lost its rudder. They may work very hard, yet they never seem to get anywhere. Hard labor and good intentions are not sufficient to carry you through to success. In fact, the key to success lies not in working “harder.” The key to success lies in working “smarter”–getting more done in less time and with seemingly less effort. As the saying goes, “a professional is one who makes a difficult task look easy. An amateur is one who makes an easy task look difficult.”
What Goals Do
Goals give meaning and a sense of purpose to your efforts and existence. Most importantly, your goals give your life the direction and meaning you want! How many times have you heard: “If only I had it to do over again?” The tragedy of that statement is twofold. Number One: We will never have it to do over again. Once time is spent, it can never be re-spent. Number Two: The person who says that would never have had to say that IF they took the time and energy to establish their goals for tomorrow, today.
If you question the importance of goals, just ask yourself some of the following questions. If you had six months to live, how would you change your life? Whom would you live with and where? How old would you be if you didn’t know your age? What would your job be? What would your personal productivity be? How would you change your attitude about helping others? What would your relationships with your employees look like? How would you relate to your children?
The satisfaction of having lived a full life, achieved happiness and fulfillment, comes only to those who determine today what they want tomorrow to bring. Goal setting is important to your success personally and professionally.
Benefits of Setting Goals
Goals provide you with a tracking system and a means of keeping a record of your achievements and successes. There is wisdom in the phrase, “Nothing succeeds like success.” To be able to see what you have achieved enables you to see that you can achieve yet more. When you look back on difficult periods and what seemed to be insurmountable odds, you discover you made it through. You were able to overcome tremendous odds and can overcome them again in the future. All of your can’ts become cans–your shouldn’ts become shall’s and your don’ts become do’s.
Goal setting assists you in decision making. Once you have a firm idea of what you want and where you are going, a great many decisions fall automatically into place. You eliminate the randomness of your actions and activities, thus reducing the number of insignificant decisions in which you were formerly involved. Much of the physical and emotional energy spent in continuous decision making of an insignificant nature can now be redirected into achievement-oriented efforts.
Goals help you operate on a day-to-day basis with singularity of purpose and determination. You become less occupied with extraneous thoughts and wishful thinking. Your attention is directed toward reaching your goals.
Goals help you discover a form of self motivation which can be sustained throughout long periods of time. Motivation that stems from within yourself is less likely to be diminished or affected by outside forces. Your up-and-down periods, which you had once considered natural begin to move upward with greater frequency. You are systematically gaining control over your own destiny.
Goals help you build confidence in yourself and your ability to succeed. By achieving one goal, your confidence in achieving another strengthens.
Goals raise productivity. Studies show that when productivity is measured, productivity will increase. Goal setting gives you a method to measure productivity.
Goals will improve work quality. Goals give a person ownership. What heretofore may have been a “task” to be completed becomes a personal goal to be achieved. Most people have pride in their achievements and will work harder for an even greater quality because it’s theirs.
Goals help to clarify management’s expectations of employee performance. When both the employee and you are clear on each of your roles and expectations, both will work harder to meet those expectations.
Goals relieve boredom by introducing challenge and a sense of purpose. By turning tasks into goals, a whole new set of standards are introduced along with a new attitude about those standards. What may have previously been dull and boring now has new meaning.
Goals improve employee satisfaction by providing specific accomplishment points. This allows for regular opportunities for an individual to feel the satisfaction of achieving a goal and thus feeling the “thrill of victory.”
Guidelines for Setting Goals
1. Goals must be realistic and attainable. Goals set too low are merely chores to be accomplished with little effort and little sense of achievement. Unrealistic goals or goals too high are a form of self deception. Goals must be set sufficiently high so that some effort must be exerted to reach them. There must be an element of stretching or striving inherent in them if a sense of achievement is to be realized.
2. Your goals must be consistent with your own system of values. It will be impossible for you to be excited about a goal that violates your standards, values, or beliefs.
3. Goals should be as specifically worded as possible. By being specific in setting the goal, you become more specific in visualizing its attainment. Steps toward achievement can be dealt with in greater detail and rewards are easier to identify.
4. Goals must be rank-ordered and a priority must be placed upon each of them. After you become involved in goal setting, you will soon discover that most goals are interrelated, and that the process of ranking them helps you to establish realistic time frames and a series of deadlines which facilitate their achievement.
5. Goals should be stated positively. One of the keys to achieving goals is the ability to visualize your goal. The more clearly that you can imagine the achievement and the rewards, the more likely you are to attain the goal. It is imperative that you visualize your goal. Remember, the mind cannot visualize a negative. For example, let’s say that your goal is “not” to lose your temper. It’s difficult to clearly visualize “not” doing anything. By converting this same goal into a positive statement such as, “I will calmly communicate with my employees,” you can begin to visualize yourself in a calm state communicating effectively with your employees.
6. Goals must have rewards that can be visualized. When you can envision an end result that you really want, that visualization provides a powerful source of motivation.
7. Goals must receive your full commitment to their attainment. Unless you are emotionally, ethically, and intellectually committed to the goals which you have set, they will not represent ends to which you could subscribe with conviction and determination.
8. Goals must expand beyond your present needs. A satisfied need is no longer a motivator. There must exist a realistic distance between where you are now and where you desire to be at some future time in all areas of your life.
9. Goals should contain behavioral changes. Since goal setting is the process of going from one point to another, it stands to reason that some change will be required. These behavioral changes should be incorporated into your goals program.
Understanding the nature of goal setting will be extremely valuable to you in establishing a specific direction for the different areas of your life. The travel through time and space — your most important journey of all—will have the predictability that comes only through careful planning.
