Maybe we don’t all do it – or at least not as often as we should – but most of us have heard many times that the key to reaching your goals is writing them down and referring to them often. But did you know there’s a more effective way to write goals than most of us are familiar with? According to Jim Paluch, it’s all about visualizing success.
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“When you write your goals the right way, it’s like giving yourself a positive affirmation,” explained the president of JP Horizons, Cleveland, Ohio, during the company’s 2006 Leadership Jam held in Columbus, Ohio. “The goals you write should give you a specific picture of the result you want to achieve.”
To establish goals properly, Paluch says it’s necessary to actually write them down in the past tense, rather than as something that will happen in the future. For instance, “I will put my three-year business plan in writing,” is a great goal, but “I have written down my three-year business plan,” is even better because it gives the goal-setter an image of what their organization will look like once the goal has been accomplished.
Another key in writing goals correctly is to write SMART goals, according to Paluch’s colleague Bob Coulter. That is, writing goals that are:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time bound
“Customers, employees and financials are the three legs of the stool that allow an operation to run, but you have to ‘win’ on all three in order to be successful,” Coulter explained. “As a manager, you should challenge yourself to write SMART goals and consider their impact on all three of those legs of the stool.”
Starting with the customer leg, Coulter led Leadership Jam attendees through an exercise illustrating how to write SMART goals. When asked what a “win” for their businesses would look like with relation to customers, many people suggested that customer satisfaction was an indicator of success. “Satisfied customers are great – but if you’re writing a goal, how can you make ‘satisfied customers’ more measurable?” he asked
By focusing more on annual customer retention, Coulter explained how business owners and managers can create specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals related to customers. Other ideas were to make job quality a measurable by instituting quantified job-site inspections, as well as to take a look at the number of referrals a company gets over time to create SMART customer-related goals.
On the employee leg of the stool, Coulter suggested looking at staff retention – a specific, measurable item – as one possibility for SMART goal setting. “Overall, employee retention is good for morale because it creates consistency and stability within the organization – that’s what makes it a relevant goal to look at,” Coulter says.
Finally, Coulter and event attendees looked at the financial leg of the stool – an area where goals are often easily measured, though managers must first establish what a “win” looks like. “If you have a company that starts with $1 million in sales and brings in $150,000 profit, they’re working with about 15 percent profit,” Coulter says. “If that business owner is told he needs to push through and keep growing bigger and bigger, he could come in the next year having made $3 million in sales, but only $50,000 in profit – just 5 percent. In those situations of growing companies, you may have a longer chain of people making decisions, rather than just one or two people as in a smaller company. You’ve also likely got more overhead and fewer processes.”
Coulter explained that in this case, the smaller company was actually in better shape to reach financial goals, but reiterated that companies must define what a “win” looks like for them in any situation.
“When you’re setting SMART goals, you have to figure out what winning looks like for the customer as it relates to the performance you need to have, and you have to do the same for your employees and your financials,” Coulter said. “Once that’s established, be sure to share that definition of winning with your employees.”