Setting Goals for Your Business that Make a Difference

By Mel Ingalls

How often do you think about the goals for your business, your division of the business, or even yourself in your career? If you are like most people, it is probably not very often. You are too busy living your life day to day.

But it is very important to set goals; otherwise, how will you move forward, achieve, make more money, make your life better, easier, less stressful?

The behavioural psychologists tell us that we are more likely to achieve something when we have set a goal to do it. We are even more likely to achieve it if we publicly declare the goal. Such a "public" declaration could be as simple as writing it down but not sharing it with anyone else. This is a public declaration to yourself.

Unfortunately, though, even when we do set goals, they tend to be vague: we don't set a timeframe for achieving them, and we are never quite sure when or if we have achieved them.

Here is the solution: SMART goals. While there are several variations on the acronym SMART, the one I like the best is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. Such a SMART goal tells us exactly what needs to be accomplished, by when, and how we will know when the task is complete. Let’s take a look at each of these attributes.

Specific: Specific goals are straightforward, simple and explicit, providing enough detail to answer the "what" question. Consider, for example, "clean up the New Zealand environment" and "reduce net carbon emissions and raw sewage emissions". In the latter case, we know specifically what in the environment we will clean up.

Measurable: A measurable goal typically has numbers; it tells us how many or how much. It also allows us to know when we have accomplished this goal so we can move on to the next. We can modify the goal above as follows: "reduce net carbon emissions by 20% and raw sewage emissions by 50%". Now we know the target. It would be even better if we could put a number on tonnes of carbon and liters of sewage.

Achievable: When we think we can actually accomplish something, that it is within our grasp, we tend to commit to it more readily. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could eliminate our carbon and raw sewage emissions altogether? Of course it would. But how achievable or realistic is this? Answer: it’s not. None of us will commit to a goal that we know we cannot achieve—at least not for very long. So set achievable goals. They may be a stretch, but they should be achievable given the resources available.

Relevant: The goal has to be relevant to the person or entity being held accountable for its achievement. It also has to be within that person’s or entity’s authority or sphere of influence. It is not relevant to set a nation-wide goal for the city of Wellington. So we could modify the above goal, assuming the goal is being set for the city of Wellington, to be "reduce net carbon emissions by 20% and raw sewage emissions by 50% for the city of Wellington".

Timely: It is critical to have a timeframe, a deadline, an end point for the goal. Otherwise, you can procrastinate indefinitely. So the last modification to our goal above could be: "reduce net carbon emissions by 20% and raw sewage emissions by 50% for the city of Wellington" before 31 December, 2010".

Take some time today to set goals—and make them SMART goals. You will find the payoff to be big for you and your business or organisation.

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