Differing Reactions to Annual Goal

In last week’s blog, we talked about how to establish goals within a company’s strategic plan in a way that helps to guarantee the company’s success. The natural follow up in this two part series is to discuss goal setting and execution at the individual employee level. Oh and good news alert: the tips in this blog can be applied to personal goal setting for all of you who just made new year’s resolutions.
Individual goal setting creates a linkage between strategy and execution.

In a survey on goals and execution in the 4 Disciplines of Execution by Stephen Covey, only 25% of participants could actually name their company’s top three goals. This points to an obvious disconnect between top levels of a company and employees essential to achieving desired results. We’ve seen this play out time and time again in our practice as well. A goal setting process that communicates the company’s top level goals across the organization and facilitates the creation of goals at department and individual levels addresses this issue head on.

Don’t just take my word for it though. Take Larry Bossidy's track record: as CEO at Allied Signal, he achieved 31 straight quarters of 13% growth or better through up and down economic periods. He attributed his company's ability to set clear, measurable goals as a key to their success.

Activity without results is a waste of time.

Any form of goal setting will deliver better results than none at all, but setting SMART goals are the best way to ensure success. When drafting your goals, make sure they are:

• Specific;
• Measurable;
• Action Oriented;
• Realistic; and
• Time Bound.

When goals are set using these criteria, well-rounded objectives are established, and the likelihood that they will be completed skyrockets. If you’re not familiar with smart goal setting, use our Goal Setting Tool, which can be accessed from the Toolbox on our website. It will guide you through a step-by-step process that results in SMART goals once completed.

Are you interested in more information about goal setting? uDrive subscribers have access to tools and templates that can help. These can be found in the Resources for the Parking Manager and HR Tools sections of the site.