Have you ever sat behind the steering wheel of a car without knowing where you are going? Sounds bizarre, right? What is more bizarre is that we do this every day in our professional lives without finding it disturbing! If you are smart (which I am sure you are and that is why you are reading Like Chapaa!), then you would have figured out that we are talking about GOALS which are important when we leave the house as well as when we want to go ahead in our personal and professional lives.
In fact, my take on this is that having a goal makes life easier by giving us a direction and sense of purpose. If you want to be successful, then one of the things which you need to do is to set goals in EVERYTHING YOU DO. This may seem like a lot of work, but goal setting a habit forming activity and when you see the results, you will not regret it.
So how do you SET goals?
Goals are usually things which we want to achieve in life. Personally, you might have a goal to lose weight (ouch!), professionally it can be to increase turnover, employee productivity, customer satisfaction etc. Once you have a broad goal…you pretty much have a direction which then needs to be broken down into activities that lead towards that direction.
How do you DOCUMENT a goal?
You can have long term or short term goals and their categorization is dependent on the time frame it will take to achieve them. For example, you can give yourself two months to lose four pounds or twelve months to increase customer satisfaction. Once you categorize this, you need to backtrack a bit and break it down into activities which will lead you to the goal.
Remember my analogy about the car? Activities to reach a place, usually involve, starting the car, checking the route, driving, parking, etc. Similarly, you need to document steps which will help you get to this goal.
After documentation comes EXECUTION
This is actually the most difficult part of achieving your goal….you can only get it right if you execute the various steps correctly. This is the place where the difference between KNOWING and DOING can be understood well. Good planning makes it easy to reach a goal. Each step should be understood properly as that will influence the overall quality of the results of achieving your goal. For example, a well planned campaign for higher customer satisfaction is likely to get you close to 80% of your goal while a poorly planned one may get you only 10%.
A goal is only as good as its metrics!
Metrics are nothing but numbers which can help you measure your goals and are as important as setting a goal in the first place. I have to lose weight is a meaningless goal if you don’t tie it with a number. Similarly, a goal to increase sales numbers is unlikely to be of any point if you don’t attach a number to it…let’s say a 30% increase from current levels. In fact, it is only with metrics that it makes sense to have goals in the first place.
There…I have put up my strong feelings towards goals and their measurements and hope to cover metrics in a business in another blog very soon!