The benefits of goal setting, 3 effective approaches and the techniques to avoid (including SMART).

Setting specific, difficult goals consistently leads to higher performance than just urging people to do their best (Harvard Business Review).

High goals generate greater effort than low goals, and the highest or most difficult goals produce the greatest levels of effort and performance.

Tight deadlines lead to a more rapid work pace than loose deadlines.

And one of my favourites, making a public commitment to a goal enhances personal commitment.

We may be good at goal and objective setting for ourselves and our business, whether set in our heads or regularly written on paper, discussed with our business mentors and coaches or reviewed independently, throughout the year, to ensure we are on track to achieve our targets and revenue goals. But are you building effective goal setting and KPIs into your team appraisals?

Do you understand goal setting enough to know when it is and isn’t effective?

Changing your approach slightly, in different situations can help to have a big positive impact on your teams’ performance. As with all great management processes, considering the individual, in terms of skills, context and motivations can impact the success of the intervention.

And, as with our approach to HR, this doesn’t have to be laborious or painstaking. Just relevant, concise and supported by you, to ensure they are motivating and stretching, but realistic and achievable.

The benefits of goal setting have been shown in numerous research studies and proven to ensure your business achieves the ambitious goals you set, here is our Mesh HR guide to how to approach goal setting successfully;

Making a public commitment to a goal enhances personal commitment.

It is widely reported that publicly sharing your progress can actually help motivate you to accomplish

your goals. This applies to helping your team set goals too.

The CIPD have reported when you monitor your teams’ progress, this has a larger effect on goal attainment. When the outcomes are reported or somehow made public, and when the information is physically recorded, which is often the case in work contexts through meetings, forms and reports, your team are more likely to achieve their goals.

Psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo has also shown that accountability is a huge motivator in crossing things off our to-do list. We need to tell someone we have a goal, and then to confirm when we’ve achieved it. That’s why it feels so good! Celebrate your teams’ successes as you go and you may see an increase in motivation.

Get your team to write down goals and help them monitor their progress in every review meeting with them. Encourage them to check things off and get things done, discuss how this impacts the business and where this information will be shared and reported, and it can help move your business forward to achieve the big goals they link into.

Tight deadlines lead to a more rapid work pace than loose deadlines.

Rather than the usual yearly goal setting and appraisal process, consider the pace and context of your business, would a 90 day goal setting approach be more successful? I use this in my business and you can see the benefits of leaping forward in a 12 week period and then moving on to the next set of objectives.

All of this can be done within an annual framework but you ensure things are completed and managed throughout the year, rather than a big push at the end, when you could have completed this months ago and been ahead of yourselves. It is amazing what you can achieve in shorter timescales when you have one big thing to focus on rather than a list of overwhelming goals, and you don’t know where to start. So often, you don’t.

Ensure it is part of a bigger performance framework.

Research by the CIPD has also shown that goal setting shows stronger positive effects on performance when combined with some form of performance feedback or progress monitoring. This can provide a much clearer and comprehensive picture of where your team are now, what they want to achieve as individuals, and what they need to do (and what support you need to provide) to get them, and the performance where you want it to be.

Prompting people to form action plans to achieve the goals, namely ‘if–then’ plans specifying when, where and how they will achieve their goals, helps them to succeed in attaining their goals. As well as considering individual aspirations, goals rooted in personal interest can show greater positive effect.

Therefore, implementing effective and relevant performance review and appraisal processes in line with the goal setting, supports successful performance.

Avoid these mistakes.

Some techniques for goal setting have been shown to have a negative effect on performance.

When employees must first acquire the knowledge or skills to perform the task, specific and challenging goals can have a negative effect on performance. So, if your employee is learning a new area, make sure the goals are manageable and achievable, celebrate the small wins and incremental development rather than big, juicy goals at this stage. Otherwise they can be off-putting and demotivate performance, instead of raising the bar.We’re all familiar with SMART goals in the workplace, however, is this an outdated technique? One of the draw backs of focusing on the SMART framework is the lack of review at the outset of the benefit and relevance of the goal itself. The goal can be set out well, but it could also be worthless to the company. It can also encourage individuals to be too safe, again, how beneficial will this be to achieving those hugely ambitious company goals? We would suggest to only use this as a basic framework, but as part of a more thorough approach to setting goals.

For support with goal setting, KPIs and performance appraisals contact us now to see how we can help you achieve your business goals.

For detail on our team goal setting document pack email us here.

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