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Don’t Overcomplicate Your Business Goal Efforts
Many business owners are under the false assumption that goals have to be a formal document, several hundred pages long. There are businesses who have been successful with goals written on a single page. While not every business will have the luxury of keeping their goals to one page, the consensus is to keep your goal-setting efforts as simple as possible.
Goals need to be usable. If you create a multipage document that is both unreadable and unmanageable you have wasted your efforts and your time. If the goals affect others, you will be wasting their time as well. When you set out to create clear and concise goals, people will find them easier to work with.
Start by listing out the major objectives of your business. Keep this stage high-level. It can be as simple as stating you want to increase your cus-tomer base by 12% within the next year. Another possibility is setting sales targets. There are no right or wrong answers during this first pass, and you can make changes as necessary.
After you are happy with your high-level goals, it’s time to dig in and cre-ate tasks that will accomplish the high-level goals. When you determine what these are, assign dates to complete them by. Determine any prereq-uisites for completing them. These could include funding, training, etc. The more specific you are with the tasks, the easier they will be to ac-complish.
If you have multiple people who are going to help you with your business goals, the next step is to match up who is qualified to perform which tasks. You also need to make sure they can accomplish them in the period given. It’s a good idea to ask them if they feel comfortable with the amount of time allocated. Some managers may even choose to add extra time as a fudge factor, to ensure successful completion. Other managers will try to undercut the time as a way to push their employees. Which way is better, will depend on the team.
Creating goals for your business is an ongoing process. It changes as the needs of your business changes. There can also be situations when mem-bers of the team leave before all the goals are complete. By keeping your goals and tasks as simple as possible, you will set up an environment where these situations will not have a big impact on completing the over-all goals.
Failure in Business May Be Due to a Lack of Goals
Businesses fail because they run out of cash. This is like saying people die because their hearts stop. Both are certainly true statements but what are the underlying reasons for failure and death? When you can figure those out, you may be able to extend the life of both.
One of the biggest reasons for business failure is a lack of goals. Many business owners tend to take a fly by the seat of their pants approach and to leave their businesses to chance. Would you let a house builder build your house without a blueprint? Most people would not, and yet, many business owners are doing the equivalent when they don’t set up goals.
Goals do not have to be elaborate or even formal. They just need to be realistic, and they need to have set time frames. Otherwise, there won’t be any way to track the success.
Not everyone knows how to properly set up goals for their businesses. Try to seek out advice from mentors or coaches who have experience in this regard. They can give you an outsider’s view about your business, and they can help you keep on track to ensure you are meeting your goals.
If you decide to seek help professionally, don’t skimp on the costs. You get what you pay for, all things being equal. However, there is nothing wrong with being demanding with the results that you get. If coaches are as good as they specify, they should be held to a high standard. Insist on some guarantee, just in case. Do a lot of research before making the de-cision. If someone doesn’t feel right, there is usually a good reason why. Trust those instincts. They will serve you well.
When you set up goals for your business, you may discover opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise found. Your goals will require tasks and those tasks will often require research. This research would never have been done if you didn’t set goals. It can open up your eyes to endless pos-sibilities. You may even find potential customers as a result of this re-search.
Running a business often entails evaluating probabilities. What is the probability that this product will sell? What is the percentage of online sales compared to traditional sales? And so on. If it’s widely regarded that businesses who set goals tend to do better than those who don’t why would you go against this probability? It’s clear that setting goals is the right thing to do.
Have You Considered a Career in Project Management?
Perhaps you’ve never thought of becoming a project manager. But guess what? If you are proficient with setting and achieving goals, you have a basis for a new career. After all, when you manage a project, you’ll need to create a list of tasks and put deadlines around them. That is similar to what you do when you set goals and create objectives for those goals.
When you work in a team, you may find yourself taking the lead on keep-ing track of the goals and tasks of your team. This responsibility could fall with your manager, but if you simply take it upon yourself, your manager probably won’t object. He or she is busy after all. It will also show lead-ership skills in you.
If you do take on this role, you will be acting as a project manager at that point, or at least the project leader. You will need to become familiar with the teams’ activities or tasks, and you’ll need to hold the team ac-countable.
You may initially take some heat from the team as you are not officially the lead. You took it upon yourself. But, if your manager accepts your role, the team will likely follow suit shortly after that. This transition will become easier over time, and the team will allow you to keep on top of their tasks.
There are some activities of a project leader that are outside the space of goal setting. You may need to ensure that the critical paths are listed and ensure that they are achieved before moving on to the next tasks. A critical path is when one task must be completed before a dependent task can even be started.
Another task that is outside the role of goal setting is communicating with the stakeholders of a project. These are the people responsible for mak-ing sure company initiatives are met (often the funders). When you are dealing with business goal setting, the stakeholder is usually your man-ager. A project leader will need to involve stakeholders during the lifecy-cle of the project (another term not typically associated with goal set-ting). In the early stages of your project manager role, your manager may still take the lead in dealing with the stakeholders.
There are other tasks that goal management would not cover that would be covered by a project manager. Some companies require formal train-ing to become a project manager. But, becoming proficient in goal set-ting is certainly a great first step in the process.
How Are Your Business Goals Progress-ing?
Without any ability to measure business goals, they become meaningless. You can set goals until the cows come home, but you can’t accomplish them. Using benchmarks and milestones can be of great help when meas-uring goals.
If you can find a benchmark on a particular goal or set of tasks, this can be used as a rough estimate of how long something should take and what kinds of procedures were used. This is by far, the best scenario because you have a guideline to refer. If you don’t find a benchmark, then you will have to make a ballpark guess. You also won’t know how successful the tasks were.
Milestones are a great tool to keep everyone in the game. You can either set up the milestones for each task or you can have one milestone for the goal. The person responsible for this particular goal will choose how to complete the underlying tasks, as long as they get them all done by the milestone date. Some managers will choose a combination of milestones for the goal as well as the tasks. In fact, a project management tool would summarize the milestones for the tasks and roll them up as a single date for the goal.
On occasion, situations will come up that make it impossible to get the tasks completed in time. They may need sign off from upper manage-ment, and this was not known when the tasks were set. The materials to accomplish the goals may not be available by a supplier and finding alter-natives push the dates out into the future. The person responsible for completing the tasks may rely on input from another department in the company, and that other department is not cooperating. These are all valid delays that a manager will need to account for If there are valid delays, try to reallocate the person who was working on those tasks onto something else. Perhaps he can help other members get their tasks completed faster. Or, the person experiencing the delays can perform auxiliary tasks for other team members such as getting signa-tures or information from groups willing to cooperate.
One of the key elements when measuring the success of business goals is communication. The team members need to make the manager aware of any issues they have so he or she can try to step in to facilitate the needed resources. Other team members may need resources from the team which will only be known by proper communication.
How to Stay Motivated with Your Busi-ness Goals
When you set up your business goals, you have an initial surge of motiva-tion. The planning stages are exciting because of what you may accom-plish by proceeding with your plan. However, as time passes and other as-pects of your job get in the way, you may feel less motivated to make those achievements happen. Here are some ideas on how to stay moti-vated.
Keep a written copy of your goals and tasks on your desk. Create a daily task list that you print out and keep near you as you work. Daily tasks are more granular than the task list that supports the goals. You can check them off as you complete them. Make sure those daily tasks are as rele-vant as possible to the tasks on the master list. It's understandable that you will have to perform tasks outside of the goals but try to keep those to a minimum.
