Why Goals Don’t Work
Why goals just don’t work.
That’s a little unfair, goals do work when they are created, focused on and actioned in the right way, but it is fair to say that in my experience and in the studies, I have seen over the years somewhere in the region of 80% of goals are never achieved.
It is more accurate and fairer to say just goals do not work.
I believe the reason for this is the way people approach them, I think that goals fit into a bigger process for achieving what you want.
I think it all starts with your Ideal Outcome, it starts with why you would bother to set a goal in the first place, in the bigger context of a business this is usually referred to as your vision, your ideal outcome is not always the same as your businesses vision but your business vision should always support your personal ideal outcome or you are very likely to find that your goals end up in that 90% that just don’t get achieved.
Once you have a Vision, (the big picture of the future) you need a Mission (how you will deliver this, what is it you are going to offer the world, what problem are you solving and how etc), then you can write some goals (these are then the milestones you will need to complete to achieve your mission) and then you need to create a set of objectives for each goal (that’s the actions that when completed will deliver the goal) and then you can set targets (what to aim at and focus on first) and then and only then you can create a set of appropriate actions you need to take to hit that first target.
This might sound complicated, and it is, this is one of the biggest reasons my clients work with me for year after year, lets try to give real world example.
Look at this from a point of History and the 2nd World War.
The Vision was Peace in Europe
The Mission was to defeat Germany
One of the Goals was to Invade France (there were others Africa, Italy etc)
One of the Objectives was Sword Beach (we all know there were 5)
The Targets were a predefined set of German Positions on that beach or overlooking it i.e a particular Pill Box
The actions become clear at this point run up the beach and don’t get shot which is what they trained for because they already knew exactly what they needed to do and how they would do it.
If all the Allies had set was a goal to invade France we may well still be waiting for them to decide where, and it would have been highly unlikely that they would have achieved that goal.
If you want to talk about setting your Vision m Mission and creating a culture that delivers on your goals get in touch
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