The Operators, LLC hosts the Career Resource Council’s monthly discussion, which is led by highly sought after Executive Coach Adriana L. Cowdin. Our most recent session featured a conversation on the importance of clear goals, and the process of goal setting. People who set goals are 43% more likely to experience career success than those who do not, so it makes sense to explore goal setting.
Adriana is a former CEO, PE-backed C-Suite executive, an experienced C-Suite executive in Fortune 500, and a 4x entrepreneur. She has leveraged her corporate experience serving as an Executive Coach for 25 years and is the founder of Be Bold Executive Coaching. In her experience as an executive coach, she’s empowered 5,000+ executives to navigate change – including career transitions – with clarity and confidence. This article summarizes the discussion that Adriana facilitated on the subject of goal setting.
Goal setting can be defined as a formal method of identifying something you wish to achieve, process steps in which to achieve it, a timeline for success and quantifiable measures/metrics of what success looks like.
Be SMART. We are all familiar with the acronym, and it is highly relevant in the context of goals: Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Time-bound. When you set SMART goals, you’re more likely to achieve them.
Challenge yourself. While establishing “achievable” goals, as stated above, ensures long-term motivation if you continue to raise the bar and update your goals, setting challenging goals may stretch your abilities. By creating stretch goals, you are most likely to ensure improvement. Goals that strike a balance between difficulty levels can ignite your motivation, prompting you to hone skills to tackle demanding targets. Setting challenging but achievable goals leads to 90% better performance.
Start broadly, with a list of goals to accomplish in the next 12 months. Next, narrow it down to the one goal that is critically important and relevant – this usually jumps off the page at you. Your goals may be process-oriented, outcome-oriented or performance-oriented. Regardless, you should write them in the present tense – for example: I achieve, I earn, I drive, I weigh, I lead, I own…
Identify your problems, shortages, lacks or weaknesses. What are the most significant gaps, absences, disappointments, or shortcomings in your life at the moment? Are they controllable or influenceable by you in any way? If you can prioritize them, you may be able to identify one or more powerful goals for yourself.
Identify your motivators. Continuing the thought process in the previous paragraph, it may not be enough to simply prioritize your most significant shortcomings. The analysis needs to also include a way of examining your core drivers. By determining what is most important to you in life, specifically, you are most likely to craft goals that are relevant, inspiring and motivating enough to drive you toward their accomplishment.
Make formal commitments. You should write down your goal(s). Ideally, keep the primary goal that you are focused on in front of you, prominently displayed. Or make it your screen saver. However, it is not enough to simply articulate the goal itself. Achieving the goal is possibly like eating an elephant – the only way to do it is one small bite at a time. Therefore, you will need to turn your goal into an action plan, with bite-sized pieces or steps. You might describe the goal; break it into component parts; describe metrics or measurements of success; and provide a deadline for each.
Be precise. By doing the above, you will ensure precision, achievability and a clear way of communicating where you stand. Attainable objectives help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Additionally, they help you focus specifically on the task at hand. Ambiguous goals lack a clear roadmap to success. Strive for precision.
Outcomes. People who take the time to make plans, write goals down, and enlist friends or family members to help them, by communicating regular progress reports, have reported success close to 75% of the time.
Despite the benefits of goal setting, about 80% of people do NOT set goals for themselves. There are reasons, of course.
- Our loved ones tell us we are doing fine and are “good enough.”
- Goals are not specific or measurable.
- There are too many goals to achieve and it is difficult to focus, prioritize or to see specific process steps.
- We lose our motivation/inspiration for the goal in the first place.
- It can be very challenging; we make excuses. There will be obstacles; and we need to plan for them.
- We do not hold ourselves to deadlines or timelines.
- Fear of failure prevents many people from getting started in the first place.
Conclusion
The art of goal setting is not rocket science but it is scientifically proven to be effective. It starts with creating S.M.A.R.T. goals, prioritized based on your motivators and your personal frustrations or disappointments. Once prioritized, a key goal needs to be broken down into specific process steps. Each step needs a timeline and a measurement of success. That is all there is to it. Following through on those steps gives you a substantial leg up on accomplishing the goal than if you had not taken the effort to codify it in this way. Best wishes for crafting and accomplishing your goals.
If you would like assistance, contact Adriana Cowdin (AC) at Be Bold Executive Coaching on www.beboldexecutivecoaching.com!