Setting goals is a fundamental ingredient for success.
Everyone is driven by wants and needs – and to this extent, we all have goals. To know what they are and consciously choose them, is to set the goals in place.
For a company, team or individual not to set goals is akin to being afloat without a rudder.
You may arrive at your intended destination but the trip could take longer and be more perilous.
All companies have goals - successful companies ensure their goals are clearly defined and that there exists a strong alignment between the company, management and employees’ wants and expectations.
Principle: Employees need tailored and competitive targets.
In competitive environments - company, team and individual employee goals need to reflect current trends to keep pace. On an annual basis, review performance benchmarks to ensure your employees’ goals are relevant to current industry practices and standards.
Goal setting is best done in the first instance ‘top down’ – meaning you first clarify the company’s goals, then benchmarks for those key executives that stand to maximise company performance, then for lower-level employees. A thorough process can help reinforce your company’s actual or desired corporate culture, and can help ensure goals are:
achievable,
worthwhile,
clearly defined, and
communicated to those people who can bring them to fruition.
Goals can be set on three separate levels:
goals affecting the company as a whole,
goals affecting groups of employees (‘teams’), and
goals affecting individual employees.
At each level, we consult the employee closest to the goal, as well as someone on a different level of the organisation offering a different perspective of the same desired outcome, to clarify the goal and identifying how it can be made consistent with the goals of the company as a whole.
Once set, the goals become the benchmarks.
Brash Solutions can:
ensure performance goals are appropriate to the individual and that they properly reflect your company’s business strategy,
develop an effective business plan, or review and improve the effectiveness of an existing business plan,
provide follow-up support to ensure the system is kept up-to-date and that employee performance targets are kept manageable, and
provide advice on specific problems in performance, or in under-performing areas of the business.
Principle: Ensure employees’ goals align with company goals.
By definition, a company is a collection of people. Ensure all your employees are working towards common, clearly defined goals, driven not just from the top down (from the business plan down to individual goals), but also from the bottom up (driven by employees’ wants). To do this requires employees’ involvement, and once their wants are identified, practical action can be taken to clear the blocks that stand in the way of a natural state of motivation and productivity.
Goal setting on its own is valuable - but our experience is that without employee involvement and goal alignment, there is bound to exist a level of negativity within a team or in individuals. Solutions can become short-term stop-gaps if the core of a particular problem is not exposed and addressed.
What is most often overlooked is aligning what employees want, with the best interests of the company. You need to also work bottom up: find out what employees want, what is obstructing their path and then develop and implement solutions.
Brash Solutions has developed T.E.A.M. – The Employee Alignment Method - to streamline the goal setting and alignment process.
T.E.A.M.’s aim is to align what employees want, with the best interests of the company. We go about this process by exploring employee performance in terms of
wants, blocks and solutions.
The end result is a more naturally motivated and positive team environment, because employees - for their
own reasons - want what the company wants.
The origins of T.E.A.M. stem from our industry experience and observation that all too often, solutions are wheeled in without fully uncovering the problems.
T.E.A.M. starts with the facts:
what are the company goals?
what do people want?
what is getting in their way?
and only then do we start looking at solutions.
Also, you don’t have to wait for problems – T.E.A.M. aims to maximise performance even where things appear to be going OK.
T.E.A.M. can also assist in managing dismissals: to prevent them by addressing discontent early on, or hastening them to avoid the company and the employee persisting if the relationship is destined not to work.
We can package T.E.A.M. in a variety of ways to suit your company’s needs.
For our generic method of implementing T.E.A.M., see our T.E.A.M.
Program.
If you want to know more about how T.E.A.M works, click
here:
Contact Us
if you wish to discuss any of the above, or for more information on Goal
Setting, go to:
For a company, team or individual not to set goals is akin to being afloat without a rudder.
You may arrive at your intended destination but the trip could take longer and be more perilous.
