A Basic Guide to Goal Setting in Business

Goal setting is an act of intentionally identifying a new objective, project, or skill followed by a plan and execution. Setting goals mean taking control of your work or life decisions. It provides focus. Thus, your choices and actions must bring you closer to achieving the goals you set in the beginning.

In goal setting, it is important to first evaluate whether the goals are worth pursuing. You should ask yourself if the goal is something you truly want and if it is important enough to spend time, money, and resources pursuing it. If you have doubts about how much effort you can put into achieving your goal, it’s a sign that it might not be worthwhile. Similarly, if you have too many goals to accomplish simultaneously you might run the risk of burnout, not having enough time and eventually giving up.

In business, all goals should meet the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) criteria. If the goal is to increase revenue, you must specify the actions and steps you and your employees must take to achieve that goal. Does the company need to assess and reduce its operating costs? Should the company come up with a new product?

The goal must have criteria for measuring progress to ensure you are on track. If the goal is to increase customer satisfaction rating, you must define how much the rating should increase. You must also determine the key indicators of success to know for sure if you have reached your goal.

The goal must also be attainable. Do you have the resources to achieve the goal? Does your team have the capabilities to make the goal a reality? Which ones are you missing, and how do you plan to get them? Another way to determine if a goal is attainable is to check if other companies have successfully done it before.

A SMART goal must be realistic. Can you achieve the goal given the time, talent, and resources you have at your disposal? Moreover, does your goal fit with all of the other higher priorities of the company? For example, hiring more employees for new business development is possible but may not be realistic if you consider the money and time needed to hire, train, and integrate the new members into the existing project team.

Last, the goal must be time-bound, which means it has a start date and a completion date. Defining the time constraints in the beginning prevents urgency, panic, and mistakes from arising during the process. For example, if the goal is to develop a new product, you must decide on the launch deadline to avoid delays in marketing, distribution, and delivery.

After finalizing the goal, you must create an action plan and a timeline to identify the roles of the people involved, individual tasks, milestones, and deadlines. Timelines give employees an understanding of the goal and the project at a glance, keeping them informed and aligned at every stage of the process. The timeline also reveals the dependencies of each task and preempts any potential issues.