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Compromise–All participants negotiate all aspects of the goal

Agreement–A commitment to achieve the goals within certain parameters (deadlines, resources, etc.)

Individualizing Goals

One of the serious defects of most top-down goal-setting processes is that they don’t consider—and therefore can’t maximize—the potential of the person assigned the goal. Unless employees have the right skills, aptitude, and knowledge to accomplish the goals assigned to them, they will not be able to accomplish them.

Research shows that many workers who enjoy what they do actually work for companies that capitalize on employees’ strengths. When companies and employees focus on strengths, productivity, employee loyalty, and low turnover follow. But when they focus on weaknesses (which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy), negative attitudes and poor performance follow. The best companies, thus, prevent failures by improving weaknesses, and produce success by developing strengths.

A discipline called SWOT analysis can be helpful in assessing the strengths and weakness of employees and in creating goals that are specifically suited to them. SWOT is an acronym that recommends that you build on your Strengths and resolve your Weaknesses, exploit your Opportunities, and avoid Threats in pursuit of your goals:

Strengths and weaknesses. Start by looking at strengths and weaknesses—your employees’, your organization’s, and your own. Think about your employees’ innate skills and resources. Consider what areas of work are involving and absorbing—where are challenges met with instinctive understanding and an innate grasp? What parts of the job are easy? Which are done with difficulty and inadequately? How does the employee (or the team) fit into the larger organization? What are your employees specifically good at? For example, people handle details differently: Are your employees strong planners or detail-oriented? Are they better at planning or better at executing?

“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.”

—Kahlil Gibran,

author of The Prophet (1883–1931)

Consider strengths realistically, from an internal perspective and from the point of view of your customers and experts in your field. Also, compare your employees’ strengths to those of others. What does each of your employees do better than anyone else? What advantages does your team have? Are there any unique or low-cost resources you can access?

Outside the Box

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND GOAL-SETTING

To perfom efficiently as a team, coworkers need to interact well with each other. In fact, many employees who are successful at developing strong working relationships and at earning respect and success do so because of their abilities to empathize, motivate themselves, persevere, control impulses, communicate clearly, make thoughtful decisions, solve problems, take criticism and improve, and support their colleagues’ efforts in pursuit of their goals.

What underlies these abilities is emotional intelligence—the capacity to perceive, assess, and manage one’s own emotions as well as those of others and of groups. Emotional intelligence (also known as EI) was originally named by psychologist Wayne Payne in the mid-1980s and popularized in 1995 by best-selling writer and psychologist Daniel Goleman, who argues that emotions play a crucial role in everyday life and at work and that people can enhance their emotional competency.

Optimism is one aspect of emotional intelligence that leads to increased productivity. New salesmen at Metropolitan Life Insurance who scored high on a test of “learned optimism” sold 37 percent more life insurance in their first two years than did pessimists.

People in your group who have high emotional intelligence are more likely to embrace goal-setting. Before you help team members develop goals, assess their emotional competence. If they are lacking EI, the goal-setting process may