Achieving Goals_ Define and Surpass Your High Performance Goals - Kathleen Schienle [2]
Strategic planning is a structured process. Led by enlightened and trained leaders, strategic planning ultimately determines how an organization’s resources can organize and direct its progress. The strategic plan guides managers as they set goals for their department and for their individual employees. The better developed the strategic-planning and goal-setting process, the more efficiently the organization will reach its goals.
Why Goals Work
The reasons that goals are effective are persuasive. Goals work in several ways:
By providing a target. One theory of human behavior, developed by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of the breakthrough book Psycho-Cybernetics, hypothesizes that each individual has a “success mechanism” that is part of the subconscious mind. This success mechanism continually searches for ways to help the individual reach targets and resolve problems. People work and feel better when their success mechanism is fully engaged. All that’s needed to activate this mechanism is a target. Without one, the success mechanism lies dormant or—worse—goes after targets that were not chosen consciously. Having goals ensures that your targets represent what is most important to you.
CASE FILE
GOAL-SETTING AT GE
The story of General Electric under the leadership of CEO Jack Welch is revealing. Early in his tenure, local managers throughout the global company were operating in silos, completely separate from other departments and even from their own teams as they pursued their own agendas without regard for anyone else.
Welch believed that the workplace should be open and collaborative, and that everyone should fully participate, so he led a series of changes—including establishing new goal-setting practices—that transformed the company.
At all levels of the organization, goals were aligned: individual goals supported departmental goals, and the goals for each department supported those of the next corporate level above it. Individual, departmental, and divisional goals all supported goals set at the top, which in turn supported the corporate mission.
SOURCE: Jack Welch & The G.E. Way by Robert Slater (McGraw-Hill, 1998).
By helping you focus your time and effort. Most people don’t have a single focus during their work days or, if they do, it’s on whatever happens to have landed on their desk. Goal-setters have learned to put their time, energy, and resources toward a single objective that will help accomplish some larger end. Even if they work toward this goal for a just few hours at a time, they can achieve outstanding results because of the concentration of effort. Goals provide a way to focus and concentrate time and energy on specific and meaningful targets.
By giving you desire, motivation, and persistence. To achieve something worthwhile, you may struggle and fail several times before you reach your target. High achievers pick themselves up after each fall and continue. Why don’t they give up? Where do they find the motivation to persist?
Commitment to goals creates a strong sense of purpose, and that’s what keeps them going. It has been said that a person with a big enough “why” can handle almost any “what” or “how.” Goals can help you remember your “why” when you are faced with adversity.
By dictating priorities. It’s easy to let distractions, trivial tasks, and general busyness fill your work days, or to allow other people’s interests to govern your time. Goals—and the missions, visions, and dreams that inspired them—provide a natural framework that clarifies your priorities so that your choices are based on the long-term view of what is most important to you. There are many forks in the road between where you are now and where you want to be, and goals keep you on the right