Smart Goals- Understanding Of The Smart Method For Goal Setting And Achievement

Book excerpt: Goals are part of every aspect of business/life and provide a sense of direction, motivation, a clear focus, and clarify importance. By setting goals, you are providing yourself with a target to aim for. A SMART goal is used to help guide goal setting. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Therefore, a SMART goal incorporates all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving your goal. Many managers struggle with articulating the behaviour and why it's not working, let alone trying to translate it into a SMART objective. So, oftentimes, it gets brushed under the carpet and the team soldiers on. This stoicism results in the staff member not pulling their weight or getting the opportunity to develop, the rest of the team having to compensate, the manager's focus stepping down, to deal with the knock-on impacts. Everyone is slightly (or a lot) behind and nobody is really benefiting. There's no win-win here. In this book on SMART Goal Setting, you will discover: - Relationship between Job Descriptions and Performance Management - Limitations of using SMART with another person - 4 Different types of performance objectives - How to set a tangible behavioural SMART objective - Understanding the employee's expectations and assumptions - Understanding your own performance mindset, as a manager - Preparing for and conducting objective setting meetings If you read this book, you will understand the assumptions that are made that render some objectives dead upon arrival i.e., the objective is doomed before you've even left the room. This information will allow you to ask questions that prompt a proper discussion of what is really meant by the objective, allowing you to shape it into a realistic objective that you are likely to benefit from, both in the short-term and in your career, over the longer-term.