From the course: Goal Setting for Business Impact as a Manager

Goal setting: The gold standard

From the course: Goal Setting for Business Impact as a Manager

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Goal setting: The gold standard

- At one point or another, you would have set yourself a goal. You would have had the vision of what you want to achieve and what your life will look like when you accomplish what you set out to do. The question is, did you consider how to create an impact with the goals you set yourself, and did you use the gold standard approach to setting goals? There are three areas to focus on when it comes to setting goals for impact. First, you want to consider the outcome. What's the end goal you want to achieve? Maybe it's a qualification or a specific role. Perhaps there's a health-related goal or a financial goal. Maybe it's related to your personal development or mindset. Outcome goals are big, broad, important goals that you're working on, and generally you'll have very few of these you're working on at one time. Next, what are your performance goals? These are the areas you want to improve, and often these goals relate to your broader outcome goals. Performance goals relate to something you have the power to work towards or to get better at. It may be that you want to learn a new skill, your performance goal, to help kickstart a new career, your outcome goal. Maybe you want to boost your confidence with public speaking, which would be your performance goal, in order to create a bigger impact at work, your outcome goal. The key with performance goals is to take your big outcome goal and break it down into what you can do to work on specific areas to help you reach your outcome goal. Next up are process goals, and these are sometimes day-to-day actions or commitments that over time, will help to enhance your performance. So take the example of building confidence with public speaking. What are the processes you could put in place to do this? Maybe you'll read around the topic or take a course. Perhaps you could join a speaking club, or put yourself forward to take the lead in a weekly team meeting. Your process goals are the actions you're taking to enhance your performance, which will, over time, help you to meet your big outcome goals and make an impact. If your aim is to make an impact at work, I recommend you take some time over the coming few days to break your goals down into these three stages. Then give yourself specific actions, measurements and target completion dates for each of those categories. This systematic approach is the most effective way to turn aspirational long-time goals into regular steps you can take to create your impact.

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