Do you feel that you’re working harder and harder but don’t seem to achieve anything?
The answer is to set goals. A goal is a target that a business or a person plans to hit in a set period of time. Goals keep a team focused, they give communication a purpose, and they’re essential if you’re going to get anything done at all.
The trouble is that you can’t simply say “I want to increase sales” and expect it to happen. A goal that undefined is no more than wishful thinking, and all the good that comes from setting goals is lost if the goals themselves are no good. Here’s how to write better ones, as a set of questions and answers with three small animations.
Why do so many managers avoid setting goals?
Because setting goals makes people accountable. It’s far easier to go with the flow than to commit to a number in front of your team.
The research is clear about the cost. Edwin Locke and colleagues reviewed laboratory and field studies of goal setting in 1981 and found that in 90% of them, specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy goals or no goals at all. Telling people to “do their best” doesn’t work, because there’s nothing to measure their best against (Wikipedia).
Be very wary of managers who refuse to set and communicate goals.
What is a SMART goal?
A goal that meets five tests. It’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. The idea is that a goal that passes all five has a much better chance of being met.
One goal, made SMART a letter at a time
Where did SMART come from?
I used to credit my management hero, Peter Drucker, with it, and he did lay the groundwork. Drucker’s idea of management by objectives, from The Practice of Management in 1954, is that managers and their teams agree clear objectives and are judged against them.
The acronym itself came later. George T. Doran introduced it in the November 1981 issue of Management Review, in a short article called “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives” (Doran, 1981).
What the letters stood for in 1981, and now
There are dozens of variations now, from SMARTER to SMARTIE (Wikipedia). The letters matter less than the questions behind them.
What does each letter ask?
Specific. Could anyone read the goal and know exactly what it means? “Increase sales” is so broad it’s useless. A specific goal says which sales, to whom, and through which channel. This part comes first because it’s the most important to get right.
Measurable. How will you know when it’s done? What gets measured gets done. A goal becomes measurable as soon as there’s a number in it, and that number is also how you track progress along the way.
Achievable. Can the team do it with the skills and money it has, or can it get them? Have you done anything like this before? It should stretch the team without breaking it. I’d also bring back Doran’s version of the A: put a name against every goal.
Relevant. Does it move the company’s bigger objectives forward? Smaller goals should line up behind the larger ones, which is the whole point of the 3-12-6 planning framework.
Time-bound. When will it be finished? Without a deadline, a goal very rarely gets met. Three questions help: what can we achieve in three years, in twelve months, and in the next six weeks?
Doesn’t “achievable” make goals too easy?
It can, and this is the weak spot in SMART. The goal-setting research favours goals that are hard as well as specific. In practice, “achievable” often becomes an excuse to set a target the team was going to hit anyway.
Hard, specific goals beat easy ones
Others have proposed alternatives for exactly this reason. Donald Sull, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, argues for FAST goals: frequently discussed, ambitious, specific and transparent (Sull, 2018). I read the A in SMART as “achievable if we really go for it”. A goal everyone already knows they’ll hit isn’t doing its job.
What does a SMART goal look like when it’s finished?
Take “increase sales” and run it through the five tests. You get something like: increase the business closed by each sales rep by 10% in the next quarter.
- Specific? Yes. It’s clear what it refers to and who it applies to.
- Measurable? Yes. A 10% increase per rep is easy to track.
- Achievable? It should be checked against what each rep closed last quarter, and the support they’ll get to do better.
- Relevant? Yes. Growing sales was the point.
- Time-bound? Yes. It runs to the end of next quarter.
Can you give some examples?
Here are some for sales, marketing and HR. Yours will be different, because the things that drive results in your company will be different, so treat these as a starting point and test each one against the five questions.
Sales
- Win four new customers a month, from April to December, by offering a live demo on every first call.
- Have a meaningful conversation with each of our ten key customers every month this year, owned by their account manager.
- Ask at least half of our existing customers for a referral in the next six months.
- Increase customer lifetime value by 10% this year by offering additional services at every renewal.
Marketing
- Generate 150 qualified leads a month by the end of the second quarter from a targeted paid search campaign.
- Increase customer reviews by 25% in the next six months by following up every customer who gives us a high satisfaction score.
- Grow LinkedIn followers by 20% in three months by publishing one short video a week.
HR
- Raise staff retention from 80% to 85% by the end of next year through a new onboarding programme.
- Increase employee engagement scores from 40% to 50% in next year’s survey.
- Run an anonymous survey next quarter to find out what people need to stay motivated, and act on the top three findings within six months.
A goal written this way is one your team can see, own and finish. That’s the difference between working harder and getting somewhere.
Sources: Wikipedia, SMART criteria; Doran, G. T. (1981) There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives, Management Review 70(11); Wikipedia, Goal setting, on Locke and Latham’s research; Wikipedia, Management by objectives and Peter Drucker; Sull, D. (2018) With goals, FAST beats SMART, MIT Sloan Management Review.