Smart goals: Attainable success

Friday 15th April 2011 - By Leo Alarcon    Share     Tweet

Enabling your people to succeed as a manager is not only one of the rewards of true leadership but an essential contributor to company culture and business success. SMART goals, apart from outlining the components of a well written goal or objective , should be attainable but challenging. An attainable objective is one which can be achieved given the three factors required for success are present:

-The correct tools and resources
-The right knowledge
-The motivation to succeed

There are so many examples where senior managers set goals and objectives which are so ambitious it would require an extraordinary amount of work, resources or knowledge which are not available to the person or team carrying out the work. Why would you set up your people and organization for failure? When setting objectives and benchmarks for performance it is important that management take a holistic view on the capacity for people and teams to achieve what is expected from them and the resources available to do this. The damage to team moral, company culture and psychological job satisfaction can be greatly influenced by the lack of opportunities to succeed if realistic and achievable goals are always being set. This leads to a drop in job satisfaction and a higher turnover decimation technical and business knowledge as well as overall competitivene