Really interesting open workshop about setting goals last Friday. The delegates talked to us about the challenges of SMART goals – why is it that most managers know what they are but fail to set them?
The real challenge seems to us to be a question of time and effort. Its easy to write fairly meaningless goals (answer the phone in 3 rings; submit monthly report on time etc), but most managers can see that these kinds of goals don’t do much to motivate people to improve.
We’ve been reading a lot about motivation, and you know, some of the best stuff has been around a long time. Dan Pink captures the issues well in his book DRIVE ( great read if you haven’t come across it yet): He identifies the ideas of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as the key motivators. In plain language that might mean – learning how to excell at something, being in control of how I achieve something, and understanding the purpose for the goal in the first place.

However, it takes time to think all this through, and that’s often time managers haven’t got – so we’ve developed a SMARTPLUS Goal Bank that does 80% of the work for them.

Want to know more – take a look at this little vidoe of Dan,

and go to the SMART Plus Goal Bank
http://www.3c-performance-management.co.uk/consultancy/224.html
Enjoy!