While simply setting goals is helpful for prioritizing tasks and maintaining focus, what truly ensures clarity and success for you and your team are goals with key details included. Motivate's preferred way of making sure you have all the necessary details for good goal-setting is to use the SMART format.
What are SMART goals? Any SMART goal has to have at least five characteristics:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-Bound
Additionally, many SMART goals will also include measures of success and tasks to break down vague or longer-term goals into intermediate checkpoints and step-by-step guides on how to achieve those goals. To learn more about each of these characteristics, you can watch this video or read the written details below:
Specific: goals should include details on particular projects or particular aspects of a larger initiative. To make your goal specific, write it in a way that answers as many of the questions below as possible:
What am I trying to do?
Why am I trying to do it?
Who else is involved?
Where is it happening?
Which resources or limitations are involved?
Measurable: There must be some way to measure whether or not you have achieved a particular goal. In most cases this means including specific numbers as a target, but can also be words such as “all” or “complete” as long as more specific details are provided in the measures of success, tasks, or associated project plans.
For examples of measurements you can communicate in a SMART goal, think of whether you can answer the following questions about the goal you have in mind.How much improvement am I looking to see?
How many more am I trying to get?
How will I know when I have succeeded?
Attainable: While all your goals should be at least slightly challenging, you also do not want to set a goal that you have no chance of reaching in a realistic time frame.
The primary question you should be able to answer in thinking about your goal is: Is this goal realistic and within your power to achieve?
Relevant: Having goals that lie outside of your primary area of work can set up unrealistic expectations around how much time you have to work towards that goal or introduce confusion about how much you should prioritize that goal over your main body of work. For that reason, goals should be relevant to one’s day-to-day work.
Consider the answers to the following questions in determining the relevance of the goal you have in mind:Am I the right person to reach this goal?
Does this match with the needs of the business?
What of my Areas of Responsibility or Approach is this related too?
Time-Bound: Every goal needs a target completion date, otherwise it isn’t as much a goal as it is a vague idea, making this arguably the most important characteristic of a clear goal.
Ask yourself: When is this due?
Measuring yourself against that deadline, you'll be able to gauge regularly whether you are on track to meet your goal on time or if you are getting off track.
Once the deadline has been reached, you'll be able to see clearly whether you have achieved your goal or not.Additional Elements:
Measures of Success: Measures of success are intermediate deadlines on the way to your goal. For example, if your SMART goal has a deadline of the end of the quarter, you may set up measures to check in on progress at the end of each month or maybe even every two weeks. Setting up these checkpoints allows you to determine whether you and your team are on course or off course to meeting your goals on time.
Tasks: Tasks are intermediate goals that need to be achieved in order to achieve your larger goal.
For example, if our overall SMART goal is to decrease ticket backlog by 30% by the end of the quarter, you may have tasks that look like the following:
Investigate the source of the backlog
Evaluate resources needed to reduce backlog
Implement plan to redistribute resources
Have at least 10% backlog reduction by the end of month two