It was a watershed moment of sorts. Several years ago I was delivering a two-day project management seminar in Reno, Nevada. An important part of any project management program is the skill of setting, planning and implementing specific goals. In future blogs I will be discussing more on the subject of goals. For now there are just a few salient points that I would like to make.
One particularly important observation I found was this. Lower levels in management were far less adept in the skill of goals (setting, planning and implementing). In fact in polling thousands of seminar participants I found most lower and mid-level managers had never consistently set goals either personally or professionally. There are many predictive elements for those who tend to be more successful than others in their business careers. One of the most obvious is summed up in this bullet point:
If you don’t have clearly defined goals, by default and without exception you will work within the framework and parameters of someone else’s goals for you. Rarely will those goals have your best interest in mind.
Employees should always work diligently toward the accomplishment of the goals identified by both employee and supervisor. Alignment, congruency and metrics are for another time. If your employees or sales representatives do not have clearly defined goals with the metrics to measure them, they are operating in default mode. They will not function at the level of those who do.
Along this line I posited a question during the seminar. “Suppose you and your colleagues decided that you wanted to get together after work and go do something, socially. It was decided that everyone would meet in the parking lot at about a quarter to six and then the decision would be made as to where to go and what to do. Five showed up and someone popped the question, ‘So…What do you wanna do?’ ” What do you suppose was the most common response? By far: “I don’t know what do you want to do?” I subsequently asked the same question hundreds of times all around the world and overwhelming got the very same response.
There is an interesting definition that I use in Project Management:
Project Management is a disciplined way of thinking about a job. This way of thinking should be followed in all projects regardless as to content, size or complexity.
One of the best things you can do for your employees is to train them in a disciplined way of thinking. A chief cornerstone to disciplined thought is the development of the skill of goal setting. The cost of sloppy, ambiguous, thoughtless ‘thinking’ is one of our biggest expenses in doing business. One of your greatest investments in your people is to lead the way.
