by Alison Green
THE POWER OF GOALS
Specific and measurable goals are far more likely to be adhered to than more general ones. As Time magazine’s Sanjay Gupta reported, “Investigators at Berlin’s Free University found that people who set general goals, like ‘I will exercise in my free time,’ did a far worse job of sticking to that plan than people who made a firm commitment, like ‘I will walk to my friend’s house and back every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.’” (“Stuck on the Couch,” Time, February 22, 2008.)
Ambitious
While measurability means that goals must contain a clear finish line, “ambitious” here means that the finish line must represent significant progress. Goals should not simply be predictive, laying out what the staff member would be likely to achieve that year if she simply did what she always does.
Stretch goals—those that require staff members to reach far in terms of effort and tactics—can drive enormous progress within an organization. For instance, with the health care organization, if the advocacy director currently had secured the support of just three legislators, then a goal of adding fifteen more within a year might be a stretch goal. The director would need to focus significant energy here, leaving little room for distraction and requiring smart thinking about how to get there.
The habit of setting ambitious stretch goals is one of the key practices that distinguishes high-performing individuals and organizations. While others might go about the ordinary course of business each year, perhaps making incremental progress, organizations where staff members must think about how much progress is possible and set ambitious goals reflecting an aggressive sense of possibility often make dramatically more progress.
“Why do we set goals? Because we take ourselves seriously.”
BLAKE DE PASTINO, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, AMERICAN INDEPENDENT NEWS NETWORK
Staff members who set stretch goals often worry about the consequences of not reaching them. The answer is more art than science because there is a delicate balance between rewarding risk and ambition, on the one hand, and ensuring that staff members take goals seriously, on the other. When a staff member sets a goal representing dramatic progress, there needs to be an implicit understanding that the task is difficult. Even in failing to meet the goal, the staff member could make significant progress, which merits reward rather than rebuke. At the same time, failure to meet a goal should cause reflection on what could be done differently going forward, and a pattern of failing to meet goals over time should be cause for concern.
From an external perspective, leaders might also fear that funders will cut support if goals aren’t met. The key here is to communicate with your funders directly, perhaps flagging from the start that a goal is particularly ambitious so that you correctly set expectations. Ultimately, though, fear of what your funders might think should not deter you from setting ambitious goals. In our experience, funders are more likely to reward you if you make significant progress, and ambitious goals help you do that.
Realistic
At the same time that you want your people to have ambitious goals, implicit in the idea of taking those goals seriously is that they cannot be so ambitious that they simply represent wishful thinking; goals, in other words, must be more than purely aspirational. The best goals lie just at the intersection of ambitious and realistic (Figure 3.2). When goals are not realistic, staff members do not commit themselves to meeting them. The staff might mouth the words of the goal, but deep down they will not have decided to do whatever it takes to reach it, which is the type of commitment leaders need from their teams.
FIGURE 3.2. The Intersection of Ambitious and Realistic
Making goals realistic has several important implications.
Goals Must Have Plans Behind Them
Setting a goal, especially a stretch goal, generally makes sense only if staff members have at least some sense of how they might reach it. Without that understanding, the goal is more of a wish than a commitment. So as goals are being developed, part of the conversation must be what tactics the staff member envisions using to achieve them. For instance, when setting annual fundraising goals at Teach For America, the directors of the local offices submitted plans showing a realistic list of potential sources of funds. No director would be able to set a goal of raising $1 million without demonstrating a realistic path to get there. Of course, your staff member’s tactics may change during the year as she reacts to new developments and adapts her plans. But the important thing is to have thought through a plausible road map and had meaningful discussion about it before solidifying a goal. (We address plans more fully at the end of this section.)
Goals May Need to Represent Interim Progress
Particularly in advocacy work, sometimes the only realistic outcomes are interim ones. An advocacy director might have the long-term goal of getting a housing bill passed through the state legislature, but for this year, her realistic (but still ambitious) goal might be to get the desired bill out of committee in the state house or perhaps endorsed by the leading candidates for governor. These are still outcome goals because they capture the result of the organization’s activities and not just the activities themselves, but they represent interim progress toward a longer-term end.
Sometimes Goals May Need to Change
In general, managers should be reluctant to change goals during the course of the year, because once a target is established, the team should commit to doing everything to reach that target. However, extraordinary circumstances may make reaching a goal impossible, in which case a leader would change the goal. For instance, an organization’s advocacy director might have an ambitious agenda this year, but if a high-profile event, such as a major disaster, dramatically shifts the public’s focus, she might have to recognize that significant progress this year isn’t going to happen, regardless of her efforts. She might instead focus on laying the groundwork for the future, perhaps building a cadre of committed “grasstops” (that is, high-level) leaders who would speak on behalf of the issue next year.
Account for Unknown Variables
Don’t get hung up on the presence of unknown variables in your goals. For instance, your regional director and her team might be engaged in state-level fights in eight states. She might reasonably argue that she will need to react to developments in the states to decide where to focus her efforts, so she cannot set meaningful goals specifying exactly how much progress will happen in each state. You and she might agree, though, that a successful year would include making significant progress in four states. Her goal then might be, “Of the following eight states, make significant progress in six.”
Measurability Should Not Become a Project unto Itself
Being realistic about goals means examining not just the content of the goals themselves, but also the energy needed to measure them. Your advocacy director might decide that in an ideal world, she would set goals for the total number of activities that your grassroots members engage in: attending meetings, writing letters to the editor, selling tickets to fundraisers, and so on. She might, though, decide that the energy it would take to keep tabs on every member activity would be prohibitive and that a reasonable, more easily tracked proxy for total activity would be the number of members who attend meetings. In some cases, devoting significant energy to assessing progress toward a goal might make sense, but managers should use their judgment about how much effort is merited. In the end, your people should devote tracking energy appropriate to the importance of each goal, but not more.
Time-Bound
Being time-bound simply means that goals should contain not just a clear finish line, but also a deadline for reaching it. For instance, the goal, “Increase the number of donors giving at least $5,000 per year from fifteen to eighteen,” should be accompanied by “before the end of our fiscal year” or “by June 15.” In most organizations, goals are set annually, so the time is at least implicitly a twelve-month window. In situations where there’s not necessarily a natural cycle (as there might be,
say, with a school year), we’ve sometimes seen clients make faster progress by setting goals covering shorter periods, like six months.
Whatever the time period, once you have agreed on final goals, also ask your team members to establish milestones for interim progress, so that you and they will know throughout the year whether they are on track toward meeting their goals. There are two types of milestones:
Milestones that directly measure interim progress toward a goal. For instance, if your development director’s goal is to raise $100,000, she might agree that to be on track, she needs to raise $20,000 by March, $50,000 by June, and $75,000 by October.
Activity-based milestones. Sometimes the only useful milestones are about completing activities rather than actual outcomes. For instance, your organization might receive the vast majority of its contributions in December, so your development director might not know how many people will end up contributing until the start of the new year. She might, then, set activity-based milestones, like having at least three “friendraisers” by July 1 and having follow-up meetings with fifteen donors by October 1.
What a SMART Goal Look Likes in Practice
Here’s an example of a SMART goal with milestones for a training director:
Goal: Train 1,000 Student Leaders by December 31
Milestone 1: Develop an effective training manual and materials by February 1.
Milestone 2: Confirm partnerships with two national student organizations by March 1.
Milestone 3: Train 500 students by July 1.
Milestone 4: Complete new student outreach by September 20.
Milestone 5: Train 1,000 students by December 1.
And here’s an example of a SMART goal for a chief operating officer in a context where measurability requires the use of a qualitative definition describing “how we’ll know it when we see it”:
Goal: By March 31, all “low-performing” staff will have raised their performance significantly or left (with “low performers” defined as staff who only sometimes meet goals and rarely exceed them, who do not demonstrate our core values, and/or who would be relatively easy to replace with someone as good if they left).
How Many Goals Are Too Many?
In general, the number of goals for a person or department should be in the rough range of three to five. Going slightly over this (say, to eight) isn’t a disaster, but having way too many (we’ve seen organizations in which one person will have thirty-two significant goals for the year) means that you can’t truly focus on many of them.
In fact, having just a single, clear, overriding goal can be incredibly powerful. For instance, your development director might have several goals around adding new major donors, raising a certain amount from an event, and so forth, but ultimately you want her to be obsessing over a single bottom-line goal for dollars raised during the year.
In cases where a person does have multiple goals, consider indicating their relative weight. For instance, you might decide that while broadly educating the public on your issue is a goal, it represents only 10 percent of success for the year, and getting your curriculum adopted by a majority of school districts in your state is worth 60 percent and thus much more important.
“If you can’t tell me what your goals are without looking at a piece of paper, then you don’t have real goals.”
JON COWAN, PRESIDENT, THIRD WAY
Goals Makeover
Take a look at how these goals were made over into SMART goals:
Before: Work with activists to build grassroots support for health care reform.
After: We will have quality grassroots activists (meaning they respond to the vast majority of our requests, they can articulate our messages, and they come off as “normal” people) working in twenty of our twenty-five targeted states by June.
Before: Manage publications schedule.
After: Ninety percent of our mailings and publications will be issued on time, and 100 percent will meet our quality guidelines.
Before: Maximize the amount of earned media coverage that includes our messages.
After: At least one-third of news stories on all major, national events related to our issue will have included our perspective. In addition, we will get an average of at least three letters to the editor published each month, reaching an average of at least 300,000 readers (based on average circulation) per month.
What About Plans?
Goals answer the questions, “What are we trying to accomplish?” and “How will we know whether we accomplished it?” Plans answer the question, “How will we get there?”
As we noted in Chapter Two, the basic ingredients for a good plan are:
The key activities needed to reach desired goals
A timeline for when those activities will take place
An assignment of responsibility for each step
Put more succinctly, plans establish who will do what by when. Within those broad outlines, plans can take a variety of forms. In many cases, managers establish a high-level plan for the year, laying out the main tactics they plan to pursue and when they will implement them. A year is a long time to plan for, though, so many of our clients create annual plans to articulate general initiatives around their goals and then rely on quarterly plans for the specifics. For instance, a development director’s annual plan might include the general tactic, “Expand circle of high-net-worth donors by convincing current donors to host friendraisers for us.” Her quarterly plan, then, would be more specific: “By February 15, Joanna meets with Alan, Robin, and Marty to see whether they’ll host events for us.”
HOW TO CREATE GOALS
Let’s now look at how you can develop and use goals. As with delegation, the key is to agree clearly on the expectations from the start and stay engaged to increase the chances of success and create accountability and learning at the end.
Lay Out a Timeline
Depending on the size of your team, there may be a lot of moving pieces to consider in a goal-setting process, so creating a timeline will help you keep the process on track. (See Tool 3.1 for an example of how this might work.) Your timeline should leave plenty of time for discussion between you and your staff members (and among staff members as well).
Engage Intensively
As your staff members propose their goals and tactics, you should engage rigorously to test their thinking, ensure the goals truly are SMART, and challenge the assumptions underlying them. For instance, if your development director proposes a goal of 50 percent growth in annual revenue, you’ll want to understand what she will do that is different from prior years to produce that growth before you sign off on the goal. Without a plan to reach the target, the goal is merely wishful thinking and thus fails the “realistic” piece of SMART. Similarly, let’s say your development director proposes a goal to increase the number of people who donate fifty dollars over the Internet. You, however, think the energy should be going to high-net-worth donors, so the two of you need to work that out. A significant part of the power of goals, in fact, comes not from the final words on the page but rather from the process of alignment that results from real discussion around what you expect your staff members to accomplish.
See Tool 3.2 for a useful goal-setting worksheet.
USING GOALS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR: TRACKING AND STAYING ENGAGED
Once goals have been created, they can be either an incredibly powerful tool for managers or an empty bureaucratic exercise that sits on a shelf gathering dust. To be meaningful, goals need to shape the regular course of business.
Managers and Staff Members Should Refer to Goals Regularly
All staffers should refer to the goals for which they’re responsible on a regular basis. Ideally, at the end of each week, they review their own goals, consider what they need to do to remain on track, and then shape their plans for the following week to accomplish those tasks. Perhaps more realistically, as the manager, you can declare that at one meeting a month with each of your staff members, the two of you w
ill look at the staff member’s goals and assess the extent to which things are on track. (Chapter Five discusses how to conduct these monthly meetings.)
Managers Should Engage Meaningfully to Assess Progress
The best managers ask probing questions to get beneath the surface so that they can truly understand how things are progressing. For instance, instead of asking a simple, “Are things on track?” a manager might ask, “Can you review for me how you’re moving forward in getting us established in Arkansas? What indicators do we have of whether we’re on track? How many active members do we have so far? What are you worried about?” By using goals as the basis for regular conversations, managers can ensure their teams stay focused on what everyone has agreed is most important and can work with their teams to evaluate what’s working and adapt tactics as needed.
Just as with delegation, in addition to asking good questions and looking at data on progress toward goals, managers should also see how broad priorities are actually playing out. For instance, if your IT department has a goal of providing same-day solutions to staffers’ technical problems, you might sit in on some conversations between the IT staff and end users to observe the work in action. Or if your development staff has a goal of prompt, friendly answers to member inquiries, you might look through some of the member e-mails they’ve received and the replies they’ve sent. As with delegation, the aim is to shrink the implementation gap between plan and reality—between what you intend to make happen and what actually happens.
