How to Set Goals You'll Actually Achieve
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Many leaders believe that their employees are engaged in their work when on the job. Most of us want to believe that our teams are highly engaged and very productive.
However, a 2016 Gallup poll found that only 13% of the world’s workforce is “involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace.” 87% are either indifferent or completely unengaged with their work. This is a 7 trillion dollar problem, as estimated by Gallup. Every company faces the issue of motivating its employees. The 87% of unengaged workers worldwide live life on borrowed purpose, phoning it in instead of finding and actively seeking achievement.
What can be done about this massive lack of workforce engagement? After all, nearly all businesses have training, onboarding, and managers.
Setting and achieving goals is how you turn unengaged employees into a high-performing workforce, so that your company can start making the difference in the world that you set out to make.
You are about to learn several proven techniques to set goals that you’re more likely to achieve. When trying to set goals across companies, these techniques are essential.
You’ll also learn about BHAGs — our short-cut term for Big Hairy Audacious Goals. This will get you to start thinking about setting goals that challenge you: goals that will change your life, perspective, and impact on the world.
While you may already be setting goals personally, the goals you set and the goals of your employees need to be in alignment to actually elevate your performance. Otherwise, you and your employees are just spinning your wheels, setting and resetting the same empty goals, perpetually coming up short. Understanding the most effective approach on how to structure and implement your company’s goals will motivate your employees to find their own purpose at work.
You’ll see the great change that goal setting effects when your employees want to come to work, elevate their performance, and achieve your company goals. Because when they find their own purpose, your employees will finally understand how becoming a high performer in their work helps them become a high performer in life.
Think Bigger, Hairier, and More Audacious
What can you imagine as examples of Big Hairy Audacious Goals?
In 2015, Dr. Scott O. Baird set his own BHAG and cycled 2,458 miles across the United States, traveling the entire distance from coast to coast on his road bike over the course of 41 days. This was only weeks after undergoing three separate heart procedures to correct his AFib.
“It is true that I wanted to test myself physically... But what I saw, up close and personal, was the goodness of America and America’s people... and what I came away with was a great hope for America’s future.”
Dr. Scott O. Baird
Griffin Hill Founder
His deeply rooted understanding of goal achievement doesn’t only come from that bike ride and other monumental experiences like it. Scott is a human and organizational performance scientist who has discovered how to turn principles into valuable performance outcomes. He sets and achieves goals that most would consider impossible to replicate themselves.
Armed with a Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology and Human Performance Technology, he developed a goal achieving program and performance toolset built from the strategies he used to achieve his own outstanding success. Through Griffin Hill, the company he founded 30 years ago, these methods are brought to all leaders in need.
The program Griffin Hill developed is called SMARTERTM and it outlines how to create a goal-achieving culture in your team, no matter what level you manage.
SMARTER™ is an acronym that stands for:
Each letter in SMARTER™ is a different requirement that every goal needs in order to succeed. In this report, we’ll go through two of the seven letters in the SMARTER acronym, providing unique insights on high-achieving goal strategies. How could these unique insights help your company or team? Start thinking of ways as you continue to read.
Ends Versus Means
One of the threshold concepts Dr. Scott O. Baird introduces in his coaching is the importance of setting goals for ends and means. End goals are the things you want to accomplish. It’s the amount of weight you want to lose, the degree you want to earn, the skill you want to develop, the contest you want to win, the thing you want to achieve. These are what we think of when someone asks us about our “goals.”
In business leadership, end goals are the increased sales numbers you want to hit, the faster growth you want to generate, and the more clients you want to retain. All of them are valuable and worth pursuing, but when looking at the transformation required to get your company there, these goals can also be daunting.
Means goals are the little commitments we make that get us to our end goals. They break the process down into actionable chunks so that you are always moving forward. If your end goal is losing weight, your means goals are exercise and diet. If your end goal is earning a degree, your means goals are completing this course and that class, as well as studying and performing well in your classes. If your end goal is a skill you want to develop or a contest you want to win, your means goals are the practice it takes to excel above the competition to be the best you can be.
Means goals are also what help all levels of your organization work simultaneously, in tandem, to accomplish your company-wide end goals. We’ll explore that a little bit later.
It seems like an inevitable consequence of the human experience that these things aren’t easy. It is painful to achieve goals:
- It is the pain of tiredness behind your eyes at the end of an exhausting day that is nowhere close to being over.
- It is the pain of injury and the long path to recovery for athletes competing at the top of their game.
- It is the pain of childbirth and the sleepless nights and unending patience required to raise the child.
But at the same time, it is painful to not achieve goals. Living with regret can be as difficult as the pain it takes to succeed— sometimes more difficult.
“It’s your choice,” Scott says, “whether to experience the pain of effort or the pain of regret. And in my experience, I’ve found the pain of regret is far more poignant.”
Choosing to set goals is choosing to experience the pain of effort during your journey rather than the pain of regret when that journey ends. And if you do it right, the pain of the effort will become the fulfilling joy of the journey.
This is the heart of Griffin Hill’s SMARTER™ methodology. It provides exercises that help you plan and offers strategies to implement in your organization. But at the core, Dr. Scott O. Baird’s message is one of commitment: discovering commitment in yourself and expressing it through a life of disciplined effort, an effort that leads to achievement and success.
SMARTER GOALS™ is also deeply rooted in human and organizational performance research.
In 2014, research scientists were studying well-being, motivation, self-determination, personality, and positive psychology at the University of Missouri in Columbia. They discovered that goal setting is useful as a performance tool when the goals you set originate from your deep, internal motivations. They revealed:
“Pursuing personal goals is an important way that people organize their behavior and mature as individuals. However, because people are typically unaware of their own implicit motivations and potentials, they may pick goals that do not serve them well. “Self-concordant” goal selection is a difficult self-perceptual skill, with important ramifications for thriving1.”
“Self-concordant” goal selection is very similar to Scott’s method of setting goals. It involves choosing goals that guide and support your desired outcomes. It also involves being sure, before you start, that the outcomes you’re fighting for are the ones you want to actualize deep down.
For example, the journal gives a case study of a lawyer who chooses a career path as an attorney at a large law firm instead of a smaller special-interest firm in line with one of her passions in college that doesn’t pay as well. The lawyer’s goals at her new firm for climbing the ranks and reaching Partner before opting for early retirement at age 40 don’t reflect her internal motivations, desires, and potentials. This lawyer experiences burnout because her goals aren’t self-concordant. She doesn’t want more money and an early retirement deep down. These goals are ones she was told were worthwhile by someone else.1
When the lawyer starts work at the special-interest firm, she is fulfilled and happy despite the lower pay. This is because her goals now originate from deep, personal motivations.
This is what it means to set self-concordant goals - set goals that originate from deep personal motivations.
The thesis of the journal, the focus, is that people are often ignorant of what goals they “should” want, the goals that best promote their own well-being and personal development.
The journal makes these main points:
- The research suggests goal setting is crucial.
- Personal development relies on “self-concordant goals”, goals that come from you.
- People make a lot of goals consciously that don’t match what they want to achieve.
- Success in goal setting comes from matching your internal desires with your conscious mindset.
Goals are vectors of activity that originate from a person. In physics, a vector is a speed with a direction. When someone else forces an objective on you or creates a goal that you don’t value, you will lack the speed and direction that drive you to achieve the goal. When Scott asks, “Can you see it? Do you believe it?” he’s keyed into this principle. Are your goals internalized? Do they match where you want to go?
How Does This Apply to Companies?
Goal setting on an individual basis makes sense. How do we do that for a whole organization?
If you, as the leader, set a goal without acknowledging the perspectives of your workers, you risk having zero impact on your workforce. The goals you set on a company-wide or team-wide level need to be supported by your employees on the individual level, in a very similar way to what Scott was saying about means goals supporting and building up to ends goals. Otherwise, it will be impossible to keep your workforce motivated.
At the same time, there are things that you and your partners need to accomplish as leaders, changes that you need to effect in order to grow, remain competitive, and excel in your fields. These things need to happen regardless of whether or not everyone below you is in complete agreement.
So, how do we do this? How does this get implemented in your company?
Start Applying Goal-Achieving Behavior
Collect information
Go to your team and ask what motivates them, what their personal goals are for their careers, and what your goals are as a team. Do this first in short, individual conversations, and then take it to the team as a group.
When you get different answers (because the answers will differ even if only slightly), start looking for commonalities. What do your team members agree is important? What do they disagree on? How are they motivated similarly and differently as individuals? Does the kind of success their leaders want to actualize look like success for them?
Your company goals will be informed by their answers. Remember that in order to transform your business, you need your employees and team members to transform with you. Even when company or team success doesn’t mean the most ideal situation for individuals, understanding individual perspectives is paramount.
Determined sales leaders must first master the sales system of process, plays, metrics, and coaching. The chief cornerstone of the four is process. In true cornerstone fashion, the sales process guides plays, metrics, and coaching.
Recording this information is crucial. You’ll remember that it’s one of the 7 SMARTER steps we talked about earlier. Tracking the stages of goal planning, setting, and achieving keeps you invested in the process and aware of your progress.
Recording this information is crucial. You’ll remember that it’s one of the 7 SMARTER steps we talked about earlier. Tracking the stages of goal planning, setting, and achieving keeps you invested in the process and aware of your progress.
Tie In Emotion
Find the common ground and start generating an emotional platform through which you’ll launch the company-wide goals you plan to accomplish.
When we say “emotional platform,” we’re referencing that 2014 study’s “...deeper or growth-consistent parts of a person.” We’re also referencing Scott’s “Can you see it? Do you believe it?”
We’re emotional beings. We can’t experience life only as numbers. Goals, no matter how logical, are most successful when accompanied with strong positive emotions. That’s clear from both Kennon and Dr. Scott O. Baird. We need belief and emotion in order to resonate with people and motivate them to action.
A great place to start is with Dr. Scott O. Baird’s coaching:
- Dr. Scott O. Baird asks, “Can you see it? What do you see?” In other words, are your goals internalized? Will they take you to the desired outcome where you truly want to go?
- How does that outcome feel to you?
- What does it look like?
- Is it a phone call, job offer, raise, or meeting?
- What does that success taste, smell, and feel like?
Just thinking about your goal now, how do you feel? What is the visual? What is the rush?
Start with answers to those questions and then refine your emotional platform until it’s something specific to what you want to accomplish while universal enough to be appealing to your whole organization.
Use SMARTER™
The Griffin Hill SMARTER™ goal-achieving framework is useful for working on both the large-scale and individual levels you need to succeed. You’ve learned much of the strategy here, but Griffin Hill also offers online tracking tools and coaching to help you be successful at each stage of your implementation. That way, you can tier ends and means goals and keep everyone in alignment.
You don’t want bad systems to be the reason you fail after reading all of this valuable strategy. Getting the right tech is arguably the easiest actionable step to setting better goals, but that’s no reason to sell yourself short. In summary, you need a way to reflect, record, and evaluate your goals and the goals of the people on your team or in your company.
Lead and Achieve From Within
Be a leader who cares about the people you work with. Employees will be able to tell if the goals you’re setting are one-sided, or if they will negatively impact their wellbeing. If that’s the case, they won’t follow you regardless of how expertly you’ve used the strategies outlined above.
There’s no magic word, red pill blue pill, or power-of-suggestion-dream-sequence that will convince people to work against their own personal values and beliefs.
Kennan brings up a case study about how being tricked into valuing things you don’t leads to almost universal failure. It is impossible to operate that way sustainably.
There are no lies in SMARTER™. The only way to create the enduring impact you seek in your company is with openness, transparency, and care for your employees.
So, put the time in to understand the people you work with and want to motivate. Encourage and support them. Sincerely look for the common ground you share and become invested in helping them become their ideal version of themselves. This is the way.
Leader Success Cheatsheet
- Approach your team beforehand, learn what motivates them, and start thinking about what goals could originate from them.
- Create an “emotional platform” that helps people internalize their company goals on an individual level.
- Use Griffin Hill’s SMARTER goal-achieving methodology to plan, implement, and track goals on a company-wide scale.
- Be a leader that cares about your team.
You’ve learned about two of the seven Griffin Hill SMARTER™ essential steps. Understanding all seven is necessary to ensure goal achievement. Also vital to tracking and achieving your goals is to implement easy-to-use record-keeping tools to manage and organize the information you’ll be recording.
“No man is an island in our organization. Griffin Hill brought a greater sense of unity and a greater drive and resolve to each individual to help them hit their mark. We see results in a shorter amount of time than expected. I was thinking when we set some of these goals that the results would come years, if not months, later. We’ve started seeing results in a number of weeks.”
Nate Higgs
CEO of Sparrow Electric